Thank you @Thylacine for your thoughtful post and for bringing up this very important topic! I wholeheartedly agree with much of what you wrote and wanted to provide some additional thoughts on this.
For those of you that don’t know me, my name is Xochitl Cazador. I was drawn to Web 3 and Celo due to its potential to democratize wealth and technology. This is something I feel very passionate about — my mother is from a small town in Mexico that didn’t have access to running water or electricity. I was born and raised in East San Jose, a predominantly Latino community in what I like to call the shadow of Silicon Valley. I’ve seen first hand how the existing systems fail those that need it most. This perspective shapes my beliefs on some of the points that I will raise below.
I lead Ecosystem Growth at the Celo Foundation and have been working on Celo since 2019. As part of my role, I led the Celo Foundation Grants Program from 2019 to 2022 (when the program was put on pause), helped launch & create the Celo Camp curriculum, led mainstream partnerships (such as Grameen Foundation, CARE, Telefonica, Google Cloud, Chainlink, etc), and have supported many projects in the Celo Ecosystem including Impact Market, Kolektivo, ReSource, Good Dollar, HaloFi, Grass Roots Economics, and many more. My comments on this post, however, are from my personal perspective and do not represent the views of the Celo Foundation.
In addition to the points raised by @Thylacine and others on this thread, I believe we need to address a few more issues in governance:
- Overall Transparency & Approachability
- Strategic Use of Funds
- Democratization of Votes
- Community Engagement and Politics
Overall Transparency & Approachability:
The governance process is not easy to navigate. Up until recently the process on docs.celo.org did not provide an overview on the best practices such as creating a forum post and attending a governance call. Due to the way voting is structured, it’s not easy to understand how many votes are required to pass. Someone needs to look at CLI (Command Line Interface for any non techies reading this) to access this information. The only tool to see the status of different proposals (https://celo.stake.id) has had various issues – including being off by one day and misrepresenting the actual time left to vote. Additionally it is hard to know when governance calls are happening because you need to remember to look at the community calendar and manually add events to your own calendar. There have also been issues identified after a CGP is submitted that require additional back and forth (validating addresses, minimum x of y multisig, etc). The best practices are not clearly understood. If we want to encourage more participation in submitting governance proposals and engaging more individuals in actively voting – this process needs to be easier to understand. We also need to think about making governance accessible in applications like Valora so that any holder no matter how big or small can engage. My point here is – that we need to go back to one of Celo’s early tenets when thinking about governance and “designing for all”.
(Note: There is work underway to create a new governance dashboard led by @TomerBa , additionally @willkraft has done an excellent job with the governance calls and moved the meetings to lu.ma so that people can subscribe and it automatically adds it to the calendar. For those interested in Celo’s community tenets, they are: Designing for All, Striving for Beauty, Innovating on Money, and Embodying Humility.)
Strategic Use of Funds
I have a slightly different perspective of the on-chain community fund. In the spirit of decentralization, I love that anyone can access the on-chain fund and put forward a request. And I agree that as a community we need to be more thoughtful in terms of how funds are allocated. I believe there are different types of funding requests: Technical Infrastructure, Ecosystem Growth, Community & Education. For example:
- Technical Infrastructure: Funds that support technical advancements and benefit most (if not all projects) in the ecosystem. A recent example of this is Chainlink.
- Ecosystem Growth: Funds that benefit individual projects (i.e. Grants given by Prezenti or Climate Collective to an individual project in the ecosystem).
