Technical Working Group: Governance

@radudaniel, my suggestion obviously assumes an additional unstated attribute as a condition before calculating any reputation score. Among other possible ideas, one of the following attributes could be required to be eligible to submit a proposal: 1) age or minimum size of neuron, 2) having a named neuron (as @cryptoisgood proposed), or 3) perhaps requiring all proposals be submitted under one’s unique Internet Identity without any connection to a neuron. The latter could be appropriate in the long term, given that the Internet Computer is ultimately meant for all of humanity’s benefit, not just ICP investors.

Similarly, for voting reputation scores, I think having a named neuron or using one’s Internet Identity would be required to build a score above the default 1.0 level. I can’t think of a different alternative for now, but perhaps others have some ideas to offer.

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The approach to a purely digital ID not linked to the real life one of the person is quite interesting. There are many attributes (as you said) that could be considered, but the issue is that the type of behaviour that could inflict repetitional cost can be avoided can be easily “transferred” to a new ID.

You can gamify the system to corroborate more such attributes so that in time only based on a certain score derived from each or sum of all, different types of actions are allowed or not, but than it just adds complication over an already gamified system - the token.

I am not against the idea, in fact I am curious how others think this can be achieved.

Good points, Radu. There is always some theoretical room for gaming the system when subjectivity is involved by necessity. However, based on DFinity’s vision for a unique “proof of personhood” ID (as opposed to a proof of real life ID like a passport), this would not be easy to game.

“People parties” (with narrow time and location windows) or similar means would be required to validate this personhood. This process would impose some sybil-resistance and personal costs to prevent bots and duplicate IDs. Also, trashing your old unique personhood for a new one could implicitly mean trashing all the good reputations earned (in various domains), your IC history in multiple SNS applications, etc. Similar logic around the high costs of acquiring or trashing an identity could be applied to a named neuron, which requires some reputation history to acquire (see DFinity’s recent rejection vote on a named neuron proposal due to that proposal coming from an individual with no forum history or verifiable identity).

Another easy deterrent would be to simply require a minimum amount of IC personhood history (say, 1 month) before being eligible to submit proposals. This is similar to the 10-15 timeout imposed on new members of some DAO forums (i.e., before a new member is allowed to post anything, to help prevent bot spam or duplicate ID spam).

Clearly, we are just brainstorming here, so I’m not trying to draft any proposal. I am also not very familiar with all the details around the suggested “proof of personhood” process. The devil is always in the details, especially when us crypto humans get our gaming hats on to beat a rigid system!

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I treat a subject like identity from a pattern perspective. In this case a pattern of behaviour unique to an individual/agent that has a very precise scope, to give others agents of the network a “heuristic” to easily evaluate future behaviour based on past behaviour as assessed in a distributed way by many agents in the network.

For the agent who is in “the possession” of the identity compliance with principles/rules is a matter of cost-benefit mid-long term analize.

The cost of wrong doing in most forms of organisation is always bigger than benefits (example: a wrong doing might slash 100 reputation points which might take on average 1 year or the equivalent in other form of resources even if by braking the rules the benefit was something equivalent to 10 reputation points)
Such disproportionate response is used to deter such behaviour which in a complex system will inevitable have unintended consequences thigh might inflict order of magnitude higher costs to the network.

Yes we can to a lot to stimulate the benefit accumulation, but there is little we can do so the “identity” will not defer the possible cost of a malevolent action through a proxy ID.

This is why establishing a form of digital ID unlinked to the biological is I think a very interesting challenge similar in nature to how Satoshi established a form of digital “trust”

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Again, great thoughts, Radu.

A digital Internet ID should be as enforcedly unique as possible. It can remain optionally anonymous, but unique personhood should be verifiable. Without any such ID, we will never learn to be responsible for what we do online. This is especially important when we are doing adult things, like collectively proposing, debating and voting on the future of humanity’s infrastructure for digital communication and productivity.

The experiment to allow rampantly disposable identities and being irresponsibly anonymous has already run its course. It’s the infantile hellscape of Web2’s (anti-)social media. On a separate note, this is where Web3 social media could really be a game changer, with unique (but optionally anonymous) Internet IDs and community-driven ownership and moderation.

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Working group agenda:

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Next working group meeting will happen on November 10, 6-7pm CET.
Recording will be shared after the meeting.
Find link to calendar event here: calendar

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Hey everyone, I’ve created a subgroup for formalizing the working group’s process. I’ve created a GitHub issue for this subgroup here: Subgroup: Process · Issue #7 · dfinity/wg-governance · GitHub

I’ve also created a pull request into the repository with my proposed changes here: Creating the README of the repository with the working group's process by lastmjs · Pull Request #8 · dfinity/wg-governance · GitHub

@emmaperetti we’ll need to allow outsiders to make pull requests, the permissions of the repo don’t allow that yet.

If you all could please review my pull request, even though it’s closed (we can reopen it later once permissions are fixed), then we can start moving towards a more defined process for the working group.

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@lastmjs will fix the pull outside pull requests

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Here’s the Ethos Problem Identification document we just discussed in the working group:

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Hi all,

I just participated in a great session of the governance working group and would like to share my key take-aways:

Discussion on proposal for Ethos

  • Many kudos to @aiv & @Arthur for preparing today’s session very well in a preceding sub-group, providing a concrete write-up ! This made the meeting very efficient and focused.
  • Ethos is meant to provide decision-making principles which should be approved by the NNS.These principles (the interpretation of which may differ) are not enforceable.
  • The principles could be used to communicate to new-joiners how the platform intends to evolve.
  • There was a discussion on concrete suggestions for these principles, e.g. mutability vs immutability of the tokenomics of the system (with varying opinions in the room).
  • We also discussed the trade-offs between formulating soft principles vs concrete tech-based suggestions to the protocol.

My (not DFINITY’s) initial thoughts on this

  • I very much like that principles could be used to explain to outsiders how the community ticks and how the NNS/IC could evolve.
  • I could imagine that these kinds of principles could also be formulated by known neurons, facilitating the choice of whom to follow. In particular we could also have a competition of contrasting principles. This would also require that we foster a much more active process for choosing known neurons.
  • With respect to turning Ethos into a proposal: In my opinion we should try to clarify beforehand what is in scope of being a NNS proposal. I am personally in favor of a narrow scope, where NNS proposals are about concrete changes to the NNS protocol (or at least motion-like intentions on introducing certain features). From that perspective, guiding principles would not be in scope of NNS voting.

Future process of the governance working group

  • Kudos to @lastmjs for preparing and presenting this point well!
  • It is suggested to follow the following open process.
    • Governance working group meetings are scheduled ad-hoc.
    • Sub-groups review a particular topic and prepare a concrete suggestion.
    • The according lead(s) of a sub-group propose a slot (day & time) for the next governance working group.
    • For documentation sharing, we will experiment with using google docs and github and subgroups will pick what works best for them.
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@emmaperetti thank you for organizing and thanks to everyone who attended. This was my first governance working group and I was impressed with everyone’s contributions.

Should I expect the recording to be posted here when it’s ready? I’d like to share with others in the community.

Thanks again!

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recording of call on November 10 can be found here: Passcode Required - Zoom (Passcode: Ndv#+18T)

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@lastmjs @emmaperetti @bjoernek @brutoshi

Please see this tweet:

In particular these two comments:

  • Zoom does not allow to see the name of who is speaking : TO AVOID

Not sure I follow, I usually see names of people talking. Do you know what they mean?

  • This is another closed door meeting ( was there a joining button ? )

I didn’t join previous but last ones I joined were all open. Did anything change?

I hope the governance and Ethos groups will place transparency on the roadmap. We have just witnessed on a grand scale what happens when organisations are trusted by users and developers while decision making process and financials remain opaque. Let us not forget that the IC is at the moment entirely controlled by a centralised organisation which refuses to release any details of its financials. There is a tendency, in small groups, to think, well we know these guys, they are all great individuals, they would never do something bad. And regret thinking that way when it is too late. Let us aim to reach a state where trust in a centralised organisation in no longer required. That is the most important marker of the IC’s success.

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Thank you for following up @diegop !

To answer your questions

  1. Zoom did show as usual the name with whom you signed in Zoom.
  2. The working group meeting was open as usual and advertised on the Forum, Twitter and Discord. Prior to the meeting there was a sub-group dedicated to the topic Ethos, who worked out a proposal and presented this in the meeting. The sub-group called for interested participants on the Forum beforehand.

I followed the link this morning to watch/listen and I did not see any usernames visible.

I meant that the names were visible during the live session. So everybody who participated could see who else was in the call.

In the Zoom recording, the names are indeed not visible. Maybe we can tweak the settings for the Zoom recording for the next round. Let me check with @emmaperetti.

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Ahhh this seems to be the crux of the matter. helpful feedback

By chance I stumbled across this article about DAO governance today. I believe it is a good read and provides a lot of food for thought.

I have skimmed through some docs and summaries of the governance working group and get the impression that a lot of great work is done by this group! Thanks to all for investing their time and energy into this important aspect of the IC and our community.

For me the quoted article is a call to action on a “meta governance” discussion. Which I believe is - long term - extremely important not only for the NNS but for any SNS!

Such a meta governance discussion might not currently be the focus of this working group. Thats why I want to create awareness for it. In the hope it will become part of a long term agenda of this group.

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