Formal classification of BUIDL and Onchain Radical Proposal Council

Governance
1

Dear all potential contributors ( including P-Reps )

Contribution Proposal System is coming near.

You love ICON project and want to contribute, but still not sure what to build ?

You are wondering how should we organize and evaluate Contribution Proposal ?

How about the idea of On-chain Radical Proposal Council and On-chain Radical Council Voting system ?

The purpose is to try experimental radical governance structures and no longer rely on decision/direction/implementation of ICON Foundation.

No more mystery, we are going to reveal it soon !

ICON network was decentralized and has been running quite well so far, despite some initial minor stability issues. P-Reps are also contributing gradually within their capability. Apparently, with the uncertainty of both market and governance, it is still a bit early for concrete commitment. That said, sooner or later, contribution must still be done, by both P-Reps and Contribution Proposal.

Let’s temporarily put non-contributing “leecher” P-Reps aside ( it should be addressed in another discussion ), for responsible and ethical ones, this article could help to unfold

  • Possible areas and topics P-Reps / contributors should choose and build
  • How should proposals be organized, to mitigate duplication of work and “dummy” proposals

It is a guide for contributors and P-Reps to choose their favorite topic, as well as helps community to evaluate proposals.

With reference from other prominent projects and their grants programs, we focus more on software development and education material. In blockchain, developer mindshare is vital you know.

**Off-line community activity is also important, but it is a huge theme and hard to verify the result, so we skip for now.

Areas of contribution can be categorized as following ( not limited )

1. Software development and #BUIDL

Infrastructure

  • Interoperability - bridges to/from

    • Ethereum
    • Bitcoin
    • ZCash
    • Tezos
    • Cosmos
    • Polkadot

  • Distributed File Storage

    • IPFS

  • Other Web3 protocols

    • Libp2p

Developer tools

  • IDEs
  • Testing frameworks
  • Easy deployment
  • Utility libraries

Auxiliary

  • Monitoring / insights

    • Chain explorers
    • Node explorers / advanced telemetry
    • Statistical and analytic tools

  • Wallet

    • Alternative software wallets
    • Hardware wallet integration / HSMs

Crypto-industry application

  • DeFi
    • DEX
    • Lending
    • Prediction market
    • Stable coin
  • DAOs
    • Radical governance structures
    • Experimental economic models

Other-industries disruptive application

  • Finance
  • Media & content
  • Gaming
  • Communication
  • IoT
  • Identity

2. Education and documentation

  • User documentation
  • Technical education material
    • Courses
    • Tutorials
    • Guides

How should we organize and evaluate Contribution Proposal ?

Let me introduce the idea of On-chain Radical Proposal Council, it comes with a new On-chain Radical Council Voting system.

Here is the simplified plan

1. We need to form a diversified council of prominent ICONists, P-Reps and C-Reps

  • Council members are elected by all ICONists using radical voting system
  • Council members posses equal power
  • Council members should be technical proficient, i.e. they are developers or with good track record in content creation ( writer, video editor… )
  • This council takes responsibility for finalizing development classification and uses it as a reference to decide if some proposal is meaningful and worth the effort

2. There are 3 types of voting

  • Council Election
    • The council is periodically elected using on-chain radical voting system
    • All ICX holders can vote or nominate themselves
    • Details is to be decided
  • Council Referendum
    • We should have a new radical on-chain voting tool for the council members to vote and express their opinion as a result of off-chain discussion
    • This voting tool need to be more sophisticated than current official voting system, simple token-weight voting is insufficient and easily be skewed / manipulated
  • Public Referendum
    • Given the opinion of the council, community would make final decision
    • Details of voting rule in Contribution Proposal is still not clear, so we assume it may be similar to P-Rep voting system, thus probably suffer the same issues that happened with P-Rep election ( voter apathy, skewed by whale, top-centralized, … )

3. For every new proposal

  • Council Referendum
    • If a proposal makes sense, the council would review its milestones as well as the amount of funding
  • Public Referendum
    • Given the opinion of the council, community would make final decision

4. For in-progress proposals, fund allocation must be done on each milestone / delivery

  • Council Referendum
    • The council re-evaluates the delivery of each milestone and see if it satisfies promised checklist
    • Vote to express their opinion of whether we should kill the proposal or keep funding it
  • Pubic Referendum
    • Given the opinion of the council, community would make final decision

Who will build that new radical on-chain voting system ?

