This proposal seeks to remove the mandated step of Incubation from our governance process in order to simplify the confusion with naming conventions and the process by which our community can enact changes in the DAO.
Abstract
Currently our governance process consists of 3 steps that are required to pass a new proposal: Incubation, Ideation, and a final Snapshot vote. While Incubation can be useful to gather community input, it essentially acts as a “Request for Comment” phase and should not be a strict requirement if a proposal is already well formulated and ready for a more formal vote from the community.
If passed, this proposal would remove the requirement for an Incubation post and deprecate the Incubation name to reduce confusion with similarly named steps in the process.
Motivation
The DAO is at a critical juncture in its lifecycle. The need for the community to be able to quickly and effectively make decisions is more important than ever. Simplifying the process and removing confusion around naming conventions will help token holders navigate the process more efficiently.
Specification
Incubation will become an optional step in our governance process.
The name Incubation will no longer be used and instead suggest tagging forum posts of this nature with [RFC] (request for comment).
The minimum final vote time will be modified from 3 days to 5 days
This change will reduce the shortest possible timeline for a proposal to be passed through governance from 11 days to 10 days
Benefits
Simpler Process
Clearer naming convention
Drawbacks
Changing the governance process involves some time period for the community to adjust to the new process.
In theory, some proposal ideas may have never made it past an Incubation post, but based on the history of the DAO this has not been the case. Additionally there was never anything stopping someone from moving a proposal to Ideation even if there was strong dissent during Incubation.
The DAO is at a critical juncture in its lifecycle. The need for the community to be able to quickly and effectively make decisions is more important than ever.
Which recent decision would have changed the course of the DAO if it could have been taken in 9 days instead of 12?
Reduced timeline
I see this as a drawback for a couple of reasons:
I do not think this gives enough space (namely Gov calls/Tokenomics calls) and time for discussions, especially in the case of ideas that lead to multiple proposal/counter proposals. The 12 day process is sometimes even short for this already.
It puts the Original Proposal at a larger advantage because it will have had plenty of time to be refined (without revealing it to the community) and any Counter Proposal will only have a couple of days to be worked on in this context. The goal is not to have all Counter Proposals arriving all the last minute and not be discussed before a Final Vote... but even if that was the goal it would still give a larger advantage to the Original Proposal. The current goal of the Incubation stage is to put them at a relatively same level in this regard.
It puts an even greater time constraint on proposers, a majority of which are for now active DAO contributors who are doing other things most of their day.
I do not think that a 3 day period of Incubation is lost at all, it signals to the community that changes are prepared and to start thinking about a specific topic and propose something based on the discussions it causes. For all these reasons I will vote “No” to removing this period and shortening the governance process.
Lastly, if the name “Incubation” is really such a confusing word for everyone, I have no issue with changing it.
This one is hard. the ‘Thought’ phase, i think its important more for the discussion around it. its a bit looser. where ideas are tossed about. Theres been a few Proposals that have skipped this (at least i remember Kent saying to someone, since we talked about this in gov you can skip the Incubation phase and go right into ideation…) but that was more cuz it was talked about. it was well received, and thought provoking etc. Counter to my thoughts above. this wouldnt stop someone from having a ‘Thought’ phase first… to formulate the idea. (helli been doing that for … months on something i want to propose. lol. Just less formal. which isnt a bad thing. im either way, leaning toward Changing it back to 2 steps. (tho that could mean both items are in snapshot , which is not ideal.) hm.
Some good conversation today in governance. I think the general take away from this was 7 days for Ideation and 5 days for snapshot voting. I will make those changes before this gets posted to ideation.
It’s a good compromise, we would still lose 1 day of discussions that could have an impact on the text of the final proposals with this 7/5 days scenario (vs. previously 3+5 days of discussions), but at least each Ideation will be mentioned/discussed in a Governance before it has a chance to pass.
I do think that this in conjunction to moving Ideation back to Snapshot (in your other proposal) does warrant to make it clear in all Ideation posts where the discussion is happening with more than just a link to the forum thread, as I’ve suggested a small text at the beginning of the Ideation text saying that this text isn’t final and input from the community is welcome on the forum…so new and existing members are invited to participate in the process with more than just a vote.
I’m in favor of removing the Incubation requirement provided that the minimum time for Ideation is increased to 7 days and minimum time for official vote is increased to 5 days. Thanks for pushing this forward 0xean