- Community & Education: Funds that support community education and growth. This can sometimes take the form of event sponsorship, hackathons, developer training, etc. (i.e. Africa DAO, Latam DAO, Europe DAO, etc)
I believe there is a place for all types of these requests in the community fund but as a community, we should think about what % of the fund is allocated to each category. My personal opinion is that a larger allocation should fund technical infrastructure with smaller allocations to the remaining two categories. Technical grants are needed to keep the platform current with critical tooling and infrastructure and even experiment with new forms of technology. (Especially in light of the L2 migration). Ecosystem growth can be an excellent mechanism to spur growth but worry that projects become dependent on this as a means to fund operations instead of seeking other forms of capital. I do believe that community engagement and education (aka marketing) is important. Celo Foundation and Celo Labs cannot and should not be everywhere – it’s important to create a community of individuals who can champion Celo locally – be the voice for what their community needs and understand how best to allocate resources to maximize impact. This is the true spirit of decentralization.
In addition to the allocation of funds, I believe it is equally important for any requester to be extremely transparent about how they plan to use those funds and what the results are. Did the grant increase the number of transactions, the number of wallets? Did it address a technical public good that was needed for the ecosystem? Did it grow the community? Did it generate new leads for the ecosystem? I’d love to see retros from past grantees to report on their impact. And believe that there needs to be a way to systemically claw back funds if funds are not appropriately allocated or goals are not being met. @annaalexa shared that MakerDAO faced similar challenges and has done some work here that we should learn from.
Democratization of Votes
Voting is dependent on quorum being met. We’ve seen proposals with few numbers of votes (in terms of wallets) but large % of engagement due to the size of the wallets that are engaged. You can view the history of votes to see which proposals had more distribution of smaller vs larger wallet engagement. Vitalik Buterin, Glen Weyl, and Zoe Hitzig wrote about voting dynamics in their paper “A Flexible Design for Public Goods” This work inspired the design behind Gitcoin’s Quadratic Funding and a number of the features that were built into Allo Protocol a new funding tool created by Gitcoin and SuperModular. (“Allo” is short for Allocation – you can catch Owocki speaking about this at Funding the Commons at ETHCC). We’ve been working with the Gitcoin team to bring Allo on Celo. It is deployed on Alfajores Testnet with plans to launch on Mainnet soon. I’m personally excited at the potential this has to help program how the community fund is used. But until this is live, I would encourage everyone to think critically about Celo’s mission and be open to various voices in the community. Voters should look not only at the allocation of votes, but the distribution, speak to others to gain a diverse set of opinions and engage in discussion. Ask others why or why not they support a certain proposal. I’d also love to see wallet holders identify themselves. This is a best practice we see in other governance models like Uniswap (see their Snapshot and Tally dashboards here). Most protocols separate governance into two steps –- a temperature check with the community and a governance vote where most large holders (1) identify themselves (2) publicly comment on why (or why not) they support a specific proposal before casting their vote.
Politics and Engagement.
This leads me to my next point on this topic – the politics around submissions. I’ve seen a lot of backchannel around certain proposals. Most (if not all) of the proposals are put forward in good faith. And typically there is a very healthy discussion on the forum. It saddens me when I hear a conversation via backchannels criticizing a proposal instead of in the forum. And I wonder how anyone can have a strong opinion, and make assumptions about the proposal without either engaging in the forum post directly, contacting the author, or attending the governance call? I saw this with a recent proposal where the author approached various people to ask their opinions before submitting it on the forum – some of those individuals responded they didn’t have time to review but provided strong commentary behind the scenes to individuals in the ecosystem. Transparency, openness, and engagement are the spirit of the Celo Ecosystem. If you have feedback – leave it on the forum and engage in discussion. We are all stewards of the community and should engage openly and transparently.
In Conclusion
I love the Celo Ecosystem and was drawn to it because of its focus on being a force for good in the world. I know that Web3 and governance are constantly evolving. This post is meant with the best of intentions. I hope this feedback is seen as an invitation for everyone to engage and help evolve this process. I’m immensely grateful to folks like @annaalexa , @joshc , Owocki, Scott, Zakk and so many others who have shared perspectives on governance frameworks and funding models. The pace of innovation that has occurred around governance and fund allocations has increased dramatically and I don’t believe Celo should reinvent the wheel – we should learn from others, stay current on the latest developments, and experiment in our ecosystem.