Reflections on the DV Program So Far & What's Next!?

Governance
21

I think the long term goal should be Option A) but in the mid-term we should stick with Option B). Total delegation of DOT should DECREASE with each cohort, say by 10-20% each time, for maybe another 6-10 cohorts or so.

The point of the program imo is the bootstrap governance participation, but if total delegation were to increase, or remain the same, it would instead overshadow it. Small token holders already are discouraged to participate as they feel that most outcomes are determined by DVs.

In the spirit of DOGE: Any good government program should have an expiry date. And while I believe that the program currently is beneficial for the ecosystem, the long-term goal must be to phase it out eventually and return power to token holders.

22

Here are some thoughts from PolkaWorld on the future of the DV program.

Let’s start with our conclusion: Before clear “standards” and “culture” are established, we recommend maintaining the current DV setup with 6 positions to ensure high voting power!

Throughout PolkaWorld’s past two DV delegations, we’ve identified several issues—such as the need for clearer proposal content, reasonable budget standards (including salary guidelines), a framework for treasury prioritization, and budget allocation guidelines. Interestingly, these concerns were raised as early as a year ago by community members like @Alice_und_Bob, yet we’ve seen little progress. These issues are challenging to push forward, and in our view, a major reason is the lack of “influence” or “execution capacity” on the part of those proposing ideas. Simply put, if a person without voting power merely writes a forum post, it’s hard to get others to follow those rules.

Therefore, we believe the most critical task now is to establish some “rules” for the Polkadot Treasury. These rules don’t need to be set in stone, but an initial version is essential to give the treasury a sense of “standards.” With standards in place, more normal voters will have a basis for judgment when evaluating proposals. For example, if we set a rule that hourly wages must not exceed $120, and a proposal requests $200 per hour, even an normal DOT holder can immediately decide to vote against it.

The establishment of these standards should involve a group of individuals who deeply understand treasury management and have voting power. The DV program is a natural fit for this role. Thus, we should first invite leaders like @Alice_und_Bob to collaborate with the DVs to co-create these standards. Then, DVs can vote according to these standards, guiding the community to establish habits and follow these standards over the next six months to a year.

In the second stage, we can gradually expand the number of DV positions from 6 DAOs to 10, or even 20, while introducing a rotation period (ideally every 3 months; 4 months can be quite exhausting—based on PolkaWorld’s own experience, reviewing proposals is essentially a full-time job, and we also need to handle PolkaWorld’s core work. Of course, in the future, it’s possible that a dedicated voting DAO could emerge as a full-time operation). This approach would maximize cultural diversity across different DAOs, foster their influence, and encourage continuous refinement of the standards.

In the third stage, we can set a target participation rate. Once the overall Polkadot DAO participation reaches a certain percentage, we can fully retire the DV program and transition to complete democracy.

The reasoning behind this is that we believe the true purpose of the DV program is to help establish a better OpenGov governance culture and environment, not merely to decentralize the Web3 Foundation’s voting power. We know that as long as large voting powers exist, there will inevitably be some level of centralization—whether or not DVs are involved. True decentralization would mean moving beyond the idea of DOT-based voting power and considering more diverse methods, where community members can earn voting rights through fair efforts.

Therefore, our view is that the ultimate goal should be to foster a governance culture and ecosystem for OpenGov, and to establish dynamic standards and rules!

23

This is a complex topic that touches several layers than range from the design of OpenGov, political philosophy, day-to-day practicalities and the spirit of participative governance of a DAO. Until day, the governance shapes the actions of the ecosystem granting/denying funds ( which from an external observer not aware of openGov, following these actions could be considered the result of a strategy ) or some openGov legislative attempts.

I will exclude the bounties here, as after their constitution they are sovereign. This deserves another completely chapter by itself.

I understand the initial concerns of the web3 foundation to create the DV program, but in my opinion it has created an elite which dominates/influences clearly the political process and fund-granting decision making ( because is the 90% what openGov does - funds projects) . I am not against “representative participatory systems”, but some deep reforms should be needed:

  • Term limitations - shaped in form of “non-consecutive terms” and " maximum x terms in y months", is needed to avoid accumulation of power and influence.
  • Not all the DVs are elected at the same time, to avoid proposal pushing when a freshly new tenure of DVs are elected.
  • No overlapping members in DAOs.
  • Transparency from W3F on the selection of the cohort. Yes, these are their funds, but they affect everyone.

