FIP-82: Governance Enhancements

Summary

Enhance DAO governance and participation through Liquid Representative Democracy. Under the proposed governance structure, a newly created Tribal Council made up of members of the Tribe DAO community will replace the existing Optimistic Approval process. Optimistic pods and a NopeDAO are also introduced via the governance proposal.

Forum discussion:

The full technical details of the motivation, proposal, and specification are available at: https://tribe.fei.money/t/fip-82-governance-enhancements/3945

Motivation

DAO governance often suffers from voter apathy, lack of community context, and barriers to participation such as gas fees. At the same time, many votes are non-controversial by the time they reach on-chain voting, making the incentives to vote (and pay gas fees) misaligned with increased participation. The Tribe DAO is not immune to these common DAO problems. Optimistic Approval (OA) in its current form is often difficult to follow and can be a long process regardless of the importance of the matter. Even trivial governance actions go through a lengthy process of proposing a draft, last call, snapshot, and an optimistic timelock. This can mean over 8 days of governance to enact small and non-controversial proposals.

This proposal could greatly improve the governance experience by creating a Tribal Council to propose and approve governance actions, with a built-in negative consent time lock and a low veto threshold to easily veto any actions taken by the Tribal Council that are opposed by the “Nope DAO”. This potential governance change will also allow for specialized governance pods to form around specific DAO issues, will encourage transparency and community engagement on the protocol level, and empower TRIBE holders to more actively participate in governance.

Specification

Full details are specified at: https://tribe.fei.money/t/fip-82-governance-enhancements/3945

Overview if passed:

• Maintain the existing TRIBE DAO three-tier governance structure, but expand the Optimistic Approval and Guardian to accommodate Optimistic pods
  • An Optimistic pod is an Orca pod with an optimistic timelock. An Orca Pod is essentially a Gnosis Safe with a membership layer.
• The existing Optimistic Approval powers will devolve to the newly created Tribal Council while removing the snapshot requirements
  • A committee will be elected by the DAO and become the Tribal Council. Initially, this will have 9 members, with a threshold of 5 on the Gnosis Safe.
  • Membership of the committee will come from the TRIBE community and by vote of the TRIBE community.
  • Tribe DAO is able to add and remove members of the Tribal Council at will through a vote of the full Tribe DAO.
  • The Tribal Council will maintain optimistic control over lower clearance pods and is able to veto them, with the exception of the Guardian pod
• Optimistic pods are introduced into governance protocol
  • These pods can be created by Tribal Council to manage specific areas of the protocol
• The Guardian pod will maintain limited powers to be used only in emergencies

A NopeDAO is created to veto any proposal from the Tribal Council or an Optimistic Pod. Its only function is the veto

• The NopeDAO has a lower threshold of 10M TRIBE to enact a veto and once reached, the veto will take place immediately without a timelock
• The NopeDAO is not able to veto the TRIBE DAO (i.e. can only overrule the Tribal Council and specialized pods, not a full Tribe DAO vote).
• Any proposal that is vetoed by the NopeDAO must then go through the DAO governance to be enacted.

The result is that Tribal Council, and yet-to-be-created specialized Pods, will be able to prioritize non-controversial matters while those matters that go to a full Tribe DAO vote will be important and ones that the community will want to focus on.

Voting:

The proposal will use simple choice voting. Voting options are:

• Yes, approve the governance upgrade
• No, more discussion is needed

Given the importance of this vote, this snapshot will remain open for 4 days and we encourage you to discuss this vote with fellow Tribe Holders.