Launching The Governance Working Group (GovWork)

[honestly_rich]

Hi all, as I presented during the last Treasury Talk, I am in the process of setting up a Governance Working Group (GovWork). I appreciate all questions, concerns or ideas in response.

What is the Livepeer treasury?

Since December 2023, Livepeer has had an unwrapped onchain treasury, governed by the community of Livepeer token holders and accruing 10% of LPT rewards every block. It specifies that anyone can make a proposal for transferring funds out of the treasury, as long as they hold the Proposal Threshold amount of LPT. The social convention is that:

1. The treasury should be used to fund public goods in the Livepeer Ecosystem.
2. Treasury proposals should be made by Special Purpose Entities, or (SPEs), that will themselves be responsible to routing the funding towards individual end-recipients or purposes. End recipients should not apply directly to the Livepeer treasury for funding.

Though a number of key SPEs have been funded through the onchain treasury, it could be proposed that there are a number of inefficiencies with the current allocation of capital to target core problems in within the ecosystem.

Why is GovWork needed?

People govern the onchain treasury, not code.

Whereas the creation of the treasury itself can be deployed in a smart contract, the ongoing governance, coordination and allocation of the treasury requires proactive management by the community.

Without ownership of that process from one individual or group, treasury allocation can become inefficient and governance can slowly break down.

Effective stewardship of the treasury requires human-focused processes, with input collected from the community and then operationalised into amendments and improvements.

As we aim for a decentralised ecosystem, we should be wary that ownership of the governance process should be managed by a group of different stakeholders, which can be elected by the community, without ownership by a single individual.

What is GovWork’s mission?

GovWork’s purpose is to effectively steward Livepeer’s onchain treasury.

Its mission is to build and nurture a thriving, decentralised network of projects and working groups, which drive the advancement of the Livepeer network and ecosystem.

How does GovWork aim to steward the treasury?

GovWork aims to be the meta SPE, taking feedback from the community and guiding the growth of the ecosystem through the creation of other SPEs.

A key part of stewarding the treasury, is to make the process for voting on & proposing new SPEs as simple as possible. By setting up a regular cadence - either quarterly or biannually - for funding proposals. An example can be seen below, where budgetary suggestions can be made to the community to ensure that we are hitting targets:

What will GovWork be doing?

Once funded by the onchain treasury, GovWork will support the community in the following areas:

• Provide best practices, accountability frameworks & tooling for new SPEs.
• Create clear documentation for the proposal, voting and reporting processes.
• Plan & support implementation LIPs and other onchain updates to the onchain treasury.
• Advise the community on collective budget frameworks for onchain treasury.
• Run Town Halls to highlight progress of SPEs and create a virtual forum for discussion.
• Provide early feedback to forum posts and SPE proposals.
  
  

How does GovWork operate?

Initially, there will be two calls that GovWorks have:

1. Biweekly Public Call - default, only committee members will be able to participate in discussion. There will be time for Q&A and other updates at the end of the meeting. Each meeting will be recorded and shared to the wider community, with notes publicly accessible and communicated via the # governance channel.
2. Weekly Operational Call - this will be a call for purely operational members of the team to project manage the deliverables.
   
   

Which roles will GovWork have?

Within the working group, there would be two different types of roles which serve different objectives. Both groups will take part in the calls and discussions.

• Committee Members - providing either expert government knowledge or detailed insight of the Livepeer ecosystem. These will be non-paid roles.
• Operators - executing on the strategy of GovWork, such as creating gov documentation, budgets, and running community calls. These will be paid part-time roles funded by the SPE.
  
  

Who does GovWork Committee consist of?

GovWork would initially consist of a group of 7 people. Initially the selection process for these members would be a combination of self-proposal and suitability. This process would start with feedback from the broader Livepeer community through Discord.

Initially the working group would consist of 7 people:

• 1x Chair - an external individual or entity e.g. Stablelab
• 3x Livepeer Inc members - chosen by the team
• 3x Core Community Members - elected or put forward by the community

The requirement to join the committee is: (a) strong experience or academic background of governance; or (b) 2+ years experience within the Livepeer ecosystem; or (c) some suitable combination of the two.

Important note: over time, the aim is to progressively move towards a more decentralised electoral process for the committee itself, reducing the reliance on Livepeer Inc in particular. Through tools such as Hats, the full GovWork committee can eventually be elected by the community.

How does the GovWork committee make decisions?

Though the exact mechanism will emerge within the Working Group, GovWork will make decisions by voting. With a committee of 7 people, a clear consensus mechanism will be used, either via Snapshot or Tally. Initially, the Chair will only take part in the vote when there is a hung decision.

Initially, GovWork will be a centralised group, with a number of experts on the committee. This is to ensure there is a high degree of efficiency initially within the working group.

What are the success metrics for GovWork?