We have also need to consider that openGov is quite still a system that needs a lot of manual input, not only to follow the “current political affairs/drama of the day”, but to process and report - it created a huge bureaucratic burden for delegates. One of the most sophisticated software in history of mankind still needs a lot of basic human manual input. Opening the door to have more delegates will increase the bureaucratic burden of the political action, which leads me the question of: Is openGov too central in the Polkadot Life? Does not drag resources, attention and energy from other activities that can improve polkadot: i.e. buidling ?

Also the DV programm underscore the idea of Polkadot being built one proposal of a time, in this permanent rolling 24/7 in-session participative process. Maybe we went better in manage spending ( or we are just sugar coating the fact of before being very bad ? ) but direction and strategy still feels random. As PolkaWorld commented, executing an strategy is not only having a plan but also getting the resources and the authority/influence to push it. Maybe something easy in a corporate environment - where the authority flows from the top-, but something very difficult in an open-ended decentralised ecosystem - where by definition there is no central authority.

On culture:

The establishment of these standards should involve a group of individuals who deeply understand treasury management and have voting power. The DV program is a natural fit for this role.

So, an elite ?

I am on the impression that the gap between those in the positions of influence and the rest of the ecosystem is getting bigger and bigger.

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How is it possible to transition from token-voting (current OpenGov structure) to democracy (one-person-one-vote) without KYC?

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Economic rewards stimulate growth. If you don’t really have objectives in mind then we’re just running experiments for the sake of experimentation. The program was successful at stimulating growth and collectivization of the network. But the ends were simply to increase participation and counter Giotto. Without altering targets and generating a 2.0 all of the work done would be pointless and ending it may just provoke Giotto to come back.

My recommended changes…

  1. More recipients of delegations – Keep more DAOs “active” to keep their member base “active”.

  2. Limitation of total delegation to a multiplier of existing delegations – Incentivize DAOs to increase their DV stake by having them acquire stake from members, friends, and other sources.

  3. Increase participation reward and tie payments to referendum outcomes. – Increase the amount rewarded to DAOs for participating in the DV program but tie the reward to the outcome of referendum. I have a few ideas how this could be done.

  4. Expand identities on People to include the following:
    A) Identity “Type” (Individual, Company, DAO, NPO, etc)
    B) Associations (Allow non-individual identity types to tag other addresses as members – like sub-identities but showing memberships)
    C) Allow individual members to revoke / reject / accept sent association requests

  5. Provide bonuses to DAOs that have their memberships associated on chain or scale existing rewards by memberships – (To start trying to get the daos that have already formed to get their members to rep them on-chain)

Going this route you’re just amplifying the existing voices of these groups. This would allow the removal of limitations such as COI. Even with the COI limitations there is still the possibility of “vote for me ill vote for you” behavior which defeats the purpose. Do we care if something is a COI if the outcome is beneficial for the network? We should concern ourselves with outcomes.

Instead of focusing on limiting behavior you don’t want think about how to incentivize / provoke the behavior you do want. I think a more interesting conversation to have is, what behavior do we want?

2 Likes
26

gm!

Great discussion!

Option B + C.

Imagine a scenario where we allocate only 1 M per DV, and we have 42 delegates serving for a 1-year term.

With requirements to become a delegate would be to prove your Polkadot citizenship—for example, through activity metrics like number of transactions, verified identity, voting history, participation in PBA, being a curator, ambassador, meetup organizer, etc.

This model distributes power more broadly across the community, prevents consolidation by individuals across multiple DAOs, and encourages personal stake voting and delegation. It brings us closer to a “House of Commons” style of governance.

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Thank you very much @Zendetta for the work done and for putting the focus on this issue.

Personally I think that the objective of the DV program is being fulfilled, it has been an excellent initiative to give more voice to the community and to balance the weights in the ecosystem but at the same time it needs some reformulation.

I agree with the opinions I read in the chat regarding the concerns that the role of the DVs always raises, possible conflicts of interest, multiple voting in two or more DAOs, transforming DAOs into whales, verifying votes, the issue of delegation, regionalization of voting and reputation, among others.

