Governance Day - Decision Making and Agency in a decentralized enviroment- by Federico Holzwarth

Transcript

[Music] thank you well let's start my name is fedigo AKA FES for the Central Community and we're going to talk today about governance decision making an agency now the centralized environment this will be basically a quick overview a picture of the current system of the okay so again talking about the central land for the ones that do not know what is the central line about

uh the center is a virtual world owned by its users and it's an open source platform based on ethereum blockchain so we we think that the central line platform what you can do is basically to create to experience and to monetize all the content within the platform so the Centerline for me it's basically about New Opportunities of the users of the Sunderland to achieve the complete ownership and over their digital assets and identities uh some of the assets that I'm talking about are basically Mana that's the cryptocurrency token uh land that are basically the parcels of the spiritual

world where you can deploy those experiences those scenes and other assets as wearables emotes and names uh that are part of the the economy of the centerland so here we have Tennessee city that it's the name of that virtual world that we're talking about and well that was five years ago with the first auction of land and that's how it is nowadays that's like a little view of the central world right now uh there you will see that there are a lot of experiences a lot of things deployed some of the experiences that I'm talking about are for example music festivals of the Fashion Week we've got a lot of games deployed in the

different scenes in the different parcels and we've got a lot of experiences that some of the most important brands in the world have tried so we have we have actually some brands that are trying and experiencing with the centerland look in the future of the metaverse so which are the organizations between behind this project so we have first the Sunderland Foundation mainly advocated for the development platform and the adapts around the project and we got the Dao basically decides on the protocol smart contracts those are the two main organizations they must have a good Synergy and well

that's something that we are continuously working on the Dell is basically composed by its Community by committees and by squats I personally I'm part of squad of the facilitation Club and that also decides about content curation about the fees in the transactions within the platform about ritual management about the community whole ecosystem and the policies about all the things that I just mentioned so we're going to move now and start talking about the actual policies and the governance behind the this this dial some basics

boning power I guess all of you know what is holding power but here in the Centerline voting power and as we say VP it contributed by Mana names and land the main assets that I mentioned a couple of minutes ago so one Mana contributes one BP so we could be talking about the seguated system a pure stake weighted system but we also have names another crypto asset and we get along Those portions of land contribute uh to 1000 BP how do you use the DVP within the dial so basically we vote on proposals we have a long list of proposals uh

where you where the community decides what to do with each one of the the different topics and each proposal also has specific categories but the main two proposals type of proposals are the grams we have like a amazing runs program so if you are interested in funding your projects in uh with free ecosystem this might be a good opportunity for you and we have the governance proposals and governance proposals is what we are going to focus now so we're basically talking about the social layer that some sense that someone mentioned a couple of minutes ago and this social layer it's a multi-layer system that gain a lot of complexity

since the beginning of the of the of the centerland so we're talking also about governance facilitation because of that complexity about uh in the governance system we had to create a role a role to help with that and to facilitate those processes and government facilitation is about a lot of stuff but we can like list some of the things that we work with and the first of them is operational routines and Reporting about what happens within the dial collaboration among the community collective decision making transparency efficiency and Effectiveness with the processes of the dial

and consensus building those are beautiful things to say those are also abstract Concepts but as I see it as my community said they are not abstract Concepts all those have to be materialized as procedures and mechanisms mechanisms to set expectations and to think in the long-term productive predictability of the Dao is about being degrees for the Dallas gearbox so what do we want what do we want as a community what do we want as facilitators and I think all the people that's here uh wants to be something something like

this we want to be Greeks in the Agora discussing about ideas discussing about policies uh all together without bitching at each other's but I can blame the people that say that right now we're more close to this I can't blame them so we're talking about the procedures the predictability and everything and all the mechanisms that help us to to build a better a better platform a better now the first one that I'm going to talk about is the three-stage governance process and for that we are going to talk about where do we

come from and we come from a single uh the Central and now started with a single pole building system to take winding decisions and that metabolology in particular showed that it can promote uh polarization and sales engagements basically conflict and no one winning the poll format also didn't allow time for consensus building there was a lack of adequate assessment of impacts and implementation pathways there was a lack of restrictions and that meant that and that could lead to a lot of spam proposals that's still happening but it's more like contained in the first stage of this process

