Gardens: A Bottom-Up Governance Framework for Web3

Transcript

This has a lot of limitations, especially when you're talking about ecosystem funding, and that opens up this whole host of other issues with abuse and gaming and the wrong people getting funded. Conviction voting is a mechanism where your support grows in conviction over time, the way that it sounds. Our challenge was to enable communities to have the tool set that they need to create a decentralized decision-making [Music] entity. Hello and welcome to ecosystem project demo where we dive into projects supporting Ethereum ecosystem. This is

episode 21 brought to you by EC Institute. I'm your host Puja Ranjan and joined by Wayin and Akash from Ethereum Cathedralers team. Today we are thrilled to explore garden pre-beta a bottomup governance framework supporting public good ecosystem. Joining us is Paul Glaven, a core contributor to gardens. Welcome Paul. Good to be here. Thanks for having me. Yeah, I'm excited to talk about what we've been working on. So, are we excited to hear more about the project? But Paul, maybe we can start this conversation with knowing you a

little bit more. If you can share about your professional journey, how you found Web 3, how did you get involved with gardens and what drew your interest in this kind of governance work? Yeah, definitely. My background before web 3 was in various web 2 marketing and growth and operations roles. I I worked for a few different startups. A couple of them were successful and kind of in the background of this whole time. I had cryptocurrency on my radar back in like 2011 2012. It was popular in hacker news back then. the the Y Combinator website, which I I was on that website all the time, and back then people were talking

about this peer-to-peer currency, and this was kind of a nerdy curiosity of mine, but that's kind of just been something that I've had an interest in and a curiosity in. And then around 2017 2018 when cryptocurrency was starting to reach mainstream interest and adoption that was kind of when I came back to the curiosity and was thinking about it less as a an interested just in like how you would do a cryptographically secure decentralized peer-to-peer payment system and more about what this actually means for the world And I spend a lot of time thinking. I go I go on walks and I

I like to think about this type of stuff. And where I eventually kind of thought my way to with this meaning question of cryptocurrency is that it's an opportunity for us to fix some of the economic issues in the world. And our biggest most pressing economic issues are described best by the word public goods. I think public goods kind of defines basically everything that free market economies and the existing capitalist system doesn't appropriately address and that we need to supplement with governments and nonprofits and

NOS's and just about everyone in the world looks at these organizations and says that these are not good enough and that we have systemic enormous issues that affect even the livability of the planet but also the quality of life of most of the people on Earth, which is really bad. And this is kind of our opportunity, our our new technology and our new chance to take a new approach and come at these issues with a new perspective and try to make a a different, more meaningful type of improvement on those things. So, that was where my head was at when I finally quit my job in 2021. And that was when I I came into web 3 full-time. And I was

looking at who are the people who are working on this public goods problem. And at that point, I was looking at Gitcoin. I looked at token engineering commons at Gith. And I had a lot of really good conversations with everyone working on those projects in that time. But then I found OneHive and that wound up kind of being the stickiest of the the web three organizations that I looked at. And what drew me into OneHive was that even in 2021, it already had an economic protocol. It had a governance token that was issued through dynamic issuance from this common pool of tokens. It used conviction voting to distribute those tokens to proposals.

And then it had its own arbitration system, an Aragon court fork called Celeste. And so this entire protocol looked and felt like what I didn't really understand at the time, but a digitally native nation of collective of people around the world who really just share a social contract which OneHive calls this the covenant which is the you can call it the terms and conditions or the constitution. It's the thing that unites everyone and everyone agrees to when they join OneHive and when they decide to contribute. I saw this and immediately recognize something that could be applied to every single public good in the world if you choose your

narrow enough social story or mission. You can get the group of people together who can work on that problem and solve it together. And they don't need to be in the same place and they don't need the existing legal structures for that. So that's what drew me into onehive. And then within OneHive, the gardens working group was the working group that was taking OneHive's governance structure and making that plug-and-play for anyone else in web 3 to use. And so I started contributing there as I was working on growth and marketing and operations when I first started contributing. And that was right before V1 of Gardens launched, which was summer of 2021. And I'd been contributing to the project ever since.