I think we have many referent people in the ecosystem that could work on improving the program without losing sight of the fact that the votes do not belong to the community but to W3F.

I think it is very important to work on regional referents, avoid multiple voting in different DAO or overlaping DAOs, avoid COI, have skin in the game and generate DV that have real reputation in the ecosystem.

Also, the rotation of the DVs and that DV should be teams and not individuals is very important to avoid prejudices in the transparency at the time of voting.

I am available to set up and/or join a team that wants to work on improving the DV program.

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There is far too much work, responsibility, and pressure for 1 person to manage it. W3F tried it in previous cohorts and it was bad.

1 Like
29

When I talk about the idea of individual DVs, think of them less like solo DAOs with DV status, and more like specialist DVs – individuals with deep expertise in a specific domain, not generalists expected to weigh in on every proposal.

These would be reduced-scope roles with far lower expectations from the community. Their purpose in OpenGov would be entirely different from that of a typical DV team. They wouldn’t vote on most proposals, only the refs that fall within their range of expertise. Projects wouldn’t “pitch” to them. Instead, they’d be recognized contributors in OpenGov – individuals whose votes carry added weight in specific areas because they’ve demonstrated long-term alignment with the network’s values and have above average expertise in a given field.

For this to work, I think W3F would need to proactively onboard a rotating group of high-signal individuals across different fields, give them a shared communication channel to connect with other individual/specialist DVs (so they have a support system), reward them for their time, and make it clear to the community that this is a reduced role with reduced expectations.

Of course it might just end up being another experiment that doesn’t stick.. but I like the idea of having a few well-informed, semi-rogue individuals who can tip the scales and influence DAOs with DV status (and other voters) by providing quality input on refs in their space, quickly.

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Unfortunately as we have seen in the past, individuals are very easy to sway, either via pressure, lobbying, or–more commonly–quid pro quo backroom dealmaking.

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Individual DVs are the best option if we care about transparency and personal responsibility. There’s not much difference between individuals voting in OpenGov or through subDAOs (direct voting by individuals means you know who voted, how, and why - feedback ???).

Sure, individual voting rates might be lower, but with enough people, participation becomes broader and more resilient. On the other hand, DAO delegates can hide behind group decisions, thereby reducing their responsibility.

Also, it’s not one or the other—you can be a delegate and still be part of any subDAO or political group. Parties can run as many DV candidates as they want.

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While some individuals might be swayed, there are principled experts in polkadot today.. like semi-retired founders from web2 that are now passionate about Polkadot’s censorship-resistant vision, who are financially secure, invested in DOT, and motivated purely by the network’s success, not backroom deals.

Definitely would require w3f do their due diligence before selecting these individuals tho, which is why I suggested an election system on OpenGov be introduced, allowing for polling and feedback on the individuals being looked at by w3f (they still make the final call since it’s their tokens, but this at least takes some burden off of their shoulders).

1 Like
33

I also wanted to weight in on the discussion of DAOs vs. individuals, when it comes to transparency. I question the narrative that individuals can be lobbied or bribed more easily, hence DAOs are preferable.

DAOs where no single individual can be held accountable for a joint decision, and many members remain anonymous, can in fact be much more opaque. “Backroom deals” can still very much happen. For doxxed individuals as DVs on the other hand, a voting decision is almost by definition more transparent, as it only includes a single input. If a COI is exposed, at least we know who it relates to.

3 Likes
34

DVs should/will evolve to be some form of ideal political parties meant to represent the very wide multidimensional spectrum that are token holders, e.g. some people want to be represented based on their geography, others based on their areas of interest, etc. therefore a DV must be an agenda, a set of ideals that focuses on a narrow slice of that spectrum, the more DVs the better as we can get to represent more people. We should take some time to identify said spectrum to know better what kind of DVs we want.

