Stacks Governance R+D Lab

*What's your name/your team's name? Juliet, Harold, Hoz, Ryeder Stacks Governance R+D Lab

Best email on which to contact you? Harold- 2rowcorridor@gmail.com -- Juliet - juliet.oberding@gmail.com Hz - info@huzay.tech Ryeder - lifeisnotscripted@gmail.com

Personal Statement Decentralized Governance Research Lab

We’ll focus on R+D in decision making processes, prototyping tools that unlock tangible models for the ecosystem. We’ll use interdisciplinary system designs, closing loops of values that revolve around product development. In our R+D context, the products are system models & tools to achieve them but should also be high value for governance use cases across the ecosystem.

Indigenous approaches to delegation & collaborative scalability will guide our system designs, providing fresh lenses to DAO PoCs, commons & community growth incentive structure models. We’ll also be bringing digital fabrication into prototyping, a focus on local accessibility here will speak to our ultimate goals of building long term power decentralization into our models & tools. We’ll continue our PoCs with Harvard/Oxford research group Metagov, building out community tools for quorums, easy paths of delegation, on & off chain processes etc. MVPs viewable in Stacks Advocates DAO, accessible in the main Stacks discord server!

End Product

We’ll deliver both a series of tools & whitepaper to the ecosystem. The whitepaper will provide R+D case studies on system models. The tools will be available to achieve gov models for miner DAOs, community DAOs etc. The tools include: PoC for modular tools for DAO decision making mechanisms. Delegation tool PoC for gathering voices across generators of value. Visualization tool MVP for intrinsic motivation incentives in community growth management. Finally, miner community specific DAO governance tool MVP, designed for accessibility to R+D systems in local lay communities.

Roadmap (Whole Team Full-time hrs) M1 SoW: PoC for community DAO decision making mechanisms in Stacks Advocates DAO. Deliverables: Documentation for on/off chain combinations in live systems & Open source governance Clarity contracts. Approx. Timeline: Nov-Feb/300 hours

M2 SoW: Delegation tool PoCs in Stacks Advocates DAO. Deliverables: Documentation of live community using the PoCs for streamlining bottom up voices in community representation. Open code for organization tooling pushed to github. Approx. Timeline: March -May/300 hours

M3 SoW: App chain and PoX-lite based tokens governance tools and MVPs for community engagement with their own token. This tooling prioritized to maximize fair launch potential of emergent app chain & public procurement models in the ecosystem. Deliverables: Documentation for on/off chain combinations in live systems. Open Source governance Clarity contracts pushed to github. Approx. Timeline: June - Aug/300 hours

M4 SoW: PoC for indigenous community DAO decision making tools. Excited to bring guidance of elders in a historical council to the STX ecosystem. They maintain Native protocols for fair long term sustainable socioeconomic organization, along w/ balanced male/female power distribution models. Deliverables: Documentation of impact in communities we’re building with. Open Source tooling code pushed to github. Approx. Timeline: Concurrent w/M1-M3 Nov - Aug/~900 hours

M5 SoW: R+D Whitepaper for System Design Models. Our interdisciplinary System design case studies will be included. Showing benefits of closed loops of unalienated value creation & flow not found in conventional product design. Deliverables: Documentation of live communities using our PoCs & Firesides Published for ecosystem access. Approx. Timeline: Sept-Nov/300 hours

Appendix Roles: R+D M1-M5-- Harold, Hz, Juliet Communications & Ops R+D M1-M5 -- Ryeder

1st place Winners in Harvard/Oxford Hackathon!: https://metagov.github.io/open-web-challenge/
Advocates DAO in Stacks Discord Server
Roundtable w/Stacks Ecosystem Entities & Follow up interviews.
Stacks Foundation Governance Working Group Research
Indigenous Digital Fabrication Platform

Hey Gov Lab, thanks for applying to be Stacks Residents. The Foundation team is currently reviewing your application in more depth and will be getting back to you about next steps soon.

Hi @hozzjss, just emailed you to schedule an intro call for this week. Looking forward to learning more about your proposal!

