DFINITY Foundation’s vote on Governance proposal #58907

Governance
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Authors: Diego Prats (@diegop), Sam Burri (@samuelburri ) on behalf of DFINITY Foundation.

Proposal in question

In this particular case, we will vote NO on Proposal “Request for Dfinity to Communicate Tokenomics Changes”.

However, we (DFINITY) do agree with the intent behind this proposal and aim to accomplish what the proposal is asking.

We are voting NO based on first principles that we believe are necessary for healthy governance.

Why we agree with the proposal…

We agree there are many updates to the IC (e.g. Tokenomics) that the community needs to be aware of. We also agree that as a foundation (whose only goal is to foster the IC ecosystem) DFINITY should do its best to spread the word on relevant community changes. In particular, in an effort to improve decentralized governance, neuron holders should be aware of all tokenomics changes.

…Why we are voting NO

We are voting NO (on what some ay call a technicality) because we believe the following tenet:

NNS is intended to control the IC. NNS should not be used to make other community entities actively do X, but to improve the IC.

We believe the NNS should not be used, for example, to propose other community entities perform off-chain actions.

How we arrived at this tenet

Philosopher Daniel Dennett once described the practice of “tuning the knobs” on an idea by replacing variables as a way to understand an idea’s limit and essence.

In this case, once we “tuned the knobs” by switching:

“Request for DFINITY to Communicate Tokenomics Changes”

Into:

“Request for ICP Maximalist Network to Communicate Tokenomics Changes”

Into

“Request for Alice to Communicate Tokenomics changes”

By switching the nouns, we realized the proposal was asking an entity to do something off-chain. That is when we saw that an NNS vote to force Alice to do X was no different than an NNS vote to force DFINITY to do X. In fact, the only way to make DFINITY a valid target (but not Alice) of an NNS proposal is if DFINITY was somehow different than for other community entities. Here we strongly believe DFINITY should be no different than any other entity.

Voting Guidelines

In discussing this proposal, we arrived at some voting guidelines for DFINITY and the NNS we would like to share more widely.

In order to elicit a YES vote from the Foundation. We would like to see at the very least proposals match the following criteria:

  1. Tangible - The proposal should be understandable and concrete. A proposal that is “make the world a better place” is not tangible enough.

  2. Achievable - The proposal should be something DFINITY believes is achievable. This means that a proposal to “make the IC consensus protocol be faster than light” would not pass since we do not believe science can make it work.
    a. Furthermore, there should be a “path from proposal to code running on the IC”. This means that an NNS proposal to add a copy on the NNS Frontend Dapp to help new stakers would be valid… but an NNS proposal to “ask entity X to change their website to help new stakers” would not be valid.

  3. About the IC and In the interest of the IC - The proposal should be about the IC and of interest to the IC.

We want to be clear in what this means and does not mean:

  1. Foundation may vote YES in a new proposal from neuron 12008772471346176261. This is only a judgment on this proposal. Indeed, we admire the community work from the proposer (@wpb ).

  2. Foundation still wants to contribute to communicating and spreading the word on IC changes.

  3. @wpb (the author of the proposal) did post his proposal for feedback earlier and we greatly appreciate the thoughtfulness.

Thank you everyone,

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This is a great response @diegop. Thank you for adding clarity and explaining Dfinity’s position. I think this is the right answer.

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We appreciate the note @wpb

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So dfinity won’t make effort to inform the people about protocol changes outside this forUm?

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No, quite the opposite.

We are actually working with Wenzel on some ways to communicate outside forum and have more systematic campaign of education.

I wrote this, but it’s clear from your question @CatPirate that I was too vague. Sorry about that.

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Waiting for it from 11 Days and Counting. Instead someone drafted a new proposal for no reason

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I’m not sure I follow. What is it you are waiting 11 days on?

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Ah sorry for being vague, I thought foundation was gonna release a summary of the proposals, haven’t seen one yet. @diegop

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A summary of the proposals?

I guess we kind of are. We are writing a blog post summarizing them (blog posts get wider distribution and even get picked up by Coinbase feeds), they also get permanence, Can be used for wiki, and we will promote it. I asked @wpb to collaborate with us on it since he did a fairly good job in bringing attention to this.

But i will be honest (and not pretend otherwise)… I was not working on a summary of these Tokenomics proposals until @wpb and others brought it up.

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Yes, Expecting the blog :slight_smile:

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I credit to the community for pointing out this blind spot.

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As a firs step, @wpb has guest written a blog post on the DFINITY medium account explaining the Tokenomics changes.

DFINITY will promote across social channels today and next week to make sure folks see it.

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