Based on that, here are some musts I consider necessary with my bit of shameless self promotion

  • As DVs represent ideas and opinions, all DVs must be DAOs, it doesn’t matter if it starts as a one person governed DAO, the “founder” can leave but the ideals and purpose stay.
  • All DAOs must have a clear manifesto that positions them in some part of the identified token holder spectrum.
  • To guaranty transparency, provide flexibility and resilience(the purpose that a DAO represent can’t be shut down), all DAOs must be actual DAOs, not discord bots, not even multisigs/proxies, DVs need robust organizational infrastructure where decision makers are identified, where they can define simple or complex decision making strategies, ability to define teams to manage budgets, etc. The kind of OpenGov based tech that is a common good and can give a lot of structure to the program, you know, the kind of tech that already exists that our team(Virto) already created and is gathering dust in some corner of the ecosystem.

My suggested action plan would be to take time to do things right(doesn’t need to take long though), the W3F along with competent parties in the ecosystem first need to do some initial research for the “token holder spectrum identification”, the outcome can already be the creation of the needed DAOs by the W3F(ping us for support on that ;)) based on what the foundation can delegate, have their initial manifestos defined, create some tooling and when things are ready open the applications for DVs again, this time it’s mainly a bootstrapping action to decide what groups or individuals are going to lead the newly created houses. As it’s the W3F’s delegation, the foundation can remain a member of each DAO to keep tabs on them.

1 Like
35

Hello everyone,

I’ve taken some time to reflect before replying to this post. I’d like to start by recognizing that the Decentralized Voices (DV) program is a valuable initiative. After about a year of testing, I believe it deserves to be improved and made more engaging, rather than discontinued.

I’ve read some comments suggesting that the program should be shut down, but this raises some concerns. If the Web3 Foundation no longer exercised its voting power through delegations, that influence would be lost — and that would be a missed opportunity. Shutting it down would also risk sending the wrong message: that DV was a failure rather than a milestone. That simply isn’t true. Additionally, we should keep in mind that similar circumstances to last year’s may arise again in the future, and it would be much better to have an improved system in place rather than restarting from scratch.

So, how can we improve it?
One of the key issues seems to be the concentration of voting power among only six DAOs. This setup doesn’t effectively promote community participation or meaningful decentralization. A possible solution would be to expand the group to include up to 10 DAOs and 10 individual delegates.
I’m aware that the experiment with individual delegates didn’t work out previously, but perhaps the issue wasn’t with the concept itself — rather, it may have been a matter of choosing the wrong individuals. The right people, even with limited voting power, can contribute substantial value if selected based on clear and fair criteria.

Regarding the notion of “skin in the game”, I think it’s overly simplistic to assume that having more DOT automatically implies a stronger sense of responsibility or better judgment. As last year showed, even large token holders can act in ways that are more self-serving than objective. In that case, “skin in the game” was interpreted as: “I have a lot of DOT, so I decide.” That mindset can be deeply damaging to the governance process.

In my view, real “skin in the game” should be a hybrid of active involvement, reputation, and the ability to make well-reasoned decisions. Otherwise, we risk ending up in a system where whales dominate, for better or worse, and that’s not healthy for a decentralized network.

To give a real-world analogy: imagine a billionaire who owns 90% of a company and wants to buy a mountain. His managers, who are far less wealthy but highly skilled, advise against it after careful analysis. In this case, although the final decision lies with the owner, their input prevents a poor decision. Similarly, in Polkadot governance, even those without a “heavy bag” of DOT should be empowered to contribute meaningfully. And the best way to enable that is through delegations.

In conclusion, I believe the most effective path forward would be to:

  • Distribute delegations among a larger and more diverse set of entities and individuals,
  • Establish clearer and stricter rules for delegates,
  • and most importantly, enforce immediate revocation of delegations in cases of misconduct or failure to respect those rules.

Only by doing this can we ensure that voting power in Polkadot governance reflects true decentralization, accountability, and shared responsibility.

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36

I completely agree—setting a threshold of owning x DOT to participate in the DV program excludes many potential candidates from engaging in current political affairs, simply because they can’t afford it. We should avoid creating any form of an Assemblée des notables. Access to the DV program should be as broad and inclusive as possible ( including individuals). Western world invented Modernity precisely to move beyond systems of privilege.

1 Like
37

Governance participation is an issue and thanks to Delegated Voting created by the W3F we in most cases can as an ecosystem make the right decisions. A good mix of DAOs with enough weight allows this to happen, I believe that DAOs should have “skin in the game” and prove themselves as good contributors to the ecosystem and its well being. I do believe that the Giotto factor needed a full frontal solution, and it seems that “attitude” applied to all project looking for some kind of funding is counter productive to us welcoming creativity and discovery of novel ideas worth pursuing. We are still maturing on that front.