The exact success metrics will be finalised by the committee itself and laid out in the first SPE proposal. Initially we will suggest:

Northstar metric: the # of proposals funded by the treasury.

Additional metrics:

1. Number of SPEs funded
2. Amount of funding to SPEs
3. Number of Contributors to SPEs
4. Quarterly funding amount of SPEs (kept within a target range)
   
   

Which other examples are there of governance working groups?

Since the creation of The DAO in 2016, a huge amount of research has been done on decentralised organisations and capital allocation. With a plethora of onchain tooling, we will look to borrow best practices and guidance from adjacent ecosystems, including Gitcoin, Optimism, Arbitrum, Uniswap and Metagov.

What is the Roadmap?

Oct 2024 - Formation

Objective: recruit and form GovWork with the founding members.

• Get feedback from the community on the GovWork proposal
• Define what Governance really is & means within Livepeer ecosystem
• Prospect, select & onboard GovWork founding members
• Conduct initial call of the working group

Nov/Dec 2024 - Planning

Objective: SPE proposal passed with a clear set of deliverables

• Define ownership of operational responsibilities
• Set up tooling for working groups (comms channels, wiki, authorisations)
• Set up internal decision making process
• Finalise H1 2025 roadmap with clear deliverables & objectives
• Apply to Onchain Treasury for funding with GovWork SPE

H1 2025 - Execution

Objective: created clear documentation & best practices for SPE members

• Implemented standardised practices and tooling across the ecosystem
• Created a framework for budgeting and managing the onchain treasury
• Set up bounty board to involve community in key tasks
• Conduct a clear retro with the community on the success of the SPE
  
  

Where can I learn more about the onchain treasury?

To give a more detailed overview of the treasury, the following documentation can be reviewed:

• Treasury Overview - Dune Dashboard showing the population of the Livepeer Treasury
• LIP 89 - creation of the onchain treasury using Governor framework
• LIP 90 - voting mechanism, governance and purpose of Special Purpose Entities (SPEs)
• LIP 92 - how the Livepeer treasury is populated
• Treasury Proposals - list of all passed and rejected treasury proposals for funding
• LIP Proposals - protocol changes related to Governance
• Orchestrators - the list of node operators who are delegates for the treasury
  
  

How can I get involved?

We are currently looking for several experts. If you would like to get more involved, please reach out directly to @honestly_rich on Telegram or Rich | Livepeer on Discord.

[dob]

Thanks for sharing this initial pre-proposal. I’m excited for all that this can bring to the ecosystem. Here are some reactions on my end:

The obvious needs
I think some of the points this proposal addresses are a couple of clear needs in the ecosystem when it comes to governance:

• Clear documentation of the governance processes in a place that people know how to find and participate in.
• Facilitation of governance related topics - treasury calls, raising awareness of upcoming and active votes, etc.
• Assistance to those who are forming or operating within SPEs so they can succesfully navigate the process with the community.

Right now these are areas that are very under-operationalized, and don’t have clear ownership, and therefore are not making nearly the impact that they could in the ecosystem. With clear leadership and ownership, they could lead to far more impactful allocation of the treasury funds.

These lightweight enhancements to existing process that can help towards outcomes. I think to justify some of the overhead the proposal suggest, including additional meetings and committees, it would help the final proposal to more explicitly highlight what some examples of the concrete impactful outcomes to the ecosystem will be.

Sample Concrete Impacts?
I know the proposal is meant to be a bit meta and focus on the governance processes themselves, and that’s ok. But I still think seeing some concrete near term steps that the Govworks committee would work towards enabling would be helpful so that people could see how forming this would help the whole project. For example, it’s long been known that there are some sample SPEs that people want to see exist:

• Liquidity SPE to help with L1/L2 bridging and DEX liquidity for LPT
• Security committee SPE to fund and operate the bounty programs, decentralize the security committee.
• Demand Gen SPE to fund credits program and take on other fee growth initiatives
• …

In the actual proposal, my two cents would be to specify a couple of concrete first use cases that the committee will budget/plan/operate around so that everyone can get a sense of how it will help push things forward, without just adding overhead.

3rd party ramp-up

• I definitely appreciate that there are external experts who have experience and can come in to help provide tools and frameworks. We have a lot to learn, and they can whip us into shape! It would be interesting to hear how an external body could get up to speed with all the nuance of the Livepeer community to be an effective chair. I hope that they’ll propose their own sort of onboarding path, and build trust with the ecosystem early on before dropping in with major changes.

All in all I’m excited about the much-needed governance operationalization that the ultimate version of this proposal can lead to. Would love to hear other’s thoughts.