For all community members interested in keeping up with the Stacks Gov Lab's residency, check out their upcoming plans and follow this thread for weekly updates from @hozzjss, @HaroldDavis3, @joberding, and Ryder themselves:

Scope of Work

Background

The Governance Lab will bring indigenous commons & governance research and development to web3 and the Stacks ecosystem, enabling more accurate community representation through intersecting relationships, skills, & contributions of its members. The Advocates DAO will be used to gather voices & organize the ecosystem sustainably long term.

Upcoming Milestones

By the middle of December as a Stacks community member you should have seamless onboarding to the advocates program, so that you can be rewarded for your contributions to the Stacks ecosystem.
By the middle of February as a Stacks advocate you should be able to participate in a governance process so that you can make your voice visible to the community in many possible forms: Community grants, community policies, wieghts of rewards in the advocates algorithm, etc.

Here's a Little Update!

By the middle of December as a Stacks community member you should have seamless onboarding to the advocates program, so that you can be rewarded for your contributions to the Stacks ecosystem.

Published the first #start-here channel for onboarding and to state the lineage of the Advocates program and emergence
Automated onboarding to the Stacks Advocates program on Discord
Enabled advocates to interview new comers themselves further decentralizing the operations of the advocates program

By the middle of February as a Stacks advocate you should be able to participate in a governance process so that you can make your voice visible to the community in many possible forms: Community grants, community policies, weights of rewards in the advocates algorithm, etc.

Initiated collective development of Advocates CoC to clarify behavior and conduct foundational to governance & Can't Be Evil structure design
This CoC is to be included in this repo along with other important Advocate documentation
Added an active issues channel to address advocates-wide issues in a consensus based model for governance as a starting point for a more robust system described below
Steady R+D in consensus flow spec document weekly
Facilitated weekly meetings for more community involvement with the governance lab through our scheduled events
Started important dialogue with Advocates community about a system design model for task creation. We are calling our model Journeys to convey incentives beyond the monetary and towards uniquely empowered innovation
Developed a Gov Lab calendar to clarify the Lab's role in the ecosystem and to designate our events
Began weekly dialogue with research collaborators - The Five Nations Longhouse - in addition to weekly internal dialogues regarding the Turtle-Wolf-Bear protocols (aka Governance & System Design)
Finally we've made great progress toward deciding a Logo for our community; we've already started to narrow down a few submissions. Next steps are to polish some our favorite designs.

Hey folks, lil check in from the Stacks Gov R+D Lab residents!

Advox Sense-making

We have weekly dialogues about ongoing Advox participation, improving commons distributions across the ecosystem, and to better develop our collective understanding of Turtle Wolf Bear protocols. See our Advox 📝meeting-notes channel for recordings!

New Advox GH Features

New Advox issue templates & labels in our Advox Github for nice accessibility & organization as learned from Jason Schrader in the Stacks gov working group but modified for Advox sense-making sessions.

Update: OPEN Advox Working Groups

Advox POAP Group: Our twist on the attendance certification NFT model. Since we’d like to distinguish our on/off chain processes from other DAOs by highlighting the innovation boosting role autonomy plays in our commons based system design. For now we are calling it our Proof of Autonomy protocols. We aim to implement a new use case for POAP tracking, morphology of Advox processes of autonomy of over time. Members opt-in naming to felt autonomy in Advox decision making, structure building, resource access etc.

Advox Branding Design: This group is continuing their dedicated async efforts across timezones to design AdvoxDAO branding that is representative of our collective excitement in working together growing the Stacks ecosystem in healthy innovative ways.

Proactive Membership Wins

We now have proactive AdvoxDAO members like @:sleepi @Herogamer @0xLoc @algorithm Many leading and promoting our events using sesh bot! Sign up for our events and get reminders before they happen. Additionally, here's our calendar which includes links to previous dialogues https://bit.ly/gov-lab-cal

Come join us! Never been by the Advocates DAO? You can 🏁│start-here

AdvoxDAO Community Archives

Weekly recorded dialogues working towards bottom up systems of representation, temporary clan affiliation, and development of consensus protocols; see our Advox 📝meeting-notes channel for recordings!

Ryeder’s Blog

First blog post about the making of the Advocates Code of Conduct. Look out for an official Advox landing page coming soon too.