I do believe that Governance participation is a high ask for anyone new coming to the ecosystem given the stakes, even for someone with experience from voting since Referendum #1. This is an issue that needs to be resolved with a new approach, one that can also deal with Inflation and how we do funding of projects.

The following content is a mix of ideas that I have been playing around with, probably too hard to implement at this point due to OpenGov, nevertheless worth hashing it here to contribute in some ways to the conversation.

1- As proof of stake, in the process of staking your assets instead of staking them with a series of Validators why don’t we make the system gives us choices to support Initiatives with clear deliverables as in DAOs with specific diverse Focuses (this can be anything that comes to your mind). The user funds will get the returns from staking, which in return supports the selected DAOs by way of the validator fees. This will bring many different points of views on the referenda themselves, having a multidisciplinary groups, is a Bonus and participation can be expected to increase many times over, the DAOs have to have readymade tooling to achieve this, and today we do have some working well.

2- Decentralizing the DevOps/Validation functions. We will need to decentralized the way that the Validators model works today. Today DevOps run the show on the infrastructure side that should change so DAOs will benefit from running Validation function, but we can not assume that the DAOs will have full time DevOps to maintain their validator network of 2 or 3 Nodes. The DAOs will have a contractual obligation to pay for the Infrastructure necessary (data centres) to run the operation, DAOs should also cover the Operators (devops) of their systems (there are many ways this can be done to achieve same result and even improve the latency that takes to do an upgrade to the node software, networkwide)

3- Inflation, The Staking Rules need to change, we can not have one blanket rule for all staked funds. What can work well is “returns set in a stair manner,” the longer you are committing your funds to stay locked in the network, the higher the returns you will have, the shorter time you are able to stake/lock them, the lower your returns will be. This rules will create the financial incentives to choose from high yield, to minimum yields for your funds, creating better incentives for long term investment and way less incentives for speculators of the coins, still being able to fast unstake your coins would be a plus where conditions will also apply.

Whales, DAOs holding a considerable weight in voting will always be a problem, and possibly a mix of Quadratic and weighted voting would alleviate some of those issues we do have today until we achieve better distribution within the ecosystem.

Hope this triggers more ideas within the community of how we can change and improve the systems already in place.

38

Adding my thoughts to this great discussion.

DV has been a valuable tool to establish a community centric governance body to counteract well funded central actors. In this regard it has been successful.

My thoughts lay on what the future of DV can look like, now that there has been some balance returned to the force.

Abandoning the program seems like a disaster waiting to happen. Especially while the current capital requirements to swoop in and wreak havoc are relatively low.

The option to reduce delegation amounts and increase the number of DV entities sounds most promising, but I fear a simple reduction in DV stake and some initiative to find other DAOs or individuals still creates a void for exploit without additional actions.

I might suggest a clear definition of DAO standards and (preferably) on-chain verification and activities for public scrutiny.

The total amount of DV delegated DOT would not change, but there is a decreasing cap for each DAO for each new cohort. So each DAO gradually reduces weight on decision making. This might spur participating DAO members to form their own DAOs as a means to scale and amplify their voices, picking up any remaining available DV delegation.

A greater number of DAOs participating in governance means a higher chance for alignment of individual ideals. DAOs being non-interacting, but output visible in one place could mean anyone new to governance can see and delegate to any DAO which aligns to their beliefs. Spreading W3F votes across a wider range of governance participants should empower a more honest view of DOT holder sentiment.

I think skin-in-the-game is vital for security of the network, but not suitable for governance voting. Securing the network is a risky endeavor and should be punished for malpractice. Voting and having your voices heard is a right for any democracy and no one should ever be punished for voicing their opinion on the future of the network, even if they intend to do harm. We should be resilient through our practices.

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You’re driving me crazy on this forum, flagging every other post. What’s your problem? We spend an hour writing an analysis and it gets flagged without us ever knowing why.

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The above post was flagged as off-topic (it’s about staking, and this topic is about the Decentralized Voices program) and for being AI-generated.