there were no BP thresholds so we couldn't ensure that important government institutions were made by by important by a significant maturity and they were known biting uh like they all depended on the dial committee uh to enact them and that under my that undermined the efficacy and the efficiency and the confidence in the Dao so where are we now the three-stage government sport process start with a pre-proposal ball that is basically the poll that we just mentioned but as a part of a huge uh a bigger process have a submission threshold of 100 VP uh

passage threshold of 500 kbp and the voting period lasts for five days pre-proversal ports polls are basically to introduce issues to the Dao and to Gorge Community sentiment they do not need to be in any specific format they can be like the whole policy the whole structure of the policy and they also got to be just a straightforward question when the pre-proposal poll passes we move to the draft proposal drop proposal has a higher summation threshold you need one kvp to to submit it it has a passage threshold of 1 million BP and the voting period lasts for one

week here is where we started to improve uh the whole process so the rapper puzzles are basically to start formalizing uh the potential policies of the all the different topics that allow can can discuss and to start discussing also about the possible implementation Pathways and the impacts of that policy so we moved from a single call a single question most of the time to a process that we have the time to analyze what will be the impacts of that policy must be structured in a in a way in a specific way so for presenting other

proposal oh you'll need a summary you'll need an abstract you need a motivation you need a specification and a conclusion when that passes we come to the third stage of this binding of this governance process and it's called The Binding governance proposal this is where when the voting ends and if the Easter proposal passes we're going to have a binding decision made by the community so here uh the BP the submission threshold also increased you now need 2.5 2.5 DB 2.5 kvp to bus it and the passage threshold is way more High you

need 6 million maybe to pass that binding governance proposal the about Imperial lasts for two weeks so binding governance proposal basically to formalize the draft proposals with the implementation Pathways and the different discussions and the different Community inputs that we've gathered uh within the period of seven weeks binding governance reversal also must have a particular form so to the summary abstract motivation and conclusion we add the impacts and implementation pathways so there's the whole structure of a policy for the Cinderella now

some findings after we implemented this processing procedure uh where that we were having better outcomes in terms of policy but we were still facing some issues around engagement something that the rest of the people also mentioned we were having some issues also around consensus billing and the policy structure so how to build consensus how to get more engagement we tried with dedicated spaces within the Discord with dedicated channels we tried with different threads in the Forum to discuss about specific topics um we will achieve was to detach the

specifications and the specific discussions from the general discussions so if you wanted to discuss about something something specific you move into that dedicated Channel and only not into the external chat it's something basic but it helped a lot we were still far away from the main objectives of this and facilitating was still complicated and I'm saying facilitating from my position and also for the whole facilitation Squad why was that well with this uh this presented some complications some difficulties the first one was to keep track and follow the discussions the second one was that information and

documentation was a mess so if you wanted to like visit the document or uh do a survey or something that happened a couple of weeks ago you basically needed to scroll in the Discord to find it it was almost impossible to catch up because of that and there were no clear roles and responsibilities at all so we were having really nice discussions about things but without control concrete outcomes Plus the fact that everything relied on the willing and the capacity of the comedies and the squads to create those channels uh wasn't wasn't good for the Dao it had

a certain degree of of discretionality so that was not scalable at all in researching about group dynamics to try to find some way to clear line rules and responsibilities to try to look towards uh specialization of those dedicated channels and to find a transparent and transparent and decentralized Pathways and Make an instance for to to put this together so the first thing that we thought was okay let's create more committees the second let's create subcommities the third okay what about commissions and

big no big no at all the community didn't want to create more structure more permanent structure and that was okay because again we're talking about the the centralized environment so it was a big no so did where did we go from there we were like stalled in the process of defining where should we move and we found the beautiful concept of working groups so working groups working groups are basically a group of people doing something that things that the people do are towards specific goals foreign those groups are domain specific about a

specific area there are non-permanent and they are focusing on delivering cross-functional outcomes so how should they be for our Dao because it's not like you take the concept and you apply it so for our Dao these working groups needed to be about substantive issues independent from the core uni teams temporary obviously decentralized obviously semi-structured with clear roles and responsibilities we Define objectives and expected outcomes and they had to Foster engagement and

