Proposal to Prioritize 55651 (Periodic Confirmation) & 38985 (Manual Voting) over 48623 (Compounding Maturity)

To be honest, I’m not pessimistic about IC governance. I just think we are all learning as we go and I hope this proposal will add new clarity. As the saying goes, Rome wasn’t built in a day. Decentralization will take time.

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Good to hear. You are an example of resilience and patience. I need to learn this part from you.
I do not mind that decentralization takes time. But until then, saying people vote count or saying IC is decentralized is only a show, as stated by @justmythoughts and I totally agree
Transparency should not take time though. Transparency is the least we deserve.

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Hi all, apologies that I did not provide any feedback from the side of DFINITY yet.

The feedback requires further syndication (and some people are out currently out). I hope that we can provide feedback by end of today.

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Hi all, as promised, here is the feedback from DFINITY on this motion proposal

We understand the background of the proposal

We appreciate the constructive inputs by the community. We all share the same vision on bringing the IC forward and acknowledge that different participants have different priorities. We are grateful for having such an active community and a lively discussion about roadmap priorities.

Why we are voting no

As outlined in this earlier blog post, the NNS controls the IC but not community members working on the IC. Hence we believe that the NNS should not be used, for example, to propose other community entities perform off-chain actions.

As a side comment, we remark that proposal 55651 (Periodic confirmation) requires further design enhancements, because in its current form it does not allow to execute quickly urgent updates as outlined here.

How we suggest to proceed

We are fully committed to working with the community on a holistic spam prevention and voting enhancements after the major release of the SNS and suggest doing this in a new technical working group on governance.

Given the intense discussions on governance topics in the forum, we may have missed to emphasize all the non-governance work the R&D team is working on. For transparency, we note that only a small fraction of our R&D works on governance.

We intend to share further details on the DFINITY roadmap and a detailed breakdown of our R&D capacity in the next Global R&D meeting on July 27th. In addition, we will share further information about joint initiatives like technical working groups and community-led engagements. This meeting will be made public and participants can register here.

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Whats the difference between “the community wants this feature” and “the community wants this feature to be prioritized”? We can add features, but have no voice in how soon we think they should be implemented?

How will these enhancements be decided upon? Another proposal? Why haven’t concerns been raised sooner by Dfinity? Dfinity even voted yes on it.

If that’s how things will have to go in the future then just get rid of governance entirely, have proposals be submitted as code changes, so we know exactly whats going to be implemented and vote on it, if it passes its immediately implemented, otherwise back to the drawing board. Adding features to a wishlist unaware on how and when they’ll be implemented seems a bit redundant.

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The last couple of days there’s been some action in this thread with respect to 55651 - it’s just a bit disappointing it took as long as it did to have a discussion about DFINITY’s concerns and to have those concerns voiced at least a month after the proposal originally passed the NNS.

I think there’s definitely a solution in there that isn’t outrageously difficult or over-complicated. What would help is to understand all of the different ideas that DFINITY has brainstormed for implementation as well as the various attack vectors they have considered. Also understanding their current process for how the DFINITY neuron is controlled in order to push out hotfixes would help in designing such a feature. But until recently that more detailed context hasn’t been surfaced.

I’d be happy to collaborate in a forum type back-and-forth environment with DFINITY to help coalesce around a solution, as I’m sure the rest of the community would be happy to participate in the technical implementation design and details - I’d just want to know that DFINITY is actively thinking about actually how a proposal would be implemented, and putting a good faith effort to think through solutions for how such a feature could be implemented in a secure fashion, and to communicate those brainstormed ideas with the community so that we can help iterate on and maybe even take on implementation tasks if we have the bandwidth and technical-depth. But without communication, from the outside (not DFINITY internal) sometimes it just feels like we’re all standing around waiting for an update.

@bjoernek as for proposal 38985, which also passed with >90% of the vote back in January - have there been any concerns with or plans/ideas for implementing that proposal?

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where is the decentralization of having a proposal approved but not executed and only executes those they prefer?

