Designing Responsible Governance UI Systems / Tina Haibodi

Transcript

foreign hi guys I hope you're having a great day um before I start the talk I kind of wanted to gauge the audience um governance experience and put your hand up if you've ever voted in any sort of governance system and this could be a

regional election for your own country this could be voting for your class president um yeah who's ever voted in a governance system okay sweet sweet okay now who's ever voted for a governance system within a dow okay sweet sweet and who's a participant of a Dao to this day okay sweet sweet we have a good Dao Community here so today I'm going to be talking about designing responsible governance systems and how are UI implications can be affecting both our Dow communities and

um the way that people are voting and the actions of our community members so I think that while we're designing these systems and experimenting we can kind of take a step back and look at the patterns that we're creating and how we can hold both our members and community members more accountable So within this talk I'm going to go into what element Finance is what we do and how we're relevant to this discussion what the historical progression of governance systems in the space has been and also what governance incentives can be in the future because right now we only have

currently seven percent of people in the space vote for Dow elections so noting this we wanted to start a conversation about how we can better um utilize governance incentives for Dow community members and the last is how to contribute to element and how you can reflect on this this discussion for your Dao and the communities that you're also in so first what is element Finance so we're a fixed and variable rate protocol and you can think of us as a yield management protocol but our most popular D5 product is fixed rate positions so

why fixed rate positions are huge because they have historically in traditional Finance they were only available to institutional Brokers and now we have the opportunity to open them up to everyone and they're really popular because they're a low risk D5 product that you can go in for three six month or 12 month term and you receive a rate at the end of this term how I kind of explain it to my little sister is like it's like a mortgage you know that you're going in for this rate at maturity you re uh you receive like two percent on top of the the amount that you deposited and it's a really really easy feasible way for beginners in the space

um to get yield for yield farming or institutions in the future with credit and asset delegation to take take out debt against their fixed rate positions and that's something we've also been discussing and ideating within our community so our community is pretty large I think 30k and our Discord members are pretty active and excited to build on the protocol but we also have our governance launch that has been recent as well so on top of having a defy product we have a gun governance protocol named Council and Council was launched March 20 uh 22nd this year and what council is and why

council is so Innovative is because Council uses a voting Vault contracts that allow for community members to be more invested in the Dow governance process so for one example we have identity vaults that um no longer have one vote for one token and allow contributors and community members to be recognized beyond their token shareholder voting so I think we've seen in web 2 when a lot of web 2 companies you only had a say in the company based on your shareholder vote and we're seeing that a lot in larger protocols as well a lot of VC firms that have a large token shareholder amount

they're the ones that have the biggest voices in the space so we wanted to rethink that model and how we can emphasize community members another great Innovation that was done on our voting vaults was our actual voting locking investing Vault that's a smart contract capability that requires users to submit their eligibility for voting prior to a voting period to prevent civil attack and to ensure that the most engaged most qualified and most educated voters are voting within the voting period so our governance launch also included an nft claim incentive and a lot of our

UI had a lot of thought into the implications that I'm going to go into within this presentation so to start off I'm going to go back to the history of voting systems and how governance design was kind of rapidly changing within the space and the first point was how we think about voter types so governance design kind of originated with people wanting to vote and kind of creating polling products to gauge Community feedback and what the community reception was and this just a general archetype of democracy systems but within this we started to see organization vehicles and these

organization Vehicles were thinking about organization design of community so how can we best um organize the community that we're we're accumulating and they're voting to fit their organizational work structures to ensure that we're pursuing consistent feedback to ensure that it's closed to a point that it's not interfering with the work but also it's open to the community for feedback and development and then also governance types so is it on chain is it a hybrid where it's off chain and on-chain and is it fully off chain so it's very close to the community and how we can improve these systems with Forum polling and other products within the

space so this was kind of one of the first governance UI systems within the space and this was Dash in the first owl and they had an on-chain voting system and it was open Community integrated but you can kind of see how his public proposals there wasn't really a UI for them to vote and there wasn't really a way to gauge information about the proposals past the initial proposal so it's very closed you don't have very very much contacts as a user going into the voting process and this was kind of the origination of how voting UI systems for governance started then we started to reflect on those designs and this was a design

accumulated by decreed and this was the first open Community design so what open community means is that you had to see how many votes were in the community the number of people that abstained the number of people that we're voting for and you got to see voting profiles of who had the largest voting power within this vote and how this implicated the vote itself and then we had makers so I'm kind of biased because our CEO and governance architect Charles he architected a lot of our governance organization structure and our governance system but he was actually a governance architect at maker and they

were pivotal in being one of the first on-chain voting systems within the space and why that was is because there was no polling or on-chain voting contracts that were completely on chain and taking proposals at executable States prior to so they kind of fully made the process automated and took into Community feedback the open Community voting system and last but not least my favorite is defy summer so why defy summer was a pivotal point in the governance voting UI system history was because that's when

liquidity mining emerged and exploded within the space so this is a huge point in governance systems because then we started to see Financial incentives for community members to get involved within contributions we saw started to see like formalized token Grant systems which the equivalent of um of token equity for a lot of contributors within Dao's and we start to see formal financialized incentives in these daos and how token admissions were also affecting the Dows and these liquidity mining programs I think compound was probably the most famous but uni swap was also pivotal in a lot of their governance proposals within D5

summer as well but this was kind of the timeline that I expanded on starting off with open Community moving to then organized voting where we started to see these proposals they're passing of them them being executed then these formal proposal systems where you start to see voter profiles more in-depth statistics about the voting so that voters are more educated and then liquidity mining where these governance incentives start to explode so now I'm going to go into elements voting system so why I think elements voting system was really unique is because we made a lot of intentional decisions to remove