consensus building how how will we do that we kept researching we kept investigating and we found the concept and the methodology of Delphi method so Delphi method for the ones that are not used to hear this uh specific thing is commonly used for uh public policy for policy decision making and some forms of qualitative research is a structural process it has the figure of the facilitator and it's basically an iterated process um each round of surveys and questionaries is based on the results of

the previous round so the main thought the main thing about this is you expect that after several rounds you will find eventually uh General consensus a particularly a particularity of these dolphin metal is that uh inputs and everything are gathered from an anonymized an anonymized panel of experts and we're going there in a couple of minutes but this is basically how the dolphin metal looks it's an iterated process where you post questions the facilitator versus questions you answer those questions there's an analysis and reporting for

that questions to jump into the next round and it keeps iterating till we find consensus so Delphi metal is it's well suited at least thinking in terms of the theory for well for distributed and web3 the centralized contexts so again it's not like you have developing method and you adapt and you use it for the particular the particular dial so our adaptation needed to be like emerge with the governance process and that developing method working groups so

um we had the governance process and what we what we thought it was like that process has to be part of the wealthy metal of the working groups so the first thing that we uh we thought it was that the proposal author if uh the proposal author will have initial governing powers to upon the facilitator that means that I for example as a governance facilitator might be or not part of that specific working group if the proposal of the of the alpha referables on choices to be the facilitator of that group or wants to appoint someone else it's fully it's it's totally good and it's actually better in the centralized

environment second thing is about we basically wanted to put away that side of experts we want everyone interested to take part in this procedure they are not intrinsically anonymized so uh well it's something again talking about the people that wants to engage be part of this um like we all know each other uh and might be the the process the the different surveys the different mechanisms that we use within the working groups can have a certain grade of anonymity if we need it but if not uh that's uh that's the way facilitator has also the opportunity to

define those group dynamics again to choose the the surveys to do open questionaries whatever suits better for the for the particular topic well that's what I just mentioned about the mythology and depending on the topic and the importance of combining asynchronous and synchronous Dynamics so basically we're talking about online meetings Discord Forum surveys everything combined into one into the same process so this is basically uh how the whole process looks like and here we will see basically that we

start with the proposal ball and if it passes the author can promote it to a working group when it passes and he promotes it to a working group he must select a facilitator he can he can be he tells the facilitator and we start with the call for participants the facilitator must call for committee members that are interested in these topics and us as uh from the facilitation Squad and and me as a governance facilitator must announce the creation of that working group in every channel the forums Twitter the Discord Etc so here you will see that we have the

Delphi medal introduced here within the governance procedure it's basically this flow where the questions are posed there are participant responses if the consensus is reached we move to the next stage if not we iterate this and here you have the rest of the governance process where you pass the drop proposal you review it you approve it and you move to the implementation and assessments Etc but the main thing about the working groups is that with uh the governance proposals might be the main uh expected outcome but the mere fact of having a summary a place where all documentation while

our working papers are together uh it's good so if there were people doesn't pass and someone wants in the future to discuss about that specific topic there will be a place for him for her to visit and to check what were those discussions about so why is this necessary the first of all the first thing is that it's an order way to do things it's semi-related because when the proposal author wants to create a working group it's just it just goes as it is he creates the working room he starts uh calling the participants he started facilitating and

that will be all it doesn't need a huge involvement from the from the core units or from from the facilitation Squad and also because it's structured the dolphin method and the working grouped structure and all these but still talking about that decentralized and transparency approach so these specific methodology what we found is that empowers every member of the community by giving the possibility of uh of workshopping the solutions without the need of relying on the dial committees in the in the squads it's a bottom-up policy wielding approach so it's again well suited for

the centralized environments it provides us with some project management tools it's a great and it's a great way to centralize documentation and working papers and one of the most important things and we were talking about creating more committees subcommittees or commissions the fact that we don't need we don't need extra Manpower uh it's like the best thing because this is all only a way to organize and structure the existing human and social capital of the community so what how to obtain with this we found that we could go through the

governing stages in a smoothly way we were fostering transparency because the policy building uh wasn't more like a black box we were unveiling the black box we were fostering consensus building from different tools instances and Dynamics defined by the facilitators we found a way to consolidate summarize these discussions by keeping the working papers available for everyone we were setting also clear objectives outputs and outcomes so we were having nice nice discussion about things but we were actually defining some specific outcomes for them and finally we obtain empowerment and

agency so we're going to talk just a little about community facilitators and agency and again when we talk about Community facilitators we are talking about the people that has promoted those pre-reposal balls into working groups and that might be or not be the facilitators of that working group or might appoint another one to facilitate that specific working group so as we understand it agencies the force behind social action here is a like a really good uh tongue twister but basically it goes that it says like the the working of the agency is about abridging the existing human

and Social Capital the self-empowerment and not only the self-empowerment and the capacity to manage change but also the self-awareness of having those capacities so when we talk about agency we say that agency races when the facilitator and the rest of the working group are aware of their roles in terms of representing the interests of the community coaching a campaigning and training community facilitators that that's mainly my role right now uh besides like helping with the design of the whole governance system is what enhances communication conflict resolution and consensus building that leads to a chain reaction and we

got a more decentralized and efficient environment because not everything is happening in the same place not everything has but has to pass through the different squads or the Committees it's more efficient because basically not everyone has to be everywhere and the outcomes happen so facilitation and Community facilitators is about fostering engagement driving engagement and that engagement drives agency and creates agency so we have now a governance process a clear governance process that it's working that doesn't doesn't mean that the BB thresholds or that the BP distribution all related to VP Works uh

like perfectly but we have a clear way to set expectation between the parts we have a methodology and we have agency and how does that look together well I'm sharing some examples of how this is implemented within our our Dow and here we have for example the dedicated dedicated uh channels in the Discord these are the active working groups right now we have a notion workspace for each one of those working groups and this is where this is what I was talking about when we said that we had places for centralizing all the documentation and

everything around the specific issue so this is how a workspacing notion for a working group looks you have like the general description and well basically the project management tools that I mentioned we have the tasks the calendar with the important events uh for the working group such as meetings sessions whatever uh you have the guides and procedures for stuff that specific working group if it has a dynamic and dynamic way different from our working groups you can like Define it here you have the most important thing again that it's centralizing the materials the background and the working papers and you have a list of collaborators

under specific roles so you have facilitators you have proposal writers and we also list the interests of each one of those participants here's a meeting basically on Discord uh we were discussing actually about strategic planning our start working group and here it was uh facilitating those discussions here we had the Community member that had that proposed the creation of the strategic planning working group and here we have a Community member that jumped and started talking about financial planning here we have well it's just an example of uh that thing that I mentioned about

uh synchronous and asynchronous Dynamics this is a mirror board for strategic planning uh so we started completing completing it in a synchronization we left it open for everyone to participate and here we have like 16 work oh what okay well it's one for monetary yellow ones that it's closer we have The Binding governance proposal approved we have one for well I speak that language uh we have some for one for the code of ethics something that uh I think someone mentioned a couple of minutes ago so it's going through the proposal and we're uh I know actually there are proposal buzzard and we're working on

The Binding governance proposal we have one working group for the headquarters of the dial for the actual headquarters in world meaning that we're going to create a building within the central and to start discussing in world that well that this is something really important as we have community facilitators um did we that no one is like 100 percent needed for this the community facilitator that was facilitating this working group uh chose to step down from from the process and another person that wanted to be more involved in the process jumped in and became the facilitator

here well the whale it's obviously about whale voting and BB distribution this role represents strategic planning our star working Loop and this one represents financial planning at some of the strategic planning working group so some final thoughts uh some things that we found during this uh this month that these months that we implemented this procedure are that okay well um this was something like uh like oh yeah like uh like some some systems or different systems work for

different moments or different stages of the Dallas okay there it is so those also allow short-term adaptability and solutioning but that doesn't mean that we shouldn't try to plan in the long term considering scalability issues uh what was the last one it was an important one um well no no matter no number one so what we need to do or at least from my point of view what we need to do is look towards automation but we shouldn't dispense of the human

proxy taus are a human process and that's we we always should consider uh thinking in terms of planning wow okay what do you want to achieve this again we want to go from this this is how a lot of people see or sees us right now to this and these working groups so that's pretty much all thanks everyone and before ending this uh presentation

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