But about two years ago, the active contributors got together and we started mapping out what a second version of Gardens looks like. And we got some funding and once we had a vision that we liked, we started working on Gardens v2, which we launched in August of last year. And that took the original Gardens conviction voting framework and made it modular. had. So, a community can set up any number of conviction voting instances. So, I'm sure we'll get into all of the fun gardens v2 stuff now, but that was kind of the path that got me to where I am. Definitely, we would love to get into details of all these terms,

conviction, voting, covenant, and many other things of garden. And uh I think it was like great background people like you can be called as like thinker early adopter and kind of tinker as well trying to solve some small issues which are there in the ecosystem. That brings me to one of my biggest question that I asked from most of the project is what were some of the gaps or challenges in existing Dowo tooling that you think garden or garden v2 is trying to solve here? Yeah, for so one of the common themes of Dowo governance is top down governance. I guess not really a theme

but one of the structures that has become common within the space and this has a lot of limitations especially when you're talking about ecosystem funding. If you're a small organization then you're that you are a top- down govern centrally managed team and that's really good and effective for you. But when you're talking about public goods or digital collectives expanding beyond just one group of people solving one problem, then top down governance can really limit you just because the people who are making decisions about where funding is going and and how the organization works are not necessarily directly connected to the problems that

are being funded. and they're needing to read grant applications and determine if if the people who are writing that application are are the right people for the job and if they're actually identifying the the real issues that are at hand. And apart from that being not ideal and like susceptible to bad decision-m that's happening, it's also a disempowering feeling for the people who are the ones who are working on those problems because they see that power structure and they understand that they don't have the agency to get the resources to solve the problems that they need. and it it can be disheartening and make people not put in

the effort to solve the problems that they are actually capable of solving if they just had the resources. So yeah, that's why top down governance is both a problem and the flip side of that is most of the solutions for top- down governance involve some sort of making it easier for people to request funding to solve their problems. And that opens up this whole host of other issues with abuse and gaming and the wrong people getting funded and all of these issues that kind of boil down to security and a system that doesn't have high performers rise to the top and kind of select for the right solutions. So that kind of

bottom up governance issues is what we see in a lot of other DAO. Problematic DAO structures today. Token voting, governance, last minute vote swings, abusive or just generally bad investments of money going because people have voting power and they can get what they want by voting for it. So, Gardens is on that side of bottom-up governance, but doing this in a way where we can solve some of these security issues and we can try to make small pockets of governance that more easy to have the right people participate in.

Very well said. Obviously, governance may have different model depending upon the project or depending upon the need of that project. I think in general having an alternative is a good idea. So even if some people may like top down governance having a bottom up governance as an option and then looking into what are the features is nice things to have. So yeah thank you for having this project. We have been talking about uh voting right? You mentioned about conviction voting and conviction voting is kind of central pillar for this garden framework. How would you explain its value to someone who's used to snapshot style voting? Yeah, so

conviction voting is a mechanism where your support grows in conviction over time the way that it sounds. So when you support a proposal, your support is not immediately executable, if that makes sense. You're you're going to grow your conviction over time the longer that you support that. And so that this mechanism makes a few it's kind of optimal for certain types of decisions. So if you have a continuous decision, that's a good use of conviction voting. That would be something like a roadmap selection or treasury allocation. Some kind of decision that's just always relevant all the time. Conviction voting lets proposals kind of rise to the top and fall as the culture changes or as

people kind of change their minds on things like that. So continuous decision-m it's also protective against, as I mentioned, last minute boat swings. That's a really common type of abuse where people hide their vote until the deadline and then right at the last second change the outcome by putting a lot of voting weight towards one of the decisions. With conviction voting, everyone in the community is seeing where the support is at before conviction has grown on them. So if if you're seeing those results and you don't like those results, you can change your vote. Or if you think those are so problematic that they need to be disputed, then you can dispute proposals also and send them to arbitration. So it

yeah, it protects that's kind of the security aspect of conviction voting, just having that time element to protect the community just by not jumping into bad decisions because something wonky happened in the governance process. point very well taken. I understand that sometimes it happens and people try to swing votes. It's not just that they are all good people. There can be many factors working behind the scene and trying to influence the decision. So conviction voting makes sense for some of the projects where there is a long-term goal, long-term road map and it is a continuous process as you mentioned here. Right. Yeah. That's right. I understand garden is also