information that is traditionally displayed on governance uis and one example of that was we specifically made our delegates not featured by voting power and randomized them because I think we did a psychological study based on the past governance launches that we saw that a lot of people end up voting or delegating their voting power to the first person that they see within the organized UI so without inherently noting that's a bias action that they're creating you're incentivizing like hundreds of your users that may be claiming tokens or being interested in

your governance launch to be delegating power to this one person that may be placed within the first spot of your UI so that was a really intentional decision we made because voting systems you're giving a lot of power to people within a huge governance style structure and it could be a large protocol or small protocol a lot of these protocols oversee large treasuries so we wanted to be more responsible in how we are architecting our UI and how that reflects a responsible governance system the second decision was having more contextual information on an overview page and dividing that from the actual Act of voting so when you go to vote for traditional Federal

and Regional governance systems like your hometown or your local state state representative you don't see any bias or contextual information in the act of voting so we wanted to segment those two so that it simulates the governance and democracy systems that have been successful for years and seeing that reflected in our own defy ecosystem in a sustainable way so my favorite part actually who our front-end engineer actually architected the front end for cash was our GSC UI so traditionally a lot of governance UI systems do not have uis that showcase their main delegates or a lot of the

delegates that hold the largest voting power and they don't have ways to actionably incentivize their community members to both remove them from power and give someone an new that may be contributing posting new ideas and Discord or forums and removing the power from the person that's been idle and giving them to someone new so what we did was we kind of organized a system where you would see what the responsibilities of a GSC member so if someone was interested they can say like oh would I be qualified to overtake this role to maybe make a post in the Forum campaigning for people to delegate to me is it something that I can take on as a time commitment and then they would also

see okay who are the current members if I know someone on the the GSC the governance steering Council can I then message them for more contextual information if I do and then also a rising delegates feature so these are people that would be from the most closest to the threshold which would be in this case the 100 000 110 000 um tokens or the people that are lowest in the threshold and people would have the ability to search through possible delegates that they could delegate to based on the people that are closest to the threshold so if you see a GSE member and you could click on their profile and

see like oh they I've been traditionally delegating to them for three months but they haven't been voting for me like how I originally thought when I delegated to them I no longer want them to represent me as a community member you can go in remove your voting power and delegate it to someone new or campaign to be a delegate yourself so I think why this is important is because we're removing these traditional structures that we saw in governance voting systems where we have politicians in power for two to three year terms and we can actually remove people that have been bought idle in these positions and I think even in web 3 and D5 we're starting to see a lot of delegates that are accumulating multiple

governance delegations and that's something that we need to solve through more consistent delegate uis because we need more Fresh Faces in the Dow system that aren't the same VCS that are posting the same opinions so I encourage everyone here to become more active in Dao's or Implement systems like this and then also experiments so I think governance is really cool because with governance incentives there's really cool things that we could do to move that initial number of Engagement up and incentivize users in new ways so one thing we did at element was conduct an nft experiment internally and we

launched an nft project protocol and this was a gift to the Dao but we issued 10 000 spots to community members and the first 6 000 were for community members that claimed and delegated within the first 24 hours and what we saw as a result of this is six thousand people delegating and claiming in 72 hours and if you look historically at a lot of the governance launches for optimism ens and a lot of the other protocols having numbers like this so fast and within such a small time frame is a really good

example of how you can incentivize people to become active in your governance system early on and claim without letting it sit idle and them forgetting that they have toku token issuance so that was a cool experiment and I encourage a lot of people here that are within daus to kind of think about how they can utilize governance incentives and the existing um products that we have in the space to make governance more fun um so yeah contributing so my last point is our element Dao is slowly transitioning fully to a Dao but one thing we're looking for is more contributors for our

nft project that was my timer um for our nft project for the governance protocol itself and also contributors for ideas for our main core product so if you're interested in governance systems shaping the future of governance systems or how nfts could affect that I'd love for you to contribute to element or you can come up to talk to me in cash but yeah that's that is designing governance systems for element [Applause] okay very nice thank you very much

do we have any questions from the audience there should be a microphone roaming around okay we've got a question here in the middle ah sorry maybe um sorry if you're there we'll come to you um hi what's hello hello yeah what's your experiences with or opinion of um volts versus government governance and basically you know implicitly explicitly delegating your votes to to evolved prevent try to prevent it try to endorse it you know how to deal with it yeah I think the act of staking creates too much of a deterrence to a lot of governance and I think that smart

contract development in the space um is innovating like our voting vaults or innovating compound also has a lot of innovative work that has been done with their voting vaults and we need to find a medium between people staking their voting power completely and their tokens and being able to um you have them as liquid as well and be active members of governance systems so I think it will be a while till we see like a hybrid structure that benefits community members okay and I think there were a couple more questions maybe in the middle at what point in the maturity of the

project did you start building these you know thinking seriously about the UI and building the infrastructure were you hacking tools together before you got to that stage yeah so it was really interesting we probably had a two-month full research period on how voting systems traditionally have been executed in the web 2 and traditional governance world and what they've done poorly and what they've done well and actually an interesting fact for this audience is there is not a single country in the world right now that has a formal fully online voting process and I think what's

cool about the work that we're doing in the space all collectively and this room is a lot of the federal and government systems that take so long to innovate they're going to be learning from the governance voting systems that we're crafting and how they're effectively executed and how they could be effectively effectively executed for federal and Regional voting system so it's really cool and it was definitely a lot of research like we had our CEO our CEO like was meeting with incred researchers within the space and we had research sessions with our front end and smart contracts lead weekly before we even started touching High Fidelity mock-ups so it's definitely very

research race thank you okay do we have any more questions from the room then I guess all it leaves is for me to say thank you very much Tina Ivory thank you foreign