We’re interested in the community’s views about an appropriate emergency process (i.e., a way to pass governance proposals more quickly than the standard processes, where everything would take 2-4 weeks as standard under the proposed HOPR Association parameters).
Here it’s important to balance risks. By definition, an emergency is a situation with a lot of risk attached (if we don’t do something soon, a negative consequence will occur), but weakening the processes and thresholds introduces an obvious avenue for governance attacks.
We have some ideas, but I’d like to start with a blank slate here.
Questions include:
Is this even necessary? What situations can we imagine where this would be needed?
How would it be triggered?
How would it alter the standard phases / timings / thresholds?
Bear in mind that we can’t just shift the burden to take action from the token holders to the trustee.
First, people are already concerned about the power of the trustee in this setup. I think this concern isn’t warranted, but I wouldn’t want to imbue the trustee with actual power.
Second, the trustee wouldn’t actually WANT this power. It complicates their liability protection.
what if the community holds elections of an extraordinary council of 7-9 people who own a sufficient number of tokens from 500 thousand . interested in the safety of their investments and aimed at helping the community and in case of urgent need, they should meet within 2 days and vote on an urgent decision. this extraordinary advice can be chosen every 3 months, for example.
if you do not create new entities. then we can simply reduce, in case of extreme urgency, the phase of discussion of the proposal to 2 days and the voting phase to 1-2 days as well. as a protection, set a quorum threshold for voting of several million tokens to consider the vote held.
of course, any issues related to the vulnerability of the protocol and the potential danger to the funds should be resolved in an accelerated mode
What if the DAO would simply vote in an early decision on a council and when an emergency comes the DAO would vote to give emergency powers to the council (i.e. make decisions for the DAO that are needed fast) and emergency powers need to be re-confirmed by the dao every 72h or so
Balancing the distribution of decision-making authority, while also addressing concerns and maintaining the integrity of the governance system, requires careful consideration and a thoughtful approach that respects the roles and responsibilities of all stakeholders involved.
This is a difficult one as what constitutes an emergency situation as the first question suggests?!?
Also the danger of ill considered and quick decisions could lead to bad actors trying to affect the DAO.
I guess maybe a hack of the treasury or the foundation, other entity going bankrupt or something of like that would require an Emergency resolution, but not sure what else would be so bad to require this process to be commenced.
Timings might be a maximum of a day or week depending on the severity of the issue. But to stop something this bad I guess HOPR could suspend the chain, but then that defeats the reasons for being decentralised so s difficult one to police / resolve IMHO.
Is this even necessary? What situations can we imagine where this would be needed?
I think it is necessary to have such an option available as such an emergency situation normally comes beyond our imagination.
How would it be triggered?
How might it be stopped / contested?
An extraordinary council of 7-9 as @Aleks suggested would be an option that I can also imagine. A member of the council can flag an proposal with EMERGENCY and set the deadline for the decision, which can be refused or halted by the members of the council. DAO member with a certain level (>1000 HOPR: Post in Discussion privilege) can possibly make an objection too.
How would it alter the standard phases / timings / thresholds?
It would require careful fine tuning here but I think it can skip the referendum phase. The timing for the voting can be initially set by the initiator unless there is any objection/refusal. Thresholds can be 80% of the council to support the decision for example.
One more thing to add concerning the council.
I think @thewanderingeditor should be in the council as a representative for HOPR Association as he has greater insight over the whole DAO setup than anybody else in my opinion.
Thanks for these very specific suggestions guys. I think this is a good idea. It certainly matches what most other DAOs have tried, with the exception that it sounds like this council would be elected from the start by the token holders. Generally these councils appoint themselves at the point of governance creation (e.g., Arbitrum), which leads to accusations of centralization.
I’d be interested to think more about this initial election process. How would you stop people from conspiring to control the DAO at this point? By preventing candidates from voting, perhaps?
Collusion of several persons is always possible. For this reason, I proposed a fairly large number of participants in the 7-9 council. this, in my opinion, will reduce the likelihood of collusion. Plus, a high approval threshold of 70% will also help this. as well as a large threshold for owning Hopr tokens to submit your candidacy to the council. Who would want to harm their finances in their right mind? And I still think that in addition to the council’s vote, a vote should be created in parallel for the community with the question of whether it supports the convocation of the council and its powers to resolve an urgent issue or whether it wants to independently resolve this issue in a broad discussion. That is, 2 votes at the same time, one for the council and the other for the community in an accelerated 2-day version. Where the council votes on the necessary measures and the community on the confidence of the council in this matter with the same approval threshold of ±70%