GP-011 Rules for Guild Committee Elections and Management

Proposals
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The Rules Committee proposes to establish the following standing rules for guild committee elections and management. These rules act as the default standing rules for guild committees and will be applied to the existing Marketing, Integrations, and Treasury guilds. If a guild wants to modify these rules they shall include the modifications in a proposal and have it approved by a DAO vote. Any newly formed guilds will use these rules as a default unless they specify different rules in the proposal that forms the guild.

Guild Committee Standing Rules

Guild Committees Seats:
Guild committee seats are filled by a Snapshot vote of the DAO.

Nominations:
Any DAO member can be nominated for an upcoming guild committee seat, including self-nominations. A person who is nominated by another member must confirm their intent to be a candidate. A nomination forum post will be created for each guild ten days prior to the start of elections; nominations are made by replying to the forum post announcing the upcoming election for that particular guild.

Elections:
Elections for all committees shall begin 30 days prior to the start of the next committee term. All nominations will be put up for a seven day token-weighted vote on Snapshot. Open seats are filled in the order of votes received. In the event that not all seats are filled by the voting process, there will be an additional election to fill the remaining seats. In the case of a tie, there shall be a run-off vote.

Committee Chairperson and Secretary:
Each committee should assign a chairperson and secretary. Chairs do not have additional power; it is recommended that they only vote on issues in cases where their vote is decisive; their principal role is to expedite business and serve as a point of contact for other guilds. The secretary is responsible for maintaining minutes of any formal proceedings and a preferred contact method for each committee member and to give notice to committee members whenever formal notification is required. Chairperson and secretary are to be decided by a committee vote in the first two weeks of a new term. A redundancy for each position is recommended

Term:
Committee terms shall be for 12 months staggered in two groups starting March 1st and September 1st. For the first election, half of seats (rounded up) will sit for the full 12-month term; half of the seats (rounded down) will receive a 6 month term in order to set up for staggered elections. The full-term seats will be filled first based on the greatest number of votes received. Committees should prioritize creating a budget for the upcoming quarter as their order of business. Existing committee members will work with any new committee members during the two weeks prior to the new term for an effective transition.

Quorum
The default quorum for committee decision making is defined as greater than 50% of the number of committee seats, i.e. for a committee of six, a quorum would be four.

Termination of a Committee Member
Termination of a committee member would require either a DAO Snapshot vote with a minimum of 2/3 of votes in the affirmative to remove the member; or a 2/3 vote from the committee itself with one week’s notice to committee members and the governance channel prior to the vote.

Committee Vacancy:
In the case of a resignation or termination, the committee will nominate and vote on a replacement for the remainder of the vacant term.

Term limits and Restrictions:
There are no term limits or restrictions on the number of committees that a person may serve on.

Number of Committee Seats:
The number of seats on a given committee is set at the time the committee is formed by a DAO proposal. Any change to the number of committee seats requires a DAO Snapshot vote.

Reporting:
The committee secretary will maintain public minutes of guild committee decisions. The chairperson (or their assignee) will attend each interguild call.

Creation of New Guilds:
New guilds may be formed by the adoption of a proposal to the DAO. Guilds will abide by the above rules unless specified at the time of guild creation or modification by a DAO snapshot proposal.

7 Likes
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Thanks Rules Committee members for this awesome work !

I’m not superfamiliar with how this elections would work though. Are token holders voting this individually or through delegates ?

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Is there any expectation around nominees abstaining from voting? Especially in the case they are large delegates? Maybe that’s not a concern since voting power can always be undelegated and there’s no way to otherwise enforce abstention.

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Great question. We tried to keep the rules as simple as possible to avoid unintended consequences; rules can always be added later. One potential problem with limiting nominees from voting—assuming you wanted to—is that voting can be anonymous. Some delegates would be obvious, but that could create a situation where the rule is followed by some but not others. Personally, I think in the case of large delegates, one may want to request notification of any objections? It could also be the case that if you are delegating to someone, you might want to support them and not have delegated voting power work against them in the election?

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Have you given any consideration to staggering guild elections, either per committee or intra-committee? Seems like we’ll have a biannual turnover that could be disruptive

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Yes, we discussed this extensively. I personally favor this, but we did not have consensus and decided to default to fewer complexities. This could always be added for future elections. We are also happy to reconsider this recommendation.

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We currently have a post in the governance forum to try to have a call next Tuesday to discuss the proposal. @mhluongo here is my alternative regarding staggering that we can discuss on that call if you’re interested? My alternative recommendation is that for the first election a certain number of seats (half, round up for odd number) are for a one-year term and those are filled first by the top vote getters. The rest of the seats that are filled receive a six-month term. This puts us on a staggered schedule of one-year terms. The main objection to this was the concern that one-year terms are too long. (If we try to stagger six-months terms that means voting every three months which we feel might create governance fatigue.) I personally favor this approach of one-year staggered terms.

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@Eastban There are a number of questions here that need to be addressed for how Snapshot voting is configured. We are assuming that these committee rules do not determined that, but this needs to be defined as soon as possible. We spoke to David, and for example, I believe Snapshot currently allows for both liquid and delegated voting. We think we need more definition for how Snapshots are configured, but we are assuming that is a separate discussion as it affects more than just elections. This proposal relies on whatever the Snapshot configuration is.

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One year is long indeed. But I agree with Matt’s concern and your ideas Nous, it’s probably best to do it this way. Guilds are working groups that should ideally evolve into well integrated, cohesive and high performing teams. We’re not there yet, but disrupting eventually the whole group every 6 months doesn’t sound very smart for the DAO.

I think that after our initial term we also figured out if people are committed and deliver or not. So I believe that with our open call, transparent ethos and having these rules in place, which even allow for termination if the need arises, will let us control these groups and individuals.

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Thanks for all this effort!

I think the staggered replacement is good to have, and you’re suggestion seems practical to me @Nous

On the quorum:

Quorum
The default quorum for committee decision making is defined as greater than 50% of the number of committee seats, i.e. for a committee of six, a quorum would be four.

With a committee of 5 → the quorum would be 3. Assuming there’s 2 yes votes and 1 no vote, the proposal would pass. It feels to me that this is a bit too low of a Threshold, and would suggest instead of Quorum to have the requirement for to have 50% of the committee positions vote yes for a vote to pass.

On the elections side token holder vote feels like the right thing to me.

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Thanks for putting this together Nous! Very well done! I especially like the clarity to Committee structure, requiring a committee chair and secretary for each guild. I am a fan of having the committee chair as “deciding vote” and “voting only on decisive issues” this reinforces the role of chairperson as an unbiased party. This also reinforces the role of chairperson to “expedite business” as the primary function.
Another aspect I like within this proposal is requiring the chairperson or designee to attend all interguild calls. As the complexity of our Network increases interguild communications will be paramount and cannot be overlooked. The nature of a designee helps balance the load of Chairperson in very busy times (for example a network feature launch).

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Thanks, @Nous and the other participants who worked on this! I recall there was some discussion prior of forming a “rules guild”, and I think your extra work here was a better way to start.

I agree this is an excellent start, and I appreciate the effort to align on a simple, clear recommendation while leaving out for now other points that didn’t have consensus - so we can vote on the basics and use it as a starting point.

I don’t see where (to @nico186’s point above) it requires the chair or designee to attend all interguild calls, but I think it’s very important that someone does, and a chair role makes sense to be the one. I’m not sure why the chair would only vote when needed to break a tie, but if the logic is that they have the extra role of facilitating the committee’s work flow and aligning with the other guilds I’d say that’s a good tradeoff.

I also agree with the call for staggered terms, as well as a one-year term being long (though perhaps having the top 2 or 3 votes be the longer term is a good way to do it, assuming those people are willing - perhaps that could be part of standing for election, that you specify whether you can commit to a full year if elected).

I wonder whether it might be valuable to share some of the other rules that were considered but didn’t have consensus - in case people feel strongly about amending to add any (or at least discuss them).

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On our discussion call today, we discussed changing to one-year terms that are staggered every six months with an initial half of seats being only for six months to set up the staggered elections. We also discussed adding a rule for a vote of no confidence in a committee that would trigger an election for the entire committee during the next staggered election. We are working on finalizing this language and will create a new official proposal to be voted on.

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Proposal re-submitted as TIP-31 and moved to Snapshot to vote: Snapshot

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Snapshot has been completed and passed with 622M voting in favor, no votes against.