integrating quadratic voting and uh streaming proposals. What in your mind are the good projects where they can be best used for? Yeah, in my view like the holy grail of resource allocation in web 3 is a streaming quadratic conviction voting where you have three different elements here. You have streaming which is throttling the amount of tokens as they're going out which is nice both as a funer and as a funding recipient to be able to have that kind of dependability of the token stream coming. There's quadratic which is finding this balance between community ownership and community say and by that I mean one token one vote we know coaleses voting

power within it's usually a small group of people. It can look oligarchic. That can be another thing that reduces the agency of small newcomers or smaller people in the community. And the opposite extreme of that is fixed voting weight where everyone has the same say and that's not always a naturally. There are some people who have a lot more context and have been in the community longer and maybe they founded the community and should brand new person who just joined this community and read one paragraph on it have the same amount of voting weight as the founder? Probably not. So yeah, quadratic is really nice way of kind of limiting the coalescence of power to

those few with while still having some more richer signaling of the people who do have more context in the community. And then conviction. The final element being that timew weighted continuous decision making flow that allows a community to kind of just exist continuously with resources being able to be requested from the people who are yeah the the bottom-up governance aspect of this is kind of tricky for a lot of people to understand and I have a hard time sometimes explaining this but this ability to request resources for what you want without being a person of stature in the community, without having

a role or admin that's been determined that you have. That's kind of the power that conviction voting opens up by allowing people to do that while still having a secure system for the community to not get abused by that. So that's what conviction voting opens up. Very well. Obviously integrating more than one method to make it foolproof is a good idea to have right here. I understand it comprises different layers right uh ecosystem communities and pools. Would you maybe like to talk a little bit about what are the core layers how they are working together in practice and who do you think will use this to create community? Feel free to

share your screen if you want to share a demo how all of these things work. Yeah, I can share the homepage and kind of walk through this hierarchy. Okay, so this is the homepage for gardens v2. At the top level are these are all the communities within gardens. And what unites different communities is the governance token. And so we call this the ecosystem. Your token ecosystem is all of the communities that share the same governance token. And there's a lot of different reasons people might share the same governance token. Maybe they were a fork of a community that they weren't happy with and and so they're in some way competing with each other. Or

maybe they're different working groups of the same collective and so they're supplementary to each other. Or maybe they're just completely unrelated altogether and just exist within this large ecosystem. And that's kind of easy to imagine at like the nation state level where there's tons of different people who are all working together for the same store of value to some extent, but they're not necessarily directly related to each other. So yeah, you can be competing, you can be helping each other out, you can be just unrelated to each other, but that's a token ecosystem. And each of the communities is then created with a governance token.

And I'll go to onehive because this is the the incubating dowo of gardens and they are also maybe like the best at using the platform because they have so much familiarity with this. So you can create a community within a token ecosystem and that community can have any number of governance pools and each governance pool can be set with its own purpose, its own parameters. We in V2 for gardens have two different types of pools. funding pools which have tokens attached to them and then signaling pools which don't have any tokens attached to them. And our eventual goal is to have signaling pools that can automatically execute any number of

actions uh beyond just funding but like role based permissions, treasury allocations. That's something that we're trying out in OneHive. And yeah, we're also using it for civil resistance. So we have a citizens registry and that's kind of how members of the community can create a proposal and get access to quadratic weighted or fixed weighted governance pools. So it's really powerful having kind of that infinite composability with governance pools. When you're able to create many different governance events, you can have really narrowly focused ones that have their own voting members, their own rules for participation. So that you can have the

disputability parameters be really clear for each of those pools. But yeah, so within a pool then any member of the community can then create proposals and view existing proposals and manage their support and whatnot. Let me see if there's a the Gitcoin grants garden has some more active pools. So this is a funding pool and this is distributing funding to different proposals. So members can come in and create a proposal here. You can look into existing proposals, see the support, see the conviction. You can manage your support once you connect your wallet and if you've joined and then also you can dispute proposals and

give your reason for the dispute here. And then that that sends the proposal to arbitration where uh it can either be blocked or accepted by the arbitration set for the pool. So yeah, that's kind of the the highest level to the bottom level for I don't know if that answers the question for ecosystems versus communities versus pools, but yeah, that's kind of how that hierarchy looks. That definitely helps to understand how it looks like and how they are working in parallel. I understand there are so many considerations for like making a decision here. You talked about token based permissions and uh also treasury allocation and things like that. I'll be

