OpenGov Track Experiments - Delegating to Experts

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Delegating power to those with a reputation of skill or expertise in a specific domain is a natural social phenomenon – keeping watch, baking bread, governing… we all benefit when we delegate responsibilities to those who do them best (and taking them away when they fail or lose touch).

Delegation was wisely added as a feature in Polkadot’s governance system.

In OpenGov, however, delegation is tied to Tracks – we can delegate our voting power to others for specific tracks only.

This works well for technical tracks, which require domain-specific knowledge, but not for Spending tracks which are currently defined by amount. Currently, we delegate to people based on management of spending amount instead of expert knowledge of the spending domain.

Through our work on AAG we find there are reoccurring spending domains (topics): Media, Events, Hackathons, UI, Infrastructure, Governance… and others possible: Philanthropy, Business Development, R&D.

Without replacing the size-based tracks, experimenting with new tracks with these social parameters would allow delegated experts to guide and curate domain-specific spends, empowered (or disempowered) by delegations from the bottom-up!

This is an alternative solution to top-down bounty structures often suggested to solve the same problem of expertise.

I’d appreciate hearing any perceived problems with this experiment or support for it’s implementation with a single track to start!

We’d present a PR for the following:

:palm_up_hand: “Events track” at 7777 KSM spend (~$250k) Max with the same parameters of “Big Spend”

Or what track would you like to experiment with instead?

I’ll add thoughtful challenges to the idea and rebuttals here with an edit:

  1. It would be difficult to code, as it’s not a parameter.
    No need to make it a perameter. The social layer would NAY proposals in the wrong track.

  2. How do you define events? What is an event and what isn’t an event?
    This is a social parameter and not one hard set in code. We are dealing with the social layer. Tokenholders are able to define with their vote. It may also stimulate more discussion before on chain submission.

  3. [What if] The experts are wrong
    Experts are just Delegates. Responsibility is given and taken away from delegates fluidly without any top-down direction. The tokenholder base makes and breaks the “experts”. Wrong “experts” lose delegation (responsibility).

Thanks for your time and consideration of this idea!

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To facilitate this idea, I’ve created a PR for the next runtime upgrade on Kusama.

If the community supports this I implore Parity to merge this PR. These on-chain configurations cannot be done via governance except through a set.code referendum on the root track, requiring a huge decision deposit. For something so simple, it makes sense to me to include this as a “rider” on the next release.

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whoa nice!

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Summary: based on our observations of treasury spends on gov2, we think it makes sense to move away from general spending tracks and create tracks for typical spending categories (such as Media, Events, Hackathons, UI, Infrastructure, Governance, Philanthropy, Business Development, R&D). The reasoning behind this is to allow users to delegate their votes to experts in each spending category. Therefore, creating spending tracks for various categories will harmonize on-chain vote delegations with expert vetting occurring on the “social layer.”

This is much like the formalisation of proposals into pre-agreed templates, a very sensible and common sense approach

It does however omit a few essential insights which should be weighed when considering such a change in strategy that will through basic incentive alignment issues end up working against the collective ability to make sense and to drive distributed intelligence.

  1. A focus on domains within arbitary categories.
  • How do you define events?
  • What is an event and what isn’t an event?
  • This is even less obvious when we try to do the same for governance, or R&D, or BD… these are buckets for launching a startup, not for scaling a network.
  • How do we judge ‘experts’ - is this just a case of people who have run a lot of events?
  • The same for media - there has been a huge amount of spending on media as a category and the effectiveness of that huge spend is definitively in question.

By doubling down on ‘domains’ within the design of the system, we work against the ‘OpenGov’ ideals, which is really about dissolving boundaries between expertise and enabling more fluid knowledge sharing where we aim to build collectives who will certainly be better at the sort of lateral or connected thinking that doesn’t emerge from domain specific groups trusted as ‘experts’.

This is why we need to move towards directions over domains, funding collectives with a full-stack capability that can generate novel thinking, not more of the same.

  1. The experts are wrong

As the data around adoption proves, this ecosystem has precious few ‘experts’ whose opinion we should trust - there is no lack of hard work, passionate endeavour but much of what has been built and is being built has been strategically unsound and short term in its focus. This is a critique of ideas, not of people.

The contrarian view is given the work to date, elevating those who have failed to correctly assess the fundamental value drivers, incentives and have used large amounts of network resources to deliver poor ROI when it comes to network metrics - or bluntly even consider their relevance is a cause to not delegate to their ‘expertise’.