Governance Beginnings

Beginning roll-out for Advocate governance on-boarding. In addition to making some temporary structures explicit to avoid structure-less-ness and empower all Advox voices in decision making. We’re taking inventory of our Advox “hidden capital” with some research guided activities. This is critical for horizontality in bottom up system design. If you're an advocate, please fill out this form https://shrl.ink/85gg

Tooling News!

Development of a Turtle Wolf Bear bot for fetching data on temporary clan organization. One of our many developing tools for tracking morphology we find important for long term community sustainability. This particular tool will help guide our sense making sessions about Advox design & governance; keep tabs on key Advox functions attached to the clan organization.

Stacks Ambassador Connections

We have also began dialogue with the emerging Stacks Ambassador program to ensure important bridgework with Gov lab R+D in community empowerment. Preservation of core community values & voice in new grants program; Advox paths for gathering community support and bringing models of web3 system design to the exciting Ambassador program knowledge base coming soon to Stacks grants.

Working Groups Update

Proof-of-Autonomy-Protocol Group We have continued interesting discussion on the overlaps of our twist on POAP models and indigenous incentive mechanisms for long term sustainability. We figure we can create a unique UX with visualizations made out of our Autonomy morphology tracking. But we’ve even started to play with education, up-skilling, commemoration among other nuanced commons accessibility and engagement. Which will function as extensions to our autonomy morphology tracking model. Our research points to incentives within indigenous commons models revolving around structural autonomy in access to regenerative commons of nuanced socio-ecological value(s) flows.

Hey folks, Another check in from the Stacks Gov R+D Lab residents!

Governance Tooling News!

We have big news in the way of Stacks Advocates governance! While we spent the last weeks of February onboarding folks into our system design and temporary governance structures with group and 1-on-1 calls. Hozz ensured the tooling needed was being completed for testing and integration into the main Stacks discord. The end result is an amazing alignment of pace and an exciting start to our consensus flows using Metagov’s Policykit. Hozz managed to build PK interactions right into the discord for users, with the post author’s thread updates being uploaded to PK seamlessly. PK can already interact with the NEAR chain, which has exciting implications for bringing our formal docs on the Stacks chain with pointers to most of our off chain gov processes in discord.

As a user I should be able to start an issue by posting in #active-issues
As a user I should be able to see a help text telling me what the process is gonna be like
As a user I should be able to discuss and make edits to the original issue that being the message
As a user I should be able to see the last revision of the issue in the #formal-proposals channel after the period of discussion expires
As a user I should be able to dissent to the formal proposal during the voting period
As a user I should be able to know who dissented on a resolution
As a non contributor I should be able to dissent even tho my vote does not count
As a user I should be able to join the governance process of a specific issue by reacting with 👀
As a user I should be able to see if the proposal has passed or failed

Governance Begins

After Using February to bring most of our most active advocates up to speed on our system design and governance steps forward. March saw the first use of our new tooling to polish the tooling itself, come together on important treasury decisions, Advox move from SourceCred to CredEquate algorithm decisions etc. Here’s an example of possible flows with use of three tiered clan design and our new tooling for bottom up quorums and consensus!

Also notice the unique mechanism for ensuring the voices of Women are not drowned out in the long term complex dynamics of Advox. Also the streamlining of bottom up voices in decision making processes, avoiding gridlock via prelims. Prelims are where most of the consensus happens, with reports between Female & Male clan representative through out the month until coming together in formalizing the positions already established in the prelims. Deliberation also happens in formal decision making meetings when needed but should usually merely be a formalization process.

Advox Invisible Exchanges:

Our twist on the attendance certification NFT model. Since we’d like to distinguish our on/off chain processes from other DAOs by highlighting the innovation boosting role autonomy & unalienated value circulation plays in our commons based system design. We have renamed our working group to speak to the exciting broader implications of this part of our system design — tracking the complex morphology of what are usually invisible exchanges. We aim to implement a new use case for nontransferable NFTs, tracking morphology of Advox values exchanges over time. Members can opt-in naming to felt autonomy in Advox decision making, structure building, resource access. Or even tangible unalienated values circulation — values of labor, expression or ecological rights etc. that are not extracted from where generators of said value work and live.