Description

Council Kit research and experimentation as an all-in-one on-chain governance framework for the Layer 3 (L3) Ecollective.

Why

The Eco community is organized into sub-DAOs named Ecollective. The Builders Ecollective was the first to emerge, and they chose a simple setup (Snapshot and Safe) because their small size doesn’t necessitate another system for the time being.

On the other hand, L3 is already a much larger group within Eco. Using the same structure as the Builders Ecollective will still necessitate some centralized or trusted group to act as Snapshot manager and Safe signers. L3 needs a better governance platform in order to manage its own treasury, the ideal solution would enable them to conduct on-chain governance without the requirement to designate a subset of trusted members to run the system and transfer funds.

It’s expected that more Ecollectives arise as the Ecosystem of Eco grows, with various organizational and governance models (democratic, meritocratic, plutocratic, or a combination of each).

Council Kit is a highly promising solution that aims to achieve the flexibility of multiple governance models that can assist each Ecollectives in meeting their needs. Researching Council Kit early on, understanding its vision and direction before it is ready for production, is the appropriate step to give present and future Ecollectives the experience they need to carry out decentralized governance at scale.

At the time of this research, L3 was in need of implementing its initial governance infrastructure, which is what prompted this research in the first place, to validate or reject the possibility that Council Kit is the proper tool to help L3.

Timeline

I started to explore the documentation of Council Kit in mid-April 2023, and have been experimenting on a regular basis since mid-May.

Learnings

Council Kit totally fits L3's needs in a few criteria:

• No need for trusted users (admin, safe signers, etc.)
• Delegation
• Flexibility: everything can be changed through on-chain voting:
  • add/remove a new voting strategy
  • mint tokens/NFTs
  • send funds from the treasury
  • interact with any contract on the same blockchain

On the other side, we decided that the overall state of development of the project was too early for the L3 Ecollective to use it for the following reasons:

• The only way to create a proposal embedded transaction is through the CLI. This process is only accessible to developers.
• There is no UI to create a proposal title and description yet.
• The documentation is only accessible to developers.
• Every L3 member's involvement would require them to pay some gas fees in the current state, lowering participation (stake, vote, create a proposal, execute a proposal, etc).
• Only developers who know Council Kit can verify what a proposal is doing (i.e., change quorum from 20 to 2).

If anyone is curious to learn more about the conducted experiments and technical learning, I’ll be happy to respond to all questions. You can also read more on the research project on Charmverse

Conclusion

My tests revealed that Council Kit has a very good offering and appears to be the ideal governance framework for the L3 Ecollective and other Ecollectives. However, either the team will need some time to make it more accessible, or the Builders Ecollective will need to actively contribute to it to get there.

Further development

I will actively monitor the Council Kit team's protocol changes. I created a direct relationship with the team and will be looking to contribute to it by generating more accessible documentation to aid its acceptance, and once I feel Council Kit is ready, I will communicate about it to the Eco community.

Funding

I request a budget of 110 000 ECO tokens at the time of the submission, to retroactively fund the research work done on Council Kit up to that date.

Team

Jeremie

Funds Destination

Send the funds to 0x25d5C9DbC1E12163B973261A08739927E4F72BA8.