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I am just posting here to have it in writing that as a seed investor I am very disappointed with the direction things are going and will vote FOR this proposal and ask for a way for us to be able to prioritize things that matter.

Focus on the tech, and not on things like that “tax improvement” proposal that has made taxes horrible for all of us (I work with an accounting firm and deal with multiple jurisdictions). At this point I am baffled by how the foundation self-sabotages the project by spending resources on things that are engineered to make things more complicated and have absolutely zero benefit and do the opposite of what their stated intention is. Not to mention the discord, and fighting it sows between investors and users.

On-chain governance for everything means nothing, if there is no way to enforce it and if the foundation and its friends hold the majority of votes.

Please for the love of all that is holy. Stop self-sabotaging your project.

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It’s time to expand the ICP network. I think tax optimizations are a waste of time. If someone has to pay taxes, that’s their business, not DFINITY’s business.

Edit: And also it is not fair to evaluate “manual voting” and “voting by following” the same.

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I read their voting guideline again. One item read:
About the IC and In the interest of the IC - The proposal should be about the IC and of interest to the IC.
Programming to tweaking maturity to try avoiding taxes in some jusrisdiction is certainly NOT of the interest to the IC

So they don’t even follow their own guideline.

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I wholeheartedly agree. Dfinity does so much right, and I really hate to criticize them but when they go shooting themselves in the foot with such stunts like this, I just find it highly disappointing, and it’s not the first time. IMO it’s going to be similar decisions like this that are going to make or break this project. Reputation is everything imo, and its hard to recover once flawed, as were already experiencing from the broader market.

This is an industry that is built upon trust and decentralization. if we can’t trust the foundation, which is building the entire project, to make the correct decisions for the protocol and community, and not just purely directed for whales and large token holders in mind - why should we even bother to participate?

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To be fair, we have exactly this today, but not many people vote on it, they instead follow the foundation. But an example is Proposal: 72143 - ICP Dashboard, this proposal proposes to changes the governance canister, and you can look up the git commit and inspect the code, and the change only happens if this proposal is accepted.

I think the purpose of motion proposals is figuring out what the community wants before people spending a lot of effort actually building it.

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@Manu exactly!

At the same time, it’s quite evident that the community

  • heavily supported 55651 and 38985
  • had then and still today has significant resistance to 48623
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Maybe I can share my personal thoughts in a bit more detail.

First of all, I completely understand why this proposal is submitted. I think there are some explanations for how this happened, and how we can improve going forward.

  1. @justmythoughts points out that it’s disappointing that DFINITY is late in voicing concerns wrt 55651 and 38985. I think this is mostly fair criticism. In the case of 38985, there have been comments from @lara and myself showing that we think this idea is not fully baked yet. But what should we then do in such a case? If we consider the proposal as a high level intent, it makes sense to vote it in, but it’s not a super concrete proposal that we can implement right away (as the comments show), so I’m not even sure what the “right” vote would be. For 55651, I did voice this concern to the proposal authors, but should’ve done so on the public forum instead. I agree that it is inconsistent that DFINITY voted in favor of this proposal while having reservations, and we have definitely learned from this and will improve.

  2. Wrt the “tax optimization”. I think it’s a bit more fundamental than that, what maturity is and how it can be taxed is quite important to many neuron holders and I believe in particular also to the foundation, which explains why this was done with high priority.

  3. A more broad challenge is that currently our motion proposals are of the form “lets do X”. People vote in favor if they like X. But inevitably our wishlist of things we would like to have grows faster than we can implement, which will inevitably lead to adopted motion proposals that are not realized yet. I personally think this is okay, the alternative would be that we start voting no on proposals that we actually think are a good idea, only for the reason that we think we won’t have time.

Overall, I think this just shows that we as the ICP community are still figuring out how to best deal with governance and priorities. On the positive side, i think what we have in the ICP community with motion and real proposals is already really great: with motion proposals we have a measurable way whether the community wants something, and with all other proposals the community must approve real changes before they can happen. At the same time it’s not perfect yet, and I think this discussion is therefore very valuable and i really appreciate all the active participants discussing governance here on the forum, and in particular @justmythoughts, @wpb, and @Zane for starting this discussion. I hope that everybody also sees that the foundation is trying very hard to improve, as demonstrated for example by the changes to our public roadmap that were announce yesterday in the GR&D, and the intent to start a working group on governance as @bjoernek mentioned.

