By George Beall, Ivan Fartunov, Rolf Hoefer, Alex Poon, and Joshua Tan
This is a draft paper written by the DAOstar Imperial Council working group, and is still undergoing active change. We have published it here for comment and review.
Best-practices, an extensible type system, and standard templates for DAO proposals, based on a wide inventory of existing proposals.
Many DAOs struggle with how to implement governance to make effective group decisions. We aim to document best practices and establish standards so DAOs can operate more effectively. These standards include a strategic map of governance proposals, templates for written proposals, and a metadata standard for all governance proposals. Our research focuses on major existing governance activity and is meant to create an actionable resource that captures core parts of governance.
Much governance in DAOs passes through proposals. Yet there is no standard or agreement on what characterizes good proposals versus bad proposals. Further, there are a wide spectrum of proposal types that many DAOs are not aware of or do not understand. And for DAO builders and tooling operators, there has been relatively little progress on improving or building on top of specific proposal types, at least partly because the ecosystem has yet to coalesce around a set of basic types.
For the purposes of this paper, we define a DAO proposal as a formal, written submission to a DAO’s governance platform, including both on-chain contracts and their associated management interfaces (e.g. Compound, Moloch, Aragon, etc.) as well as off-chain community governance platforms such as Discourse, Commonwealth, or Snapshot. These off-chain proposals need not advance to an actual vote, though most successful proposals do.
To identify the proposal types, we looked through 6,500 written proposals from 18 of the most active DAOs and identified the most common workflows. We also considered (1) common workflows of new DAOs as well as rarer and more sophisticated proposals that are still currently being developed. As we went through the proposals and bucketed by category, we identified the most thorough proposals, key information needed by proposal category, and proposals that effectively followed through on the proposed action. We currently see the following three core proposal types across DAOs:
The types described here represent a snapshot of what DAOs can do in 2022. However, the type system we specify below can be extended to cover new proposal types and subtypes.
In this standard, we extend the EIP-4824 Proposals JSON-LD Schema with a “proposal-type” field and a dictionary of such proposal types, including: