[GIP-0] Introducing the GIP Procedure

Gus · January 20, 2022, 3:49pm

A DAO is an Organization enabled to upgrade itself.
.- Anonymous

The GoodDAO is the governance entity responsible for oversight of the GoodDollar protocol. All GoodDAO members have the power to propose changes to the protocol or to the governance process and of course, also vote on the proposals of others.

The GoodDAO can vote on anything directly affecting the protocol. Successful proposals for edits/additions/changes to the functionality of existing smart contracts are implemented through code upgrades. Code upgrade proposals must include the proposed new code in its final format. For a further understanding of the GOOD distribution see this article.

With great power comes great responsibility.
.- Benjamin Franklin Parker, aka Uncle Ben

Decentralized governance is an ongoing improvement process, in order to coordinate seamlessly and propose healthy changes to our protocol and Ecosystem while avoiding governance attacks and/or summing entropy that might take us away from our goals and objectives, we need to agree on a GoodDollar Improvement Proposal procedure so the community can evaluate, accept or deny the proposed changes.

What is a GIP?

GIP stands for GoodDollar Improvement Proposal. An GIP is a document that details a change proposal to our protocol to the management, allocation, or use of shared resources owned or directly influenced by the GoodDAO.

All GIPs must be consistent with the goals of making GoodDollar a people-powered framework aiming to generate, finance, sustain, growth and distribute global basic income via the GoodDollar token (“G$ coin”); which goal are to provide a baseline standard of living and reduce wealth inequality through the creation of a universal basic income (UBI) while exposing also financial opportunities to the different GoodDollar stakeholders that are supporting our mission and Vision.

A Mission to Empower

Our mission is to leverage new digital asset technologies to enable all people to experience,learn, and on-ramp into digital assets, by building products that are inclusive by design.

A Global Vision

Our vision is a world where everyone has access to basic economic assets according to the principles of basic income.

Proposal workflow

Parties directly involved in the process are the GIP author (you), the GIP Commenters, the GoodDollar Foundation (“the Foundation”), and GoodDAO voters (GOOD holders).

Proposals follow this workflow:

Stage I: Select GIP Track
Stage II: Pre-proposal
Stage III: Work In Progress
Stage IV: Final Proposal
Stage V: Snapshot Vote
Stage VI: Onchain Vote (when applicable)

During Stage III-IV GoodDAO community and forum moderators will review proposals for formatting, legibility, and compliance with GIP-1, referring to GIP-1 as the basis for accepting, denying, or requesting modifications to a proposal.

Stage I: Select GIP Track

Before you spend time working on a proposal, make sure the proposal complies with GIP-1 and has a chance of passing review by the GIP Commenters Editors and your peers. Review the GIP tracks and their requirements then select the track that you think is best for your proposal. If your proposal meets the requirements, it has a much greater chance of being accepted by GIP Editors and approved by GoodDAO voters.

There are four tracks that an GIP can be categorized into. Select the one you think is best for your GIP:

Protocol: proposals for making changes to the GoodDollarV2 protocol.
Finance: proposals for transferring funds from the a GoodDAO community vault.
Meta: proposals for changing GIP-0 (“changing the way things are changed”)
Proclamations: proposals for making a public statement on behalf of the GoodDAO.

Proposals that cannot be categorized into one of these tracks will likely be stopped by GoodDAO community and moderators. At the discretion of GIP Editors, a proposal may be categorized as “Other” until a new track is approved as part of a Meta GIP.

In addition to the requirement that all GIPs must be consistent with GIP-0, each track has its own requirements for GIPs as follows:

Protocol: Proposals made to the Protocol track must affect one or more of the following:

GoodDollar Ethereum SmartContracts.
- E.g. “Should the GoodDAO modify the Reserve Ratio Expansion rate from 20% to 8%”
- E.g. “Should the GoodDAO mint 100M G$s for a new Liquidity mining program over PancakeSwap (BSC)?”
GoodDollar Fuse SmartContracts
- E.g. “Should the Not-claimed UBI be transferedd to GoodDAO Community vault instead of being added to the next UBI cycle?”

Finance: Proposals made to the Finance track must affect the movement of assets held by the GoodDAO community vaults. The Foundation will have discretion over which multisig/addresses transfers must go through the GIP process.

GoodDollar avatar vault:
- E.g. “Should the GoodDAO transfer 100 ETH to

Meta: Proposals made to the Meta track must affect changes to GIP-0. The Foundation has the power to add and remove governance moderators and fix errata in GIP-0 on an as-needed basis without going through the GIP process. All other proposals to modify GIP-0 should be made to the Meta track.

E.g. “Should the min. acceptance quorum of GoodDAO votes be increased?”

Proclamations: Proposals made to the Proclamations track must exist for the GoodDAO community to signal required changes in the assets and operations managed by The Foundation. The Foundation will make their best effort to commit to the proposed change and disclose a plan to execute it. The Foundation reserve it’s right to avoid committing to changes that could damage itself.

