Great question. I documented the process in detail and would be happy to share, but I need time to clean it up by removing personal information that might be present. I’ll share a google doc link soon. The basics can be found in this post by @bjoern here on the forum. He was gracious enough to help me learn the ic-repl commands and explain the steps.
You need a parent neuron that is capable of spawning a child neuron who can be assigned a principle that has no known private key or seed phrase. This means the parent neuron needs to have sufficient maturity to spawn a neuron and it must have a private key that enables you to operate on it using command line tools such as ic-repl. When the spawn command is executed, the child neuron inherits the Followee and hotkey configuration of the parent neuron. Since the goal is to end up with a decentralized neuron, the principal you assign should be one that is verifiably without a known private key and seed phrase. Bjoern described how that can be accomplished in that post linked above. Before the child neuron is spawned, it is critical that you ensure that the parent neuron has a Followee configured for the Manage Neuron proposal topic ( which is topic 1). The parent neuron can follow itself on this Manage Neuron proposal topic. You want the child neuron to inherit this Followee because there will be no other way to control the neuron since you won’t know the private key. Once spawned, the only way to control the child neuron is via Neuron Management proposals. You can configure up to 15 Followees to manage the neuron, which means they can all create proposals, they all have full access to view the neuron configuration, and they must all vote to execute the configuration proposals.
As mentioned, I will provide example commands for creating the decentralized neuron and for configuring the decentralized neuron. If you want, I can also create a decentralized neuron for you and assign you as Followee for the Manage Neuron proposal topic for that neuron. Then you can configure it however you want. I have a parent neuron with sufficient maturity to be used for this purpose. That way you don’t have to wait to accumulate sufficient maturity to perform this task from another neuron.
It is currently not possible to submit proposals or manage a neuron using the Manage Neuron topic with the NNS dApp. This means you will need to submit Manage Neuron proposals using command line. However, if you have a neuron that is configured as a Followee on the Neuron Management proposal topic, then these proposals will show up in the NNS dApp and you can vote using the NNS dApp. This was the key recent development that made it practical to create this new decentralized neuron for Synapse. We have quite a few voting members with know how to submit these proposals, but everyone can vote using the NNS dApp. Nobody can change anything about the new synapse neuron unless it passes a vote from all our voting members.