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@manu thank you for sharing your thoughts. Overall I agree with your assessment. I think motion proposals should be conceptual ideas that don’t need to be fully developed. If I were the developer trying to implement a proposal, I would want to have some degrees of freedom on designing a solution that satisfies the proposal intent. Inevitably there will be issues that are recognized during detailed design that hadn’t been considered at the front end. Developers need freedom to address those issues properly. I hope motion proposals don’t move to the opposite extreme of needing to be fully baked before they are submitted to the NNS.

This proposal we submitted resonates for me because it’s just not clear how community driven proposals get prioritized. I wasn’t opposed to Compounding Maturity (48623), in fact I voted to Approve (even though the ICPMN neuron voted to Reject). However, I definitely wasn’t aware that DFINITY was working on it with haste. I assumed all NNS related resources were working on SNS. I don’t recall any communications that 48623 was in progress as well. So when the details of the modulation function came out directly on the heels of reverting proposal weights (70015), it definitely had me second guessing the purpose of active participation in governance and community driven proposals. Maybe the right answer is that the community should be prepared to implement the solution if we are going to lead a proposal submission. That would be a paradigm shift for me and I’m not sure it can be done without forming some sort of secondary foundation or association that has resources behind it to accomplish those kinds of goals.

I have a lot of respect and appreciation for everyone at the foundation. The work you all are doing is hard and the community can definitely be demanding at times. I agree we are all just trying to figure out governance and priorities. Thank you for engaging in this conversation.

I also want to recognize that @bjoernek has done an amazing job since he started at DFINITY. He has provided much needed transparency on governance related topics and he is very diplomatic about it. I have great appreciation for his engagement with the community.

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Just can second this.
It’s a really bad look if all the community neurons people follow vote For something and then Dfinity itself just blocks it. Per definition this will upset a lot of people in the community, who put in a lot of thought and effort into these proposals. Don’t even want to start with decentralization. Why all this governance theater in the first place if people can just follow the foundation, get the same rewards and can’t decide something on their own if Dfinity itself doesn’t like it?
If it’s a resource problem might as well slow other things if this is something majority of the community wants.
Community matters and is the main driver for adoption and the success of projects in this space. ICP had a really horrible start community wise due to the PA and there is finally a possibility to turn this around and we see a more and more positive community developing. Don’t trash this right away and think more about the implications these overruling votes have.
PS: Is there a community discord or similar where it’s easier to get alerted about these things?

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One place for community discussions on various IC related topics is the ICP Maximalist Network on Telegram.

A NNS Proposals Bot also exists on Telegram that will alert you with push notifications when new governance proposals are submitted to the NNS.

The Taggr app also has a proposals bot you can follow, but I don’t know if it has push notifications yet.

The best place for deliberation on specific governance topics is right here in the forum in the Governance category.

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It might look similar, but it’s not the same

  • Canister upgrades usually contain many changes, they are more similar to a software upgrade than an IC equivalent of BIPs.
  • As you said barely anyone votes on those proposals that is because we assume all the changes are either tech improvements or implementation of previously accepted proposals.

I agree and that is one of the reasons I decided to go ahead with this proposal, if motion proposals are meant to figure out what the community wants,it should be fine to also use them to figure how much the community wants something, Dfinity’s arguments for voting against the proposal seem to be contradicting:

Why doesn’t this apply for motion proposals? They literally are meant to ask community members (Dfinity for the time being) to work on a task, which is an off-chain action.

Furthermore this proposal followed all Dfinity’s guidelines, it’s tangible, achievable and about the IC and In the interest of the IC.

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wpb this was a helpful share. I appreciate your patience through the learning curves. You’ve been an informative individual to follow along with.

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