Thread by @jbrukh

We as an industry need to make explicit a key point about the #governance space:

*In our 500,000 years of being humans we have learned less about coordination systems than we will learn in the next 5-10 years.*

@lrettig @MolochDAO @cburniske @AragonProject @daostack @nc0we 👇

First and foremost, if you are designing *governance systems* and you’re not up to speed on our 200+ years of quantitative research in this area, consider researching this body of work.

Here is a resource to get you started, first tweeted in 2017:

https://twitter.com/jbrukh/status/929425644458561541?s=21

Secondly, by and large, we collectively have at most a few years of experience with on-chain voting systems.

Voting is just one way to coordinate.

Everything is an experiment.

Governance of networks, upgrades, DAOs, nonprofits, public co’s does not & should not look the same.

There’s a fair amount of naïveté with respect to governance systems in our industry today.

Building an efficient, inclusive, scalable, and fair governance system is *very hard*; and if you read the social choice literature, annoyingly often it is *mathematically impossible.*

We need to be pragmatic, hypothetical, and open-minded. We need to approach governance as an experiment. Some folks, like @MolochDAO, want to layer governance experiments on top of public blockchain experiments, and that’s fine.

@VladZamfir and @VitalikButerin make extremely coherent points about the dangers of on-chain governance, the impact of powerful defaults, and the tyrannies of breaking down checks and balances in systems.

We need to read and understand these arguments, and it’s hard.

Simultaneously, not all gov systems have the same considerations as public blockchain platforms. There is a bottomless list of nonprofits, public co’s, community orgs, and many other possible public goods for which we’re now able to construct novel customized governance.

Many folks, acting on ideals or abstract “blockchain values”, have railed against #plutocracy in a DAO context. There is a number of things to say here. . .

1. A lot of arguments on plutocracy rest on the assumption that we lack decentralized identity and are limited to 1T1V voting systems. In fact self-sovereign identity is possible, happening, and will be an integral part of web3, enabling 1P1V experiments.

2. There are examples, in general, where plutocracy is not only more efficient as a governance mechanism, it is desirable or required. We cannot rule out plutocratic systems on idealogical grounds in case they are optimal, we must experiment with them.

3. Radical inclusion is an ideal and we should definitely experiment with it to understand the areas where it will be most successful. But it will not be the only possible model.

4. Decisiveness analysis of on-chain voting systems can be useful to evaluate plutocratic schemes. What it also shows is that delegated voting systems can go a long way to rebalance the power between pluto-whales and the long tail.

github.com/coinfund/gover…

This is a super exciting time to be alive and watch these experiments underway. Join a plutarchic DAO and understand what that’s like. Support inclusive and disruptive experiments. Participate in networks!

/the end