EvenGov

EvenGov

EvenGov is a service DAO that helps the genesis teams of Web3 projects decentralize authority and responsibility to their communities.

In a world where decentralization is becoming increasingly important, approaching the process with careful regard for your vision is critical. As a DAO, we are building a supernode that can support the DAO ecosystem with talented governance engineers and an open knowledge base of successful decentralization experiments.

Our current approach is enumerated in our Continuous Decentralization framework, which you can read more about below. This framework represents our latest thinking on how to decentralize well.

However, this is a new approach that we are currently testing with our partner DAOs. We anticipate that it will change rapidly as we learn from experimentation, and from forking and copying other decentralization success stories.

We are excited to partner with prosocial projects that are building essential ecosystem infrastructure. If you are ready to decentralize and want our help, please reach out to our team at hello@evengov.com.

An example decentralization timeline using EvenGov Continuous Decentralization v0.1
An example decentralization timeline using EvenGov Continuous Decentralization v0.1

EvenGov Continuous Decentralization v0.1

The Roles

You need at least one person for each of three main roles to manage your decentralization process:

DAO Product Manager

  • Expert at stakeholder management, maps DAO member types and interfaces with each
  • Synthesizes documents to keep everyone on the same page
  • Manages the Authority Negotiation Roadmap (and larger backlog)

Community Manager

  • Helps DAO Product Manager interface with the most important stakeholder: your DAO member community at large
  • Facilitate bridge to community and show clients best practices of engaging community
  • Posts to channels, ensuring clarity and concision
  • Listens on all channels and brings info to the DAO Product Manager

Governance Engineer

  • Expert at mechanism design, tokeneconomics, game theory
  • Can help create and test and red-team incentives
  • Not a smart contract developer or a lawyer - highly necessary, but out of scope for Governance Management

The Process

On an iterative basis, the decentralization team should complete each of the following steps once per epoch:

1. Map the Governance Surface of your ecosystem

  • List available computational, economic, and political authorities in the ecosystem
  • List the types of members in the ecosystem
  • List authorities held and desired by each member type
  • Breakdown risks of transferring authorities to particular member types
  • List types of decisions that need to be made
  • Interview DAO members, soliciting broad feedback from the community

2. Create an Authority Negotiation Roadmap

  • Develop a timeline of negotiations to hold between DAO members
  • Authority holders in the Genesis Team can communicate their plan for transitioning any surpluses of authority to DAO structures, along with approximations and/or commitments as to when DAO members could expect these transitions to happen
  • Roadmap includes a prioritization of which authority negotiations to hold in which order

3. Facilitate Authority Negotiations amongst DAO members

  • Hold meetings, feedback sessions, and discussions in online forums in order to reach agreements about the decentralization of authority to the community
  • Select a "first authority transfer" — a low-risk, highly desired authority to transfer to DAO
  • Includes governor recruitment — getting people to contribute work to the DAO formation process outside of just the genesis team

4. Implement technologies that support Authority Negotiation outcomes

  • Evaluate the agreed upon functionality in the Authority Negotiations and Constitution to write technical requirements that can be used by engineers to implement DAO functionality
  • May be delivered to the genesis team, or to the DAO in the form of bounties, grants, or requests for proposals

5. Run a community-wide retrospective

  • Evaluate the impact of the mechanisms and features toward the negotiated outcomes
  • Iterate on mechanisms and features as necessary
  • Renegotiate with DAO members as necessary
  • Update your ecosystem constitution, including the computational constitution (the software / smart contract portion of the constitution)
  • Hold a constitutional convention - meeting(s) to negotiate, publish, and ratify the constitution
  • Commit to self-disclosures from the decentralization team: due to the nature of this role, it is important to transparently self-report compensation, responsibilities, and incentive dynamics that involve the DAO Product Manager, Community Manager, and Governance Engineer to the community at large

Conclusion

To recap, the Continuous Decentralization framework is about finding the right balance between centralization and decentralization for the phase of the project that you are in.

By running this process, you will get to a stable, sustainable point with your game rules and technologies that support the long-term vision of your DAO. And on the meta, the authority to run this process will also be delegated from a governance management team to your community at large.

Again, this is an experiment, a hypothesis. One that we will test and learn from, and one that we hope that others will build on top of and share with the community as well. Because that’s why we’re here, for the decentralized future, for Web3.

If you are interested in partnering with us, please reach out at hello@evengov.com. We look forward to building with you.

Sincerely,

EvenGov DAO