Summary

This proposal suggests a way to improve the governance process in VitaDAO, by “batching” governance into seasons, each season consisting of a Governance Phase and an Execution Phase. Each season lasts 4 months. Within season, the Governance Phase lasts 6 weeks and the rest is the Execution Phase.

Seasonal governance provides the following advantages over the current way VitaDAO does governance:

• Separate governance and execution. This separation allows better focus on the objective of each phase (discussions and voting during the governance phase, distraction-free execution during the execution phase).
• Time bound governance discussion and project execution. Discussions and voting must end at the end of the governance phase, projects must complete execution at the end of the execution phase.
• Prioritise projects and goals better. All goals and projects are considered at the same time, making the opportunity cost transparent. The DAO makes more intentional decisions on what to work on, instead of working on projects defined by a recent proposal.
• Generate better solutions to each problem. Issues are presented to the community, and everyone is asked to help with proposals. An issue can be presented with 10 different proposals, as opposed to only 1 like right now.
• Create a schelling point for promotion and community involvement. Interested community members are invited to gather at the same and have focused high-level conversations about the DAO, volunteer themselves for projects, and start contributing to the DAO.

Motivation

The Current Way

The current way VitaDAO does governance is “rolling” governance. Governance discussions are always happening, votes happen when they happen. There’s no deadline discussions or decisions.

The current way is also not friendly to decentralized contribution. Proposals almost always come from core members, because they’re the only people aware of what issues are being discussed.

The current way is also not effective, because most issues are addressed with a single proposal from a core contributor. Revision process is slow. Voting is difficult, due to a lack of viable alternatives if a voter happens to disagree with the one proposal.

Specification

The Seasonal Way

Instead of rolling governance, in this proposal we “batch” our governance process. We do this by dividing our operation into seasons, where each season is 4 months long. Governance only happens during 6 weeks of each season, called the Governance Phase. The rest of the time is dedicated to execution, called the Execution Phase.

Implementation

This proposal suggests implementing an experimental first season for Jan-April 2023. A rough timeline for implementation:

Timeline

• First week of January: Goals and Objectives
  • VitaCore and stewards publish a set of goals and objective s for the season
• First two weeks of January: Appeal Period
  • If any community member disagrees with a goal or objective proposed, they can start an appeal discussion and vote (e.g. “X should not be a goal yet”). The vote passes if a supermajority (66.67%) of tokens vote for it
• Week 2-4 of January: Proposal Submission
  • VitaCore and Steward publish calls for proposals to address certain goals. Anyone can submit proposals in response.
  • For example, a goal could be to have a conflict resolution process. Anyone can submit proposals for what conflict resolution should look like. There can be several competing proposals for this goal.
• Week 2 of January to Week 1 of February: Proposal Discussion
  • Community members and contributors comment on submitted proposals
  • They can also volunteer themselves for projects and initiatives
  • Proposals may be modified, merged, or spilt up during this time
• Week 1-2 February: Voting
  • Proposals are voted on, teams are formed
• Mid February - April: Execution Phase
  • During the execution phase, we focus on executing the proposals that passed voting.
  • Governance related discussions and proposals are minimized, until the next season. Exceptions can be made for urgent matters. Whether something is an urgent matter will be decided on by a majority vote among VitaCore.
  • Project funding proposals are not part of seasonal governance! Funding proposals can be proposed and voted on any time