Dear community,
Based on the recent experience with the increasing number of treasury proposals, I am presenting the following proposal aiming to improve the Governance 2.0 experience through a series of referenda proposal audits.
Governance 2.0 Referenda Audits
1. Problem
Since the launch of Governance 2.0 on Kusama I spent many hours reading, reviewing, and trying to understand many treasury discussions and proposals. I try my best to understand every proposal before forming an opinion and voting. For the majority of the proposals, I try to provide feedback to the proposer explaining the reasons for either supporting or rejecting the proposal. So far I feel like proposals are sort of a wild game at the moment.
Most proposals are not very well structured, lack information, and include budgets that seem very hard to defend. Proposals can also be very diverse with a focus on different areas that not everyone can be familiar with. For all these reasons it is significantly time-consuming for voters to truly understand the proposal and cast an educated vote on it.
With the given time constraints, it is not surprising that proposals are receiving very little or no feedback at all. The feedback is often provided in a free form and is not always clear and precise. Such insufficient information has little use for other voters. It provides low assurance to other community members that the reviewer has objectively formed an objective opinion on the presented proposals.
2. Available solutions
The official Polkadot treasury page, Kusama and Polkadot Wiki provide a good source of information and documentation. Most of this information and guidelines explain the “old” Governance 1.0 system or in other words, it relates to the very specific set of proposal reviewers – Councilors. With the Governance 2.0 introduction, the set of reviewers dramatically increased from a limited set of councilors to a much wider Dotsama community. For this reason, all the documentation needs to be adjusted so it can be better presented to the wider audience where not everyone needs to be an expert in the field to have a good understanding of the proposal content.
3. Proposal Solution
This proposal aims to create a clear and precise framework for creating and presenting the proposals. This framework is not meant to be a strict requirement but more as a set of guidelines for the proposers to successfully present their project and increase their chance to defend the proposal and win community approval.
As the counterpart to the proposal framework, the equally important audit framework will be created as guidance for the reviewers. This audit aims to provide more precise feedback to the proposer and give a sufficient and educated review that can be later used by other voters to form their opinion on the proposal.
In a young system like this, creating these guidelines is simply not enough. To create a better treasury proposal system, a great level of engagement is required. For this reason, I propose a temporary Project manager/auditor role for a period of 3 months. The main task of the PM is to actively follow the governance tracks, objectively check and audit the proposal content according to the proposal guidelines and produce and publish the audit according to the created framework. The task of the PM is to be available to the community and gather feedback and accordingly adjust the framework.
4. Key deliverables:
Proposal template – a document with predefined categories and as many pre-filled and guided data (examples) as possible.
Feedback template – directly related to the proposal template. Possible checklist for each category with additional room for the feedback
Produce a minimum of 30 one-page audits with included feedback on active treasury proposals or proposal discussions
5. Key objectives/ Success criteria
Reduce the time required to write a detailed and comprehensive proposal – measured by the proposal owner's feedback
Higher community involvement in the governance – measured by the number of members involved in discussions, number of provided feedback, and number of interactions with one-page reviews
All these points are taken from the full proposal document.