Hi Joe,
Thank you for your insightful forum post. In response, I would like to introduce the Kusama OpenCommunity Governance project which addresses some of the challenges you have outlined.
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The Proposal Template and Guidelines is an important component of the OpenCommunity Governance Project, designed to guide proposal creators. Integrated into both the Kusama Wiki and Polkadot Treasury page, it standardizes proposal structure, ensuring comprehensive and clear submissions. Providing an outline of crucial sections - including introduction, project details, team, and budget - it promotes transparency, clarity, and improves informed community decision-making.
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Clearing Proposal Noise: One of the key issues you identified is the overwhelming number of proposals and the difficulty in providing sincere evaluations due to this noise. The OpenCommunity Governance project addresses this problem through our proposal audits. These audits are conducted by dedicated curators that go into each proposal detail, providing constructive feedback to proposers during the early development stages. The aim here is not to assess the quality of the proposal idea but to guide proposers in providing all the necessary and relevant information in a clear and concise manner. We believe that this process substantially improves the proposal clarity and comprehension, enabling the community to better understand the proposal and make informed voting decisions.
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In our Kusama OpenGov experience, we found that many proposers are often left in the dark regarding the community’s thoughts on their proposals. Our proposal auditing process ensures that proposers receive timely and critical feedback to refine their proposals, ensuring all relevant details are included and presented in an understandable manner.
Report 1 Report 2 Report 3 Report 4 -
Transparency: We have adopted a fully transparent approach. All our audits, including the process and results, are publicly available for review. We maintain a detailed progress tracker on Polkasembly, and all audit reports and other relevant documents are available on our Github repository.
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Decentralizing Audits: We are actively working towards further decentralizing the auditing process. We believe that multiple auditors from diverse backgrounds can provide a broader spectrum of feedback, and further reduce noise and refine proposals. We are actively onboarding new auditors, and I would like to extend an open invitation to interested community members.
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Funding Auditors: To maintain the decentralization ethos, we have moved the auditor funding process to the OpenGov tips. Each auditor needs to present their work to the community, which then approves the quality of the work through a tipping process. This model ensures that auditors are post-paid for their efforts, based on community approval.
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Multi-asset treasury with stablecoin reserve: In our experience with Kusama, impact by the native token price volatility, led to over 30% fluctuation between proposal submission and funding reception. When the price increases, proposals sometimes gain more funding than intended. Only a few proposers in this situation either return excess funds or compensate with extra work. A price drop can leave proposers underfunded, causing implementation issues, with many requesting additional funds. Introducing a multi-asset treasury, potentially including a stablecoin reserve, could guard against these issues. Such a measure would offer more predictable, stable funding, improving the reliability and overall quality of treasury-funded projects.
In conclusion, the OpenCommunity Governance project aims to improve proposal quality, facilitate feedback, maintain transparency, and foster decentralization. We are optimistic that these efforts will help mitigate many of the challenges that the community currently faces in the OpenGov process. We hope that this project, given its potential, can progress towards becoming a fully-fledged collective, with a diverse range of auditors on board.