Suggestion

We don’t need new tracks, we need collectives who operate across all tracks and all domains.

The ‘experts’ in this case are the collectives, not the domain experts.

It is within these multidisciplinary groups - fluid, interconnected groups, sharing a common vision and direction that we will develop unique new expertise, and that is the sum of the whole.

Final point

In many ways this really focuses on two binary perspectives - a strategy based on activity or outcomes.

There is an experiment here - a bet on the old, ie the domain based approach and the new, a direction based approach.

In the end everyone is free to express, design and ‘sell in’ their strategy - it will be the outcomes that define objectively which approach is more valuable.

Much as in political systems, we will see two extreme perspectives emerge as the network culture evolves due to external stimulus in the form of on-chain feedback - it will inevitably be the centre ground that ultimately dictates where the majority of spend goes over time.

So in the end, your approach should be encouraged. I am obviously of the opinion that it will fail, but in the end, we need alternatives to show a different path is possible. I wish you the best of luck.

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This is much like the formalisation of proposals into pre-agreed templates, a very sensible and common sense approach

Nay this is providing domain specific tracks to submit proposals to based on topic. It’s not template or a requirement.

such a change in strategy that will through basic incentive alignment issues end up working against the collective ability to make sense and to drive distributed intelligence.

This is not a proposal to change any strategy. It is a proposal try something out, getting more out of the liquid delegation system. It would be more respectful to read the post carefully before taking up some else’s time to respond.

How do you define events? What is an event and what isn’t an event?

This is a social parameter and not one hard set in code. We are dealing with the social layer. Tokenholders are able to define with their vote. It may also stimulate more discussion before on chain submission.

  1. The experts are wrong

You seem to misunderstand the power and purpose of the delegation system and the role of delegating in society. Responsibility is given and taken away from delegates fluidly without any top-down direction. The tokenholder base is a collective and their delegating makes and breaks the “experts”.

a bet on the old

strawman… again.

You’ve missed the meat and gone off a bit on your own ideas again ser. It’s helpful to stay on topic so we can determine the best action. :confused:

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I’m aware of how delegation works.

You are explicitly suggesting domain specific delegation tracks. You list them out.

Adam’s PR is : Add spending track specifically for users seeking funds to host ecosystem events

You are telling me what you have written, is not what you mean. I am confused.

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Indeed, the very purpose of a standing up a straw man is to confuse. Please, please stop. We’re trying to get some helpful feedback on the simple ideas presented and the simple experiment proposed.

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I’d definitely find this far more useful when getting granular in agile delegations than the broad (but weirdly siloed?) spender and tipper tracks. I’m still not entirely sure why we need five tracks for nondescript distribution, especially when two of them are so small that they’re almost guaranteed to never be used. It would be far more practical in evaluating if the tracks were broken out into more common subjects like (off the top of my head) events, marketing, educational materials, software development, and general for anything that doesn’t fit neatly into one.

Aside from helping to select subject matter experts for the most effective delegation possible, it would help to categorize proposals to keep them from bouncing between use cases depending on who they’re justifying their ask to (eg. if you are asking for funding to create educational videos, you clearly must deliver educational videos and not marketing content, etc)

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Nice distinctions in here, thanks! Definitely a good way to organize the collective around spending for specific purposes.

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Hey all - bumping this as I’m interested to hear what the current status of this experiment/idea is.

I think most of the key points have been covered so I don’t have much to add other than that I think this proposal makes a lot of sense. When it comes to delegation Polkadot is already innovating beyond most (any?) chains that I’ve seen at least. Elevating the delegation system with even more area/expertise-specific capabilities would in my mind only serve to highlight Polkadot’s innovation even further.

Taking an even higher-level perspective, this type of delegation is ideally something we would see in real-life politics someday, both on a national and local level. I myself have some prior experience from my time at a blockchain research institute in Sweden of working/speaking with local municipalities on the idea of implementing blockchain tech to facilitate closer citizen engagement. Now my excitement around this means I’m getting slightly ahead of myself, but I think the Polkadot model could really serve as a valuable role model and inspirational case in point here. Taking it even further, there would be some cool possibilities for collaborations on conceptual/pilot-type of research here. Anyway I’ll leave it at that…

Looking forward to hear where this idea is at as of today