Probably ICONVIET ( assume that community supports this initiative ), in development progress, we would openly discuss voting mechanism with community.

@duyyudus - ICONVIET

5 Likes
2

Very interesting proposition! It is obvious that we must organize ourselves to manage and plan the contributions to the ICON ecosystem. Just one question: is this system intended to be permanent or only a transition before the arrival of DBP & EEP?

4

Thank man, for your question, I expect it to be a permanent alternative on-chain system that helps community to make final decision on DBP & EEP, as well as being the testing ground for new ideas of governance. We cannot keep relying on ICON to do it for us, too slow.
At this point we haven’t known what exactly DBP & EEP would offer, if they don’t come with some similar system, we will do it ourselves.

5

Ok in general that’s great and I don’t want to be the guy says that since the start I was pro for diversity of the preps since we need people from every area. That makes prep stronger but I don’t agree that statement for this council idea " good track record in content creation ( writer, video editor… ) " from what I read that statement doesn’t fit in this council. How do you determine good track? outside all people who deciding need to have business minded. I can even say devs might need to to be excluded from that council as well. Developers are mostly engineers and engineer mind mostly doesn’t bring success at the business level. I am also falling into that category even tho I can see obvious business flaw I am more on the engineer side. All of these statements I made for the decision part of that council. Not about project teams etc. teams need diversity.

6

Council is voted by ICONists and anyone can self-nominate. We decide nothing here anyway.

This is focused more on BUIDL and education rather than pure marketing and business ( those are easily empty promises and hard to validate result ). It is basically a grants program but governed in a decentralized manner. Just look around at other strong chains ( Ethereum, Cosmos, Polkadot, Stella… ), their grants are also mostly about development and education.

By the way, you should not underrate developers, all prominent chains have a lot of great developers :wink: Again, please look around.
One extra point here, do you know why we need developers in council ? To help community avoid getting fooled by heavily marketing-sugar-coated proposals that exactly happened to PReps election.

Business and stuff like that are easily said than done, if someone want to make product with good business plan, they can just submit it like other proposals ( with well-defined milestones and amount of funding, no more BS and vague proposals ).

7

I said it for decision makers not for the teams people who make the products etc. Council will grant the projects from what I understand so that’s why they are in my comment. The community will not decide from what I can see first decisions from comes from the council and I am not sure how much community follow with council members ideas.

Maybe I get your idea wrong I don’t know I am just saying if there is someone deciding on grants their majority should be on the business side and these people know generally what they are doing. If they get fooled by a proposal that means they are not that good. I don’t underrate any role. Also, I don’t agree with that statement “To help the community avoid getting fooled by heavily marketing-sugar-coated proposals that exactly happened to PReps election.” that’s not reality it’s a utopia. I say that because I don’t know any chain with success in node election stage for these type of stuff. While the whole market fueled by speculations, rumours, hype, BS that how the trend goes in general for the community as well.

8

If you are blockchain developer, you will know which project deliver and contribute to knowledge pool of the whole industry ;). It is hard to explain if you are not a developer yourself. There is a lot of BS and hype, but not all projects are shit and empty.

That said, I agree that council should be diversified, including developer, content maker, business man, marketer…you get the idea. But because this system leans toward BUIDL and development, and BUIDL literally means creating quality blockchain application, Dapps and good documentation. It makes sense to prioritize developer and content creator in the council, nothing unusual here.

9

I already said I am more in developer group than others while throwing them out anyway w I don’t think we are getting anywhere we keep repeating same thing in general I support the idea I wish best outcome for it.