curious to hear your perspective on challenges that the project team may have occurred when trying to design this kind of governance for public goods. Yeah, it's extremely difficult to come up with systems like this and yeah, there's a lot of questions of so our challenge was to enable communities to to have the tool set that they need to create a decentralized decision-m entity and that giving that tool set doesn't mean necessarily that that is how the community is going to look. a a poorly built community by a a admin that is not really considering wanting

decentralization. You you could create a garden community and you could create centralized decision-m processes within that. And so one of the challenges that came up a lot is like are here's an action that a community could take that is probably unhealthy for that community. Do we want them to be able to do that? One example of that was in picking the tribunal safe for a pool. And one of the questions is should the admin allow to set themselves as the arbitrators? And I was one of the early people saying no, I don't think that we should have a separation of power here.

The people who are ruling about whether or not proposals should be funded should not be the same as the people who created that pool in the first place. Otherwise, they're kind of holding all of the power themselves. But I was convinced after a lot of good conversations with the developers that there are communities where it's they're small and it just makes sense for the same people who are setting the parameters for those pools to also be the ones that are ruling on disputes. And there are plenty of gardens pools that have we call it the council safe, which is the moderation admin safe for the community. and they're also ruling on disputes and that hasn't been a problem for communities yet. But yeah, those types of challenges

came up a lot of like we wanted a modular framework that was as powerful as possible so that you as the creator of the community can create whatever your heart imagines. But that we also need to have security for both the community and the community admins and anyone who's who's coming in to participate in a funding pool or whatnot. So yeah, lots of very hard conversations over the last couple years. Very interesting. I understand this is relatively new concept and I am just trying to understand if we have any metrics in place like has project team thought of certain metrics that can

suggest like this is a good project and other projects in the ecosystem should adopt this kind of governance. Yeah, the metrics that we're tracking are number of community members, number of communities, number of transactions in communities, number of proposals, TVL, which can be both with the governance token stake in the community and of the tokens within funding pools in a gardens community. That might be the best metric in terms of how successful we feel like we are. If you're going to look at one number, how much money have the communities put in themselves because they think that this is the best way to allocate their funding? So, yeah, we've got all kinds of Dune dashboards where

we're tracking all this, but those are the onchain metrics that we're looking at. Cool. So, is there a Dune dashboard for this project already? Yeah, we have a few different ones, but there's one main gardens v2 dashboard that's tracking number of communities, number of members, and funding distributed and funding in funding pools. So, yeah, I'll share that with you. Oh, that would be great. We will include that in our show notes and people can also follow. So it's all being transparent and people can follow all these metrics as well to for how the project is making progress.

Very well done. I would be curious to hear what's next for Gardens. I understand it is still in beta. Are there any major milestones, upcoming partnerships or any interesting feature in pipeline that you are excited about? Yeah, so we just finished the Gitcoin GG23 round. Yeah, I think by the time you post this video, our portion of this round will be done. We have six days left in our gardens round. Ours went further than the other Gitcoin rounds did, but Gitcoin is a really good match for us with the types of communities that are participating in that, the open source software focus. And so, yeah, we're hoping to be a bigger part of GG24. There's a lot of changes coming up

to Gitcoin that are just being announced as we speak. So, we'll see what that winds up looking like. But yeah, more open source software integrations. We also working a lot with pop-up cities. Uh this is a big focus of ours because there's a really strong fit between how those communities are governed and especially there's an opportunity for pop-up cities to be able to give resources to the the people living in their communities to do things like throw a community dinner or host an event and just get the amount of money that makes it easy for them to do that while things that people want to be doing anyways. But it sometimes if $500 or $1,000 is what's going to prevent you

from doing that, then gardens is a really good way to allocate that amount of money for that. So yeah, and I think uh for a lot of our roadmap, we are to this point still fully dependent on grants and Dowo funding proposals and we have a few active proposals out and I think that would probably wind up determining our next roadmap steps. A lot of those are structured where we're proposing the milestones and if we get approved then that's our next work how it'll look. So yeah, I think stay tuned for what we get funded for. That would be interesting. I mean I have heard about this Bitcoin pizza party kind of

events and people are looking for some kind of funding for smaller events and fundings. I believe garden is a good place to fund raise or yeah have some kind of grants over there. Yeah, there's also another example is refi. That's a kind of chapter-based ecosystem and they just created a funding pool that will let people start up their own refi chapter. So if you're in a city that doesn't have a refi node yet, then you can get resource to spin up your chapter and get your first events running. A lot more coming up in public good domain. So people should stay tuned and try to learn about each and every project and try to figure out what is the best one for themselves to go with. Definitely.