E.g. “Should GoodDollar name be change to GoodMoney?”

Stage II: Drafting proposal

During Stage II you should seek feedback on your GIP idea by sharing it with your peers in the GoodDAO community and soliciting their feedback. Examples of appropriate venues to share your GIP idea include:

Comment

The #governance channel in GoodDollar Discord
The Governance category in the GoodDollar Discourse (aka forum)

Be open-minded and respectful of all feedback you receive. Adjust your proposal to address serious concerns as they come up to increase the odds of your proposal passing review in later stages.

Stage III: Work In Progress

After you have asked the GoodDAO community whether an idea has any chance of support and have received sufficient feedback to feel confident going forward, you can create a draft GIP as a Governance post in the Governance Forum. Use a template from the Template section below to ensure you are including all the necessary information.

Templates Below is a list of GIP templates for each track. Copy the template for the track your GIP is in, fill it out, and post in the Governance Forum. Sections marked as “required” in the template must be completed.

Protocol

---
GIP: N/A
Title: Title
Author: Name
Status: Stage III
Track: Protocol
Created: YYYY-MM-DD
---

# Insert title like "GIP-X: Example title" here

## Description of desired Protocol policy change

## Motivation for asking changes in such Protocol policy

Finance

---
GIP: N/A
Title: Title
Author: Name 
Status: Stage III
Track: Finance
Created: YYYY-MM-DD
---

# Insert title like "GIP-X: Example title" here

## Address of the transfer recipient

## Network of the 

## Amount of the transfer

## Number and frequency of transfers if recurring (enter “1” if only one payment will be made)

## Purpose of the transfer

## Recipient information

Organization (if any)
Name:
Website:
Other URL:

Fill out the following information for each individual team member who will be managing funds from this transfer:

Name:
PGP key fingerprint (optional):
Website:
Other URL:

Stage IV: Snapshot Proposal

Once the the discussion about your proposal is finished and a GoodDollar Discourse moderator has given the approval to move it forward. The editor (or someone sponsoring this proposal to the editor) shall create a proposal keeping the already selected template (and considering the community feedback) at the GoodDollar Snapshot Instance.

Where the Ask a question… field is filled with the Governance Proposal Title ([GIP-X] This is a title example), filling the Tell more about your proposal field with the description already discussed at your post (just copy&paste).

In order to avoid spam in the Governance proposals, the submitter need to have a minimum amount of 0.25% of total GOOD (currently 240k G$s). Votes will be enacted and weighted with GOOD non-transferable tokens.

Note that this vote will not happen on-chain, Snapshot is a second layer service that computes and store voting data off-chain.

If the decision in discussion is not related to the change of protocols variable nor to the re- allocation of on-chain assets, then the community and/or the team in charge of the voting scope will act accordingly to fulfill the community mandate.

If the decision above relates to changes in the protocol or on-chain asset allocation, then the proposer and Community Moderator should decide if it is a case of a simple or complex on-chain proposal:

Simple Proposal: a proposal that just need a change of the variable within the Protocol (e.g. should we change expansion rate in the reserve ratio from 10% to 20%), OR a proposal to budget allocation from DAO funds.
Complex Proposal: a proposal that requires a change in the logic and/or architecture on our smart contracts (e.g. a proposal to add multiple tokens into the reserve).

In case of a Simple Proposal the proposal can be submitted on snapshot following this stage guidelines and without needing to submit additional code.

In case of a Complex Proposal, that requires to add or upgrade contracts in the current protocol, the proposal shall also include the relevant code in its final form and audited before being voted on snapshot.

In both cases after proposal has passed on snapshot, the proposal can be finally submitted on-chain and enacted according to Stage VI guidelines.

Stage VI: On-chain Governance

In case of a Simple Proposal, the foundation and/or the community will act to create the on-chain proposal with the relevant code and audit when applicable. If it was a complex proposal, the code shall be already developed, audited and approved by the snapshot vote before arriving to this stage.

Any on-chain proposal that did not follow the above guidelines will be canceled by the “Guardian” (currently the Foundation)

Once the code is ready, the contracts should be deployed, and an on-chain proposal should be created

The proposer need to have 0.25% of GOOD power/delegation in order to trigger the vote.
3% minimun quorum, which means at least 3% of the GOOD supply shall be participating in this vote.
50% of approval, this means that at least half of the actual votes should be favorable to the proposal in order for it to pass.
This vote will stay open for 14 days until a quorum is reached, once a quorum is reached the proposal voting will end after 24 hours that the voting result did not change.

In case of a Finance proposal that wants to make use of our Community Steward Treasury, the addressing of the funds will be enacted by the multi-sig signers instead of an on-chain GOOD voting.

History Comment

This document borrows Aragon’s AGP-1 written by John Light, which was inspired from Ethereum’s EIP-1 written by Martin Becze and Hudson Jameson, which itself was derived from Bitcoin’s BIP-0001 written by Amir Taaki, which in turn was derived from Python’s PEP-0001. In many places text was simply copied and modified.