Note, edited this post a few hours after my original to better reflect and articulate the areas I’m excited about within the pre-proposal, as well as suggestions for the ultimate onchain proposal

[obodur]

IMO this is all too much beuracracy. I understand the urge to formalize things especially when everyone (me included) becomes like a tiger protecting their offspring when giving out our lpt but things should actually be faster and more encouraging when the simple fact is that this is an emerging market and everyone is actually trying out new stuff. Adding beuracracy and administrative kinda work is just gonna make things discouraging. We need technical people to just go for it.

So, I don’t believe this GovWork thing is a good idea. Even SPEs are too much beuracracy.

So… What I just said is just objection. What am I suggesting instead? I’ll give you how I vote for a proposal: I look at the people requesting the funding. I Iisten to them. Check out their credentials. I also see how much and how long they are involved with Livepeer, also look at the requested amount and vote accordingly. My first criterion is that I don’t want the requester to take the money and run. That’s it. Because we all know maybe a very small percentage of all proposals will be able to deliver what they promise in terms of demand to the network in the end, anyway. Let them have it and try it out. We just need to make sure they will really strive for it and not take the money and run.

In summary: Look at the requester. Who is that? Would they be embarassed not to deliver, or would they be just fine with it because they were nobody to the network in the first place? That’s it. We don’t need additional administrative work (except for that fund guardian thing that’s already been put in place)…

[honestly_rich]

Hi all, thanks for the feedback thus far. In response to each point:

@dob:

1. The obvious needs - yes, the aim for the first 3 months is to deliver on quick wins and build credibility within the community. 100% aligned that “lightweight enhancements” are the priority to smooth proposal processes at this point.

2. Sample Concrete Impacts - while GovWorks is planning to make quick wins on governance (as listed above), the ultimate metric is the # proposals passed. So yes, GovWorks plans on creating a Request for SPEs board and facilitating team formation around specific challenges.

3. 3rd Party Ramp Up - while I agree that external agencies can be problematic, they can also bring a new lease of life to the community. In discussions with StableLab, we want to ensure that there is someone working half-time on Livepeer and who has a long-term incentive to stay involved with the project. We do not see this as temporary but will look to align

@obodur

4. All too much bureaucracy - I understand your concern that GovWorks could create more bureaucracy. And I understand your frustration that there should be a formulaic vetting process as with a VC fund. To be clear: the aim of GovWorks is to make capital allocation from the treasury more efficient. To improve efficiency requires having a group focusing 100% on the problem: collecting feedback from the Livepeer community on SPEs, analysing key problems within the ecosystem, creating visibility on these problems and attracting high-value developers and founders to tackles these problems. Without someone owning this process, we will be left with the current situation: a paralysis over capital allocation because no one person or entity is measuring what matters.

I wanted to post this for transparency for the community. I realise this may have been a bit too soon, as we do not plan on putting forward a GovWorks until December 2025. In the meantime, the Ecosystem team will fund this and try to have some quick wins as listed above. GovWorks will look to get some quick wins under its belt as a lightweight working group, and build some credibility with the community (documentation, treasury calls, requests for SPEs).

I welcome more feedback and invite anyone to join the working group calls

[deboot]

So, I also feel that there is a risk that this ends up as too much bureaucracy, and too rigid and formalised. At the same time, I can understand that having some kind of offchain structure can help to increase the flow of funding.

The risk for me is that these SPEs will end up becoming the real governing bodies of the community, and not the active network participants. This would feel like a step backwards in terms of creating a permissionless and liberated environment for fostering innovation.

End recipients should not apply directly to the Livepeer treasury for funding.

This in particular makes me uneasy, as it increases the barrier to entry for individuals to be able to secure small grants to start-up. It would mean that individuals wishing to contribute to the ecosystem must adapt their proposals to the personal preferences and inclinations of the decision-makers in the SPE - which doesn’t feel like it will foster open innovation, more likely it will result in personal hobby projects being developed.

I could understand the need to adapt to something like this, if it were the case that too many proposals had failed to reach the required participation, or if too many had been defeated. But we are hardly experiencing voter apathy/fatigue, and given the near-zero financial cost of voting, I think we could double-down on empowering Orchestrators/Delegators to make decisions, and to cultivate an environment where people can feel free to make even the smallest proposals for funding. If we end up with the problem of having too many proposals, and we become overwhelmed by the number of votes (which might be a nice problem to have), only then might we look at introducing structure to cater to the nature of the proposals that we are seeing.

We’ve come a long way with Delta, and I can understand people feeling the risks associated with opening up funding channels to all and sundry. Now is the time to be cultivating independent contributions of ideas and proposals, from a broad variety of different perspectives, and not limiting things down to a finite set of SPEs decided upon by a small number of permissioned individuals.

Picture a scenario where someone comes with an idea of something to build on Livepeer that nobody in the community had even considered already… and that idea becomes the thing that sparks a wildfire of adoption. We don’t want to be holding the reins so tight that such scenarios get strangled too soon because they don’t “fit with what we want”.