Yeah. Very well. My last question for today would be for listeners who want to explore garden or support the project. What's the best way for them to get involved or start using this tool? Yeah, right now if this video goes out before the Gitcoin round ends, people can join the Gitcoin grants garden and there's a lot of different ways you can participate in that garden. There's matching funding for communities, which is the most popular. So that lets people request matching for a funding pool that they create for their own gardens community. And so how that process looks for people with projects is you're

creating a garden community and you're deciding what a good use of funding is for your community and creating a funding pool to address that within your community and then you can register that for matching in the Gitcoin round and we'll match up to I think it's about $175,000. There's also a bunch of signaling pools and some of the things that we're trying to surface with our signaling pools are things like what are the biggest pain points in the Ethereum ecosystem today. And so that pool has proposals like L2 fragmentation, approve and send transfers being multiple transactions.

And this is kind of a way for GTC holders to signal what they think the the biggest issues within the Ethereum ecosystem are. And our hope is that we can use that to make make better funding decisions, but like explicitly not having funding directly tied to that governance so that you can actually source a good answer and not try to incentivize muddy the pot basically by having people who are interacting with it for their own financial gain instead of just what are our pain points. So yeah, there's a number of different pools there. There's also a a builder fund which is funding milestones for people who are building capital allocation and capital formation. This is connected to the Alo capital

ecosystem which is a Gitcoin offshoot and so that's good for projects who want funding for their capital allocation builds that they're working on. So yeah, that's the Gitcoin grants garden. That's a good way to participate in an active community right now that's open for everyone. But if you are a community builder, then we have a notion and there's a good starting point there is the how to grow using gardens document and that kind of shows all the different it's our documentation basically but more along the lines of like how to strategically create a gardens community that's going to be effective and how to create funding pools and signaling pools. And we have a governance pool

library which is kind of this it's a library of all of the experiments in modular conviction voting. There's a couple case studies in there, but you can also just go to all of the existing pools and see what communities are using gardens for and and which ones are working. So those are good resources to go to. I think one has already piqued my interest. I would love to go and check out on this signaling pool to understand the pain point of Ethereum ecosystem. I remember there was something like carbon voting a while ago that also tried to do the similar job but um there are new methods as well. So I would be curious

to learn more about it. We'll definitely go and check it out. Thank you for sharing. Yeah, that's a good one to check out for sure. Very well. From questions point of view I think we have covered almost all the question and at this point we would like to open the floor for you for anything you would like to shill we would like to give a shout out or any message for the community. So a potential interesting integration we've been talking with flow state graven is the the uh lead at flow state and they do streaming quadratic funding. So there's an interesting potential integration there with streaming quadratic conviction voting.

Like I mentioned before, we have also been in conversation with Claros about a uh ClariS recently launched V2 which supports layer 2 networks and uh we're looking into integrating this as the tribunal system for gardens pools. We have also been talking with good dollar and we might be able to use good dollar sibil facial recognition as a voting protection system in gardens pools. And so the way that would work is people to be eligible for funding for to vote in pools on gardens would have a the good dollar. I don't know if yeah the so good dollar is UBI and their civil

verification for this is a a facial verification system so you scan your face and it recognizes that you're unique and then that makes you eligible for the UBI but that's something that we're looking at integrating to provide simple resistance for gardens pools that need that. So yeah, we're pretty much any project that that it is building cool stuff, we're trying to talk to and and find ways to find ways to work with them. We've also been talking a lot with Juice Box and I think that's a a potential really good solution for governance tokens for gardens communities. So that could be another potential integration. Sure. So multiple integration and collaborations are on

the horizon. We should be looking forward to it. Yeah, definitely. Very well. Thank you so much, Paul, for joining us today. Garden seems to be a powerful tool in shaping how we fund, govern, and grow the future of public good. Thank you again. Yeah, thanks again for having me. It's good to talk to you, buddy. Sure. Dear listeners, you can learn more about the project at app.gardens.fund and join their communities across GitHub and Discord. If you like this conversation, don't forget to hit like and share. Subscribe to Eatcat Hurders YouTube for more projects and information. Until next time, keep building the decentralized

ecosystem. Cheers.