#Summary#

The project aims at publishing an article called "decision lego" which will deliver a framework to design, experiment, and scale the next iteration of decentralized governance.

To do so, it will analyze the lessons learned from the first pilot of Citizens' Assembly in Web3, and aligns with the set of questions proposed by the ground breaking article "open problems in DAOS".

It will take two case studies as experimentation fields: Arbitrum Governance (also reflecting on the process since launch and the bottlenecks in governance there) and Uniswap (reflecting on the longer experience and adjustements since the airdrop).

#Context: Governance for the 21st Century#

As Humanity dives into a new paradigm, there is a profound need to reassess the way we take collective decisions. Activists, academics, and practitioners worldwide have been planting seeds of new ways of doing exactly this. 3 emergent practices and approaches are particularly interesting to explore: Deliberative Governance, Web3, and the regenerative mindset.

As blockchain technology and crypto-related ecosystems grow, they are demonstrating the potential they have to change the world. If we look at governance, DAOs have very strong potential in terms of immutability, transparency, scalability, and incentive structures. At the same time, the challenges they face are also becoming clear. Particularly, decentralized governance has reached a clear bottleneck: crypto governance is plagued by low participation and turnout, bad quality forum discussions, nepotism, collusion, influencer biases, etc. This in itself is not dramatic as DAOs are a very new institution and there needs to be a lot of piloting and experimentation to find the right balance between old and new institutional designs, between soft and hard governance, and between social and onchain consensus.

Deliberative Governance has been invented, piloted and scaled since roughly 40 years as an answer and complement to the shortcomings of classical representative democracy and direct democracy. It brings collective intelligence (vs collected intelligence from voting, opinion polls or current crypto governance) to fruition, is epistemically strong (through cognitive diversity and the methods used in the process) and highly legitimate (through random selection of participants also known as Aleatorian Democracy). An overview of the many faces of deliberation can be explored at (https://participedia.net/). 

These 2 approaches have a clear potential to test and scale a new way of taking collective decisions as long as we are able to approach them in the more general framework of the regenerative approach manifesting through 4 principles: open network (nested, in relationships), regenerative (homeostasis: structure resilience & auto-poiesis: evolution), creative (emergent properties), intelligent (learning loops, cognition: adaptation to perturbations).

#State of the art and approach#

There is a flourishing activity in research and experimentation in DAOs governance, deliberative governance and regenerative activity. But there is a lack of understanding in how exactly those 3 components interact. The goal of the research is to propose a framework for grasping the intersection of the three worlds and a series of possible experimentation to test the framework. It aims at responding to the call launched through the ground breaking paper “Open problems in DAOs” (https://arxiv.org/pdf/2310.19201.pdf). Particularly, it aims at contributing to part 7 of the discussion.

The approach aims at being practice oriented and experimentation oriented. It builds on a series of exploratory discussions (https://archive.org/details/vergne-metagov) and a first pilot in the Web3 ecosystem: The Cosmos Citizens’ Assembly (see: https://aez.global/ and https://forum.cosmos.network/t/proposal-draft-after-the-big-bang-a-constitutional-process-the-cosmos-hub/8695 ).

#output#

The output of the research will be a paper titled “decision legos” that will be organized along the following structure: (1) a metalevel approach on decision-making, (2) the proposition of a framework for thinking about future proof polities, (3) an operationalization for how a future-proof decision making set of decision legos could look like.

It will be based on a multidisciplinary, “fuzzy logic” approach (Cintula et al. 2021; Zadeh 1975). It will also be inspired by a long-term ethnographic approach as the author has been involved in both the field of aleatorian democracy (since 1998), deliberative democracy (since 2003) and the crypto/blockchain ecosystem (since 2011). The paper will also reflect on the first pilots in the Cosmos Ecosystem.

The paper will have a specific focus on Arbitrum and Uniswap as case studies both for reflection and for the design of a future proof set of decision legos.