EOSCommunity.org Forums

1 2 3 of Governance

The new governance proposals proposed by @bytemaster are great to get the EOS community engaged and successful.
The USA model of three branches of government is a solid model for separation of powers with the legislative (congress), executive (president), and judicial (supreme court).
EOS community could also have three branches of governance:

  1. Operations. This is already in place with the Block Producers who are voted in by token holders.
  2. Governance. This is the new governance proposed by Dan but with a slight change (in the future) for removing the judicial and eviction roles from the the governance branch.
  3. Judicial. This is a new branch that could be created in the future if and when it’s needed as discussed below.

In Dan’s current proposal, the governance group handles governance aspects and judicial/eviction aspects. This should work well in the near term and all focus should be on implementing those proposals. However, the tasks of governing the community and judicial are very different and the people involved would have different skills. Personally, I’ve never been interested in BP operations of EOS so I leave that to others. I’m very interested in governance as described by Dan, but not that skilled or interested in the judicial aspects. For me, I would choose to participate my time in the governance group and not the operations (BP) nor judicial groups. Others would have their own choice and some members would be skilled and interested in the judicial aspects.

There is nothing we need to do now except work towards getting the Governance proposals going. Then, when the time is right, the judicial branch should be formed when needed.

8 Likes

I was thinking along somewhat similar lines that the Eden governance system should have multiple branches of government to not place disparate responsibilities on the same people. I think the third branch of Operations (I refer to it as “blockchain consensus governance”) is technically outside the scope of Eden governance but might still tie into as I discuss in my topic specifically on that matter: Blockchain consensus governance.

I was thinking that one of the two branches within the Eden system proper could be called the “Community Guardians” and they would be solely focused on protecting the Community from Sybil attacks and from bad actors going against the community guidelines which means being involved in the subjective matters of dispute resolution (this branch would be closest to the Judicial branch). They would not be involved in any decision making regarding distribution of funds. There would be an Eden-style hierarchical governance (HiGov) election process to determine the different levels of Community Guardian representatives each coming with their own privileges and responsibilities. The highest level representatives would form something analogous to a Supreme Court. The HiGov election process for Community Guardians would be triggered by the conditions of community size increases (increases by 10%) or 1 year after the last election at the latest.

The other branch would involve what I call the “Executives” and their primary focus would be on matters of funding. This would also involve a HiGov process to get different levels of Executive representatives but that election would happen at regular cadence unlike the one for the Community Guardians. Those different levels would get some amount of funding control flowing down to them as described in the Eden governance proposals. However, the top level representatives elected from that HiGov process would instead be the new members to enter the next session of a semi-persistent group called the “Executive Committee” and it would allow them to serve in the Executive Committee for a year term. After they serve their term, they could choose to re-enter the HiGov election process again if they wished to try to continue to serve. However, every quarter, approximately one-fourth of the Executive Committee (the ones whose term is over) would need to leave thus making room for the new members without indefinitely enlarging the Committee. (This is modeled similarly to how the US Senate functions.) The Executive Committee would have control of 50% of the inflation funds but they could also have other powers when acting collectively (typically two-thirds supermajority agreement required): they could make changes to configuration parameters in this Eden system and agree on updates to the core smart contracts making up the Eden system (possibly with other constraints imposed like time delays); and potentially they can interact with the blockchain consensus governance if the host blockchain chooses to accept that (e.g. they could potentially be given the multisig powers to change system contracts on the chain and they could perhaps just directly choose the active and standby block producer lists themselves).

These numbers can be adjusted of course. If people think doing HiGov for the Executive branch four times a year is too frequent, it could be done once a year instead. But then the term for elected members would need to be longer than a year. For example, the term length within the Executive Committee could be three years and thus each year approximately one-third of the Committee members would exit to make room for the newly elected members. However, the consequence of making it less frequent is that it will take more time for the members to change the makeup of the Executive Committee to affect meaningful change; three years is a long time in this space. This is mitigated a little by the fact that the flow of funds to lower levels allows other members that can completely change each session to immediately start using those more limited funds for the purposes they were elected for. In addition, I suppose the system could also include a flat voting mechanism of no confidence by members of the community to immediately trigger a HiGov election that completely replaces the current Executive Committee, but I think the threshold to trigger that should be pretty high.

3 Likes

Good ideas! We will have to talk in greater detail how to manage complexity

Surely complexity should try to be envisioned into the framework design? Would be rough to have to throw out a good design, or code, because a fundamental design assumption was missed in the beginning…

I understand that the Eden OS community would manage governance for EOS, BP’s etc. Give them inflation coins to run that, no problem.

But I’m more concerned with actual, local communities being able to use Eden. For instance, my little off-grid, most self-sufficient village. Could we use Eden to run ourselves as a small regional community? Could we use EOS as our currency of choice? I’m interested in how these actual, real world communities can bridge from fiat to a coin such as EOS, and be sustainable at the same time.

I kind of think of it all like a tree… The BP’s and main community are the tree trunk. Regional communities branch out like… er, branches… So a China branch would grow out of the trunk, and it would itself branch into provinces, or states e.g., Shaanxi, which would itself branch out into towns e.g. Xi’an. Then, leaves would grow on each branch, representing transactions that come and go within the network, although all could be recorded on the chain. Although a tree doesn’t bother to record its leaves - it just knows those leaves are going to nourish the soil around it for next year’s growth… Hint, hint… :grinning: