Meeting - 16th August 2022
Fund 8 dRep White Paper Working Group - Community Review
Last updated
Fund 8 dRep White Paper Working Group - Community Review
Last updated
Kenric Nelson
Steph Macurdy
Stephen Whitenstall
Aharon Porath
Consenz
Thorsten Pottebaum
Chris Keller
Community Review
Andrii Volostyn
Community Review
Harry Hellyer
Community Review
Jack Briggs
Community Review
Dr A. Fisher
Community Review
Bruno Valverde
Community Review
Cliffon
Community Review
Nori Nishigaya
Community Review
Simon Sailstrom
Community Review
Philip Lazos
Documentation funded by Fund 7 - QA-DAO Transcription Service
(Used for Project Management tracking and reporting)
You can refer to this Agenda as a record of who attended and a summary of the content of our meeting.
We usually have a 45 minute recorded session and then have an informal unrecorded session afterwards. There's references here for the documentation.
Brief Updates/Notices from each participant - All
And we usually have a brief update from each participant. So maybe we can just as a few of us here, just a sentence or two.
I am Stephen Whitenstall of QADAO. I am part of the Community Governance Oversight proposal which includes this dRep Working Group.
I'm Kenric, I lead a company called Photrek and I am really thrilled to be working with Steve and the team as part of oversight of governance and this dRep paper. It's really coming together. Thanks everyone for joining us today.
Hello, everyone. I'm Andre. I'm in Catalyst from Fund one.
I have been a proposer, a CA and a vCA. I'm interested in blockchain governance, and in governance in general. So I submitted an application to be a dRep. And two weeks ago on the After Townhall there was a group on this. So I left many comments in that white paper. Thanks for inviting me.
I'm Jack. I work for IOG and I'm part of the team that are rolling out delegation, dReps and many other things for governance.
Hello, I'm Steph. I work at Wolfram Blockchain Labs, which is a subsidiary of Wolfram Research. I am part of writing this white paper focused on the measuring the influence of voter power using the Banzhaf Power Index .
I'm Aharon, the founder of Consenz, a platform we're building for documenting decision making processes in a decentralised manner. We have been funded by the Catalyst project and we are also writing together with Kenric a chapter in the white paper for providing clear consensus and communication for governance.
My name is Harry Hillier. I run a coaching consultancy firm called edify with a set of partners. And then we run Edified co Labs.
We work with a lot of technology firm, corporates and mid tier firms. So what's my value in this conversation? It will be to come at it more from a business point of view as opposed to a technical point of view. So rather than it being an objective perspective, it will be a business development strategy.
Hello I am Thorsten. I am a Co-Editor. Some of you may have meet me already in the After Town Hall.
Hi, Stephen, good to see you. Again. I am here in support of QA DAO, the Challenge teams and the Circle and all pieces of Catalyst. I'm here pleasantly absorbing the dRep conversation and maybe won't be adding today I'm burdened with kids. But here for all the work you guys are doing with us.
We received the final payment from CGO Treasury for this project. And I've also forwarded a payment for Thorston for his work this month on being the co-editor. Later in the month we'll make final decisions with regard to rewards for the reviewers.
On the project planning side, I'll just refer to the previous Fund 7 CGO proposal which we have now done a closing report and we will be doing a presentation at Town Hall tomorrow. In that presentation there will be a reference to the predecessor of this working group, which was a DAO literature review. Then this project will be referred to as the successor of that. So watch out for that in the After Town Hall tomorrow.
Looking at the calendar the team had made a request to not hold as many meetings during August, but I wanted to kind of press forward. So we did have two meetings this month, but I'm going to suggest that the meeting for the 30th August 2022 be cancelled or postponed.
I'm going to make a recommendation that rather than waiting a full month that we meet on 1800 UTC, September 6th 2022 as our next meeting for this group.
Next meeting : 1800 UTC, Tuesday, September 6th, 2022
Looking at the month of September my recommendation is the 6th September 2022 include this whole team with the reviewers again. And then the 20th September 2022 be just the author's. And that's when we're going to finalise everything.
Authors/Editors meeting : 20th September 2022
If anyone wants to make input into the review of the dRep white paper they should be doing it this week. So can [Thorsten] get on Catalyst social media, and provide a link to the white paper and let people know that. You know, they should make their input this week, if they want to contribute to the review.
Maybe the 14th of September 2022 might be a good time to do another after town hall discussion before we release the paper ?
Some updates on the organisation of this.
The title page will just have the editors now because the way we're doing this kind of more like in the structure of a book chapter or journal.
So we have a whole group of authors but the authors are only responsible for their section. And then I also put a table of contents together.
The editors are putting together an introduction.
Philip Lazos is putting together a literature review on delegated representation.
Steph Macready is going into more depth on the analytical side of how you measure power in delegated systems.
Finally, we'll conclude with Aharon Porath who's applying governance to the process of consensus in writing a document.
To make sure that we're also giving time and depth to Aaron's work, I'd like to start with that today.
Andrew Fisher is not is not apparently able to join us today. But he did a really deep dive and was quite helpful. Have you had a chance to look at his comments, Aaron?
Yeah and I implemented some changes and edited some sections according to the comments that have been added to the document.
The conclusion you are seeing now is after considering those comments.
Once you feel like you've satisfied a comment it's good to have a reply so that the commenter can can understand what you did.
For instance, this comment [...] "feels like you need a link between the last section in this one, it was initially unclear to me how this document creation ties back." And then I said, "I've changed the order".
As far as linking in your section, Aaron, I would recommend an opening sentence or two describing that you're providing an application of governance [to enable] for communities to develop documents together.
The comments that I have noticed were about structure. Very useful comment comments about some unclear parts of both the section and and good advice also how to change the structure of a paragraph or an idea.
A content, specific content referred to Liquid Feedback as doing something similar [to Consenz].
I did know in the past of this application but haven't checked it for a long time. I did watch the demo. It is very interesting, useful, but not focused enough. This is this my impression.
Later on we'll make a comparison to other apps aiming for the same goal. I'm not sure that if if it should be in the scope of this specific paper, I doubt it actually.
Three of us are already gathering citation sand references for previous works on consensus and voting on on creating documentation.
So we will find the ones that are relevant for this specific section edit [to add] to the references of the document.
To summarize, the idea is to widen the decision making processes. More than just voting. To create the guidelines and the documentation that are needed for the cooperation of the community. This is what we offer.
In the context of liquid democracy and decentralized representation, we are offering some [versatility in] voting processes or voting influence.
That can combine liquid democracy for one decision, direct democracy (or one person one vote) for another decision, some of combination derived from holding of specific coins and also a quadratic voting and square root voting.
On the same application we can provide a different methods of decision making, that can be a playground for us to explore and experience different decision making processes.
Consenz can provide an ongoing governance process that is between the voting periods of the catalyst funding process.
It's a very much a document centered approach and that's the aspect that we're covering here for the white paper.
If anyone has read Aharon's section and wants to comment on it that would be helpful right now. And the other thing is some of the reviewers may still need kind of an introduction to what's expected of them. So if you have questions about the review process, you can ask those now. Let's start with the first question.
Yes, I read through the sections.
And I think my comments on it are two or three different levels of contexts.
So as I said before, it depends where you want to go with it.
I liked I liked Aharon sections [of the white paper] and I liked Andrii's feedback on those sections.
Because for me, the issue is, [...] what's the purpose of the paper and what's the purpose of this way of voting ?
I liked the explanation of things throughout the paper [...] the issue, though, is that perspective.
As you were saying about having a canonical description, who is the group that this is aimed at ?
I can definitely see it's aimed at people inside Catalyst who are taking an inside out view of the world. So looking from the inside to the outside, and they're thinking about being a dRep or they are a voter who has some power to delegate. And they're thinking about why should I engage in that system?
That was all really well explained. And fantastic.
The group I didn't see represented [was the Catalyst proposer] ... the bit that says, right, I'm a proposer, I'm going to put 50 hours worth of my team's time and effort into putting a proposal in.
And if I'm from the outside in, [...] I'm not already working [in Catalyst] as a [full-time] job. And this is a side hustle.
I'm actually going to take my resource and try and get it into a blockchain solution, and run that through Catalyst. [...]. If I'm doing that, I need to understand that the process that I'm going to put my 50 to 100 hours of time into, can be a trusted process that works in terms of fairness and trust.
And I haven't seen much of that description in this process.
It's not a failing, it just it's not covered. In a funny way, that goes back to [the question of] what is Catalysts here for? If Catalyst is a brilliant incubation, innovation Hub, aimed at entrepreneurial developers, who are in or who may come to Catalyst. Fantastic. That's cool.
If however, it's aimed at supporting innovation driven businesses who are going to come into that ecosystem from the outside, then there's a different set of conversations that I don't feel are covered.
If you could pause there, because you covered quite a lot in that first comment and I'd like to have the group give some response because I think this is an important issue.
And it came up in our early discussions in the context of where in a voting process [where] we need to be evaluating the quality of the input, which is the voting process itself, [and] we also need to be evaluating the quality of the output, which is do you choose projects that actually contribute to the community's success ?
And I think you're right, at least for this white paper, we're not going to be covering that second issue (quality of the output ... choosing projects) as strongly.
It's mentioned a little bit in Philips section.
But that would be a great follow on.
For instance, Steph [Macready] is doing a lot of work right now, about how we put the tools together to measure voting power.
But it really comes down to how we develop an auditing process. [In respect] of, the community selected this group of projects, what were the outcomes, and how does that compare with what the outcomes could have been ?
I actually left also some comments and suggestions at the end of the paper, so I won't repeat them.
I just think there needs to be more detail in some sections. Because, as I understand, the white paper will be read by many people outside of the Cardano ecosystem. So [while] we here understand, and probably [have] had more conversations on this [...],there are still some basics like who will delegate [which we should] even repeat, because some people might read who are not yet registered on IdeaScale.
[...] we can beef up the introduction, which is intended to kind of give background for the reader. Andre, feel free to expand upon what you've written in the paper.
Picking up on [Andrii's point], there's a potential, an opportunity, to appeal to a much wider audience in the blockchain world.
And to do that, we need to have good entry points into the paper. Not just a good summary, we can think about little precis introductions, entry points into different sections.
So Andrii if you can expand upon strategies for doing that on, that'd be much appreciated.
I'm sure Harry, from a business perspective, the relevance there could be perhaps brought out a little bit more. What you were saying about trust reminds me of a recent discussion between the CEO of the Cardano Foundation (Fred Gregaard) and Dirk Hohndel (Chief Open Source Officer). They were talking about establishing trust, in terms of governance. So community governance can mature to such an extent to be trusted by businesses can trusted.
I think that was part of my second point.
The first [point] from my perspective, it's just about positioning.
[In the] case of your paper. If you're not going to talk about the set of constituents who are your customers, for the voting, then that's fine. Just say, this looks at technical, at d-Reps, at ADA holders, [...] that we're not really looking at the business side of it ...]
Because if the scope bleeds (expands) [...] if it isn't box tight enough, particularly when you're into such detail [...] they will say Yeah, well, this doesn't work for me.
The second point was, building on what Stephen and Andre said, is the positioning of this. It's got several different levels. It starts with the team, then it builds out to the Catalyst community, then it builds out to Cardano and its associated entities. And then it builds out to blockchain. And then it builds out to people who want to invest.
Now, [...] this was my point, where I agreed with Andre, this paper is the kernel of how Cardano can show its value to all the organizations out there.
[...]
This will be part of the major value add that Cardano is ahead of the curve because the values, beliefs, behaviours, ethos that Catalyst has set up.
I would emphasise, as a Community Governance Oversight team, white paper might not even be the right word for this in the end, because a white paper typically is done by an organisation, in part for marketing of some product.
That's not really our mission here.
Our mission has been to ask, how can we help the community be more aware about what's at play in moving to a delegated representation system? What's potential positive outcomes of that? What's potential negative outcomes of that? And how can we put tools in place that are going to help the community actually oversee this process and make sure that it has integrity ?
Maybe you would like to respond to some of these comments Aharon ?
Yeah, actually, [I am] a little bit out of focus about the scope of the conversation. Are we talking about the whole Catalyst process or the d-Reps introduction ?
My impression is [...] that your aspect of the paper is bringing out the more community documentation side. You're broadening the scope [...] to trust issues. This is the context Harry is picking up on ? [Addressing] how we can evolve the maturity of our governance to such an extent that it establishes greater trust for community management of the Cardano blockchain.
I appreciate Aaron giving an overview of your section, and the input from Harry and others.
In the interest of time, I want to go now to Steph's section. Steph, if you could give a very quick synopsis of what your section is about. And talk about the feedback that you've worked through so far. And then we'll open it up to the rest of the group to comment on your section.
We want to define and demonstrate what the Banzhaf power index is so that anybody not familiar with governance, can understand what it is.
Banzhaf power index - Wikipedia
And [this is reflected] already some of the feedback that I've seen in the comments. [That] this needs to be understandable from anyone's perspective. Because it could go outside of Catalyst specifically.
How do you tailor the measurement of the Banzhaf Power index to Catalysts, specifically, when dealing with 10s of 1000s of wallets with limited data about how voters voted. To detail some of these limitations and then find a way to simplify and work around these issues.
Have you had a chance to read through the comments that had been provided so far?
I can see some [comments] are grammatical, some help define things that we take for granted like what does the abbreviation for IOHK or CF (Cardano Foundation) stand for.
There's a point from Andrew that commented that if you have the data on what the combinatorial math of the 32,000 wallets is. That's not something that I just have. But I do think it's very useful.
Yesterday I met with Seth and he was able to fix a bug in the original paper that he had referenced. So now our very simple example works.
I just sent you the link for the data from Catalyst Fund 4 and 5. So we can now get your algorithm working. [Now] we should be able to do this simple example of measuring the voting power as it's distributed by the wealth cohorts for Fund 5.
I think that will be an excellent contribution to this white paper and gives us a nice path forward to [address] the challenges of developing the delegated representation system.
I think it is useful in that it's points in the direction of [what we] ultimately want to explain.
But I don't think it really says anything about Catalyst specifically because each proposal has voted in a particular place. [While] a wealth cohort abstracts into 10 [which] doesn't really say anything about who voted for a particular proposal.
As we've discussed, there's simplifications we have to make in order to make some initial analysis, and then there's a path towards doing more sophisticated calculations.
Let's open it up to the group. Who's read this section? And what further comments do you have about it?
[A small comment is] that I think maybe [some other] example [of the application of the Banshaf Index] could be chosen. Because readers might be confused by the Cardano governance example, that IOG has three [genesis keys], Cardano Foundation and Emurgo [have less]. But in Catalyst, these companies and entities don't have the same power. Like in these examples, so this could onfuse a reader [who might] think that IOG, Cardano foundation and Emurgo have influence and voting power in Catalyst.
I think maybe it's possible to run some tests or to take some proposal[s], which was voted and see how many wallets voted. And try to prognose a "What if" with d-Reps.
There's three things that we're trying to work through in this section are three examples that are important.
This first example, as you've just said, is not the Catalyst process [...] but it is part of the Cardano system. It's a beautiful example to introduce the Banshaf Power Index because it's so simple, and simple examples are important. from an educational point of view.
One of the challenging things about this section is to try to [communicate] what this Banshaf Index Power is and why it's important. That [is what the] first example is intended to do.
I think what needs to be strengthened, but we haven't been able to do it [yet] because we didn't have all the tools in place, but we're getting closer now, is a second example that is directly related to Catalyst.
Now, as Steph just described, our first step there is just going to be a preliminary step, because the computational complexities of trying to do this for 50,000 votes is too much. We don't have the ability to do it completely for every voter.
What we've planned is to kind of do a Banzhaf Power Index based on treating each wealth cohort, as a single or maybe two wallets. To show [some] flavor of this kind of analysis applied to the Catalyst programme. [...] And that that may be will satisfy what Andrii is describing in our last meeting.
Steph [...] you referred to the possibility of use and infographics in the final paper. I've been doing some whiteboard animation explainer videos, for example, on the Voltaire Principles. And I've been trying to look at the content of the last meeting to see could this be explained in a minute? In a whiteboard video? Could it be explained by better use of infographics?
Yeah, I could definitely use the compelling visualizations for sure.
[with reference to wealth cohorts] you're planning to take some specific wallet with the greatest holding and compare them using the Banshaf Index with other voters?
The thought is to broadly take the whole spectrum of voters and the wealth of those voter wallets, which we have some data on, and break them into deciles.
And then compare those deciles with how much power they have. So [...] abstracting away the 10,000 wallets that would make up one wealth cohort. We're just making that one coalition, and we're doing that 10 times.
In this simple example we did there's only three voters (IOG, Cardano Foundation and Emurgo) and we were able to do that on a website that [calculates] this index. But that website can only handle up to six voters.
[But] now Steph will be able to 12 different [wealth] cohorts within the Catalyst community and do a comparison of how much voting power each of those cohorts has as a group.
So the purpose here, unlike previous work on quadratic voting is not to provide insight about Catalyst voting but to show how we can use the Banshaf Index to measure [the power] influence of the Delegated Representatives implemented in the process ?
My [Photrek] team carried out that research and we were working towards [demonstrating] the importance of the Banszhaf Power Index. However, within the scope of that project, we were not able to complete the calculation.
What Wolfram brings to this now is actually a working algorithm that can carry out the calculation. I's not an easy calculation to do. Steph and his colleagues are bringing to the table the ability to do the calculation.
[Returning to an overview of the paper ... ] the introduction is going to give the scope of Cardano and this transition to delegated representatives. And then there'll be another paragraph added, that will be like an abstract of each of the other sections.
Phillip [Lazos] has done a literature review on liquid democracy and how it's been used in other places. So [that] gives an excellent context for what the potential positive gains are from using this kind of method, [as well as] what the potential vulnerabilities are.
For those who are new, if you look at the meeting documentation [for 19th July 2022] Phillip [Lazos] went over his paper in quite a lot of detail. And we took a lot of notes of what he said. [In short] it's resolving a controversy in the background literature which creates a negative picture of liquid democracy. But Phillip suggests that this is not quite accurate in terms of the evidence that's its based upon. So Philip is arguing that new data and more recent research into liquid democracy tells a different kind of story.
1800 UTC, Tuesday, 6th September 2022
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