Just that there will be some brainstorming of how to incentivize experts to participate in governance. Seems reasonable to me. We will never decentralize if we rely only on community members who volunteer their time.
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Iâd prefer for this experiment to have some actual skin in the game. As I mentioned above, being a (1/10) or (1/11) member of the DFINITY neuron would be a good half measure - DFINITY would still have a very comfortable quorum, and could kick you out at any time. You could then take your learnings from how they manage the âexpert membersâ and then spin off this c-neuron plan. Or maybe it would convince you that a different plan is better before investing days of engineering time?
I honestly donât understand the purpose of having a roadmap neuron. I feel similarly about the governance topic. Whatâs the point of taking the time of thousands of people to gauge their interest on a topic if thereâs no forcing function that produces results from that vote.
I may be pessimistic or not completely understanding your idea of the roadmap neuron, but I currently see governance proposals as the equivalent of glorified surveys.
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The issue I see is then how do you or I define an âexpertâ? What does that mean, and what qualities should they have?
Did Eva or the Growth team elaborate on any of these ideas?
Iâm more on board with the representative democracy idea here where experts can be easily voted in and voted out by the greater NNS community, but just the panel of experts or âc-neuron membersâ decides the daily fate of proposals in certain topic categories.
So I believe we now have a forcing function with c-neurons. The roadmap c-neuron would set the vision and represent the will of the community. The replica code c-neuron would be responsible for only allowing changes into the replica that are aligned with the roadmap passed by the roadmap c-neuron. If the community sees that the replica c-neuron is allowing in changes that shouldnât be there, they can rearrange the membership. Or perhaps the roadmap c-neuron can have other checks on the replica code, by being able to reject code changes or vote on them in some way. If we split up these groups and allow them to check each other, we might have this forcing function that you speak of.
So then what youâre describing requires both the roadmap c-neuron and a replica code (Subnet Management) c-neuron.
Why not just start with Subnet Management and see how that works out?
But to back up just a bit, how are you going to convince DFINITY approve of and vote for this change? Otherwise this will just end up being a waste of time.
Why not just start with Subnet Management and see how that works out?
Because itâs way more dangerous. The roadmap c-neuron would allow us to clean up our messy governance proposals right away.
But to back up just a bit, how are you going to convince DFINITY approve of and vote for this change? Otherwise this will just end up being a waste of time.
Through persuasion, community consensus, and talking to the right people.
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If we take governance proposals away from the community, how will they vote on the election of c-neuron members? Through a new proposal topic?
@lastmjs
I just want to echo this comment by @justmythoughts because I think it is currently under appreciated. If the community wants something pushed through the NNS, then we need to spend time learning how to do it. It wonât happen overnight. It requires developing expertise for this outside DFINITY and partnering with DFINITY. It also requires incentives and a few basic changes in default neuron configurations, but DFINITY has already provided an example to the community for how this can work when they did it for the Governance proposal topic. I think we are better off thinking of strategies for how to best work with the system we have instead of trying to make fundamental changes or trying to control DFINITY.
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I love your optimism 
In addition to community approval, youâd need to then get a group of non-DFINITY developers to design and implement this, and then the real hurdle would be getting a majority of the 9 voting DFINITY neuron members to vote to approve the replica code changes. God speed, and good luck 
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There are a few things to consider here.
Iâm not sure we need to take away governance proposals from the community, but perhaps we should create a higher bar for these proposals to pass. Iâm thinking that the community should always be able to check the c-neurons somehow, perhaps with a supermajority vote of some kind.
As for electing the c-neuron members, yes some new topic or maybe just through following. For example, if you follow someone for a certain c-neuron, that counts as a real-time vote for that person. Those with enough votes become members of the c-neuron. Follower relationships can be changed in real-time.
Or DFINITY can implement it, if we can persuade them.
DFINITY has yet to themselves implement a community-passed proposal that required any significant code change (other than the re-configuration of a parameter).
The only community passed proposals that were implemented thus far were:
- The changing of governance voting rewards weights
- The backup/removal change to seed phrases for Internet Identity (for which the code change was implemented by the community)
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Seems like they actually did a lot of work on the II change after we did a lot of work on it (Iâm not sure much of my code even made it to production), I think our pull request was more of a motivator for them to actually do the work. They collaborated with us a lot though.
So, perhaps it will be the same way. If DFINITY doesnât want to take it head on we (maybe me, hopefully not though) can implement it ourselves and attempt to get it incorporated. That may be enough to push it forward. It would be interesting whatever happened though.
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@lastmjs also donât forget you canât take away the requirement that neurons vote to get voting rewards. This is fundamental to ICP tokenomics. We cannot give away voting rewards for doing nothing or ICP is at high risk of becoming a security. Hence, you canât just let c-neurons make unilateral decision on proposals, especially if those proposal topics are the most common governance decisions that have to be decided by the NNS. Your idea really needs to work the way liquid democracy works today. Perhaps a c-neuron is regarded as a defacto authority on a given ânewâ proposal topic, but itâs act of approving or rejecting needs to cast liquid democracy.
If people follow member neurons then they can get the rewards whenever the c-neurons vote. This is assuming m-neurons are âelectedâ by people following them for specific c-neurons.
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Iâm also a bit confused on the purpose of the c-neurons for Roadmap. What does it mean to implement the will of the community? Why does liquid democracy not work to represent the community provided we fix the structural issues around power concentration and limited named neurons?
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@lastmjs I love seeing your thoughts here because they parallel a lot of my own. Some types of decisions are just never going to be well managed by a large group of strangers casting anonymous independent votes.
Imagine a company like Samsung being a DAO, how could a mob of laymen ever drive a more effective corporate strategy than a team of experienced executives?
Organizations lead by a highly competent board of directors is currently the most effective way weâve found to run complex corporations and governments, the only problem is the greed and corruption which festers anywhere thereâs a concentration of power which lacks accountability (or worse, is only held accountable to maximizing greed at the expense of human good).
Iâve been working on a new DAO structure (more for web3 in general and not specifically for the NNS) and gaining feedback on it from a few others in the community. Hopefully Iâll find the time to finish writing and publish the whitepaper within the next few months.
A key part of this new DAO structure is something Iâm calling an âAccountability Marketâ to make sure board members (committee members in your terms) are held accountable to the outcome of their decisions by the community. It should also prevent the possibility of committee members becoming entrenched, since their removal would be automated by the protocol.
Within the context of the NNS and your Committee Neuron proposal, it would look something like this:
- The votes of each committee members are logged, and the committee neuron determines the outcome of a proposal.
- A set time period later (perhaps 3-6 months) the protocol triggers an accountability proposal thatâs voted on by the NNS. Essentially, this proposal asks the community if the decision the committee neuron passed had a positive or negative outcome.
- These accountability proposals are used to score the voting record of each committee member. If a committee memberâs score drops past a set threshold (they often vote against positive outcomes and/or for negative outcomes as determined by the community), then they are automatically fired, and removed from the committee by the protocol.
The idea here is that a public voters would often be much more effective evaluating an outcome rather than determining a complex solution upfront. While finding solutions often requires a lot of skill and expertise, outcomes after the fact are often fairly obvious to almost anyone.
Iâd love to setup a chat with you, or maybe even do a Twitter Space or something, so that we could engage in some live discussion on these ideas!
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Very interesting indeed, letâs set up a time to chat over DM. Iâm @lastmjs here, Twitter, Telegram, and OpenChat.
The community follows/elects representatives that they trust to come up with the best roadmap for the IC. Those representatives vote in the c-neuron based on what they personally think is best for the IC. Because they were elected by the community on their behalf to choose the roadmap, the roadmap becomes the will of the community.