User-Defined Organization. Moving beyond coin voting governance / Wlodek Gogloza

Transcript

foreign hello everyone my name is vodac vorder goguaza but that's probably is going to be rather hard for you to spell and pronounce so I'm representing Gollum foundation and today I'm going to talk about user-defined organization which is our attempt at providing alternative to coin voting governance but before I

explain to you what the UDR user Define organization yes let me start with explaining why we think that such an alternative is even necessary uh so it's widely acknowledged that service-based internet puts users in a rather precarious uh position uh one may even say that users are caught or kept between rock and a hard place by companies that dominate the current Internet landscape and it's not only that internet has become a fifthom of a few large companies that each operate their own world garden and each exploit their

users in a slightly different manner what is also problematic and what should be especially concerning to us as a community is that web free doesn't really provide users with a viable alternative either it is enough to just do scratch the surface a little bit to realize that coin voting which is the most popular governance melt within the web free space basically basically replicates the corporate economic model it just replaces stockholders with coin holders but it doesn't really try to tackle the fundamental problem of service based

internet which is the misalignment of interest between users and investors and it doesn't really matter if the investor are stockholders shareholders or coin holders because whenever there is a conflict of the infra interest between investors and users it is usually the users that pay the price so if the web free is to deliver like a viable alternative to the Google's Facebook and apples of of the award uh we need to put users in charge of platforms that they rely on and this is not an easy task because it requires us to for finding a way to tie governance

with usage which means that if the governance is to be token based which is usually the case within the web free space the token generation and token distribution needs to be based on on usage and usage alone and uh at Gallen Foundation we are developing a model that puts these ideas into practice we call this model user-defined organization or udl for short and a key concept and the basic primitive within this udl framework is a

proof of usage it's a governance token that is generated and distributed based on the usage of the platform but uh before I explain to you how this token is generated how it is assigned to users and what the users can do with it let me first emphasize two key points that are underlying our design so first we very strongly believe that there has to be some economic cost attached to the generation of this token and second the token has to be non-transferable and hence

non-speculative the first condition we believe is necessary to rise the cost of economic attacks against the Udo without satisfying this requirement gaming the system could prove to be way too easy so you can say that in a sense the robustness of the UDR relies on this this assumption the second condition is necessary to ensure that governance power will stay with users and users alone and not some outside entities who are interested in the platform from purely Financial standpoint and there are a lot of

problems that may stem from the fact that token distribution does not reflect a platform usage I will mention only two of them because I believe that these two are the most important so the first one is logarithm low government's participation and the second is the suspectability to economic attacks as for the first one the the numbers of quite recent studies that look how nadals are operating in practice and the authors of this studies conclude that people who held

governance tokens are purely speculative assets are very rarely involved in day-to-day operation of the organization they very rarely vote they are not involved in like discussions on Discord some or any other platform the organization is using and when they do actually get involved in the governance they are mostly interested or interested only in a short term gains which is not uh something that is sustainable in the in the long run for the organization the second problem the Second Challenge is that a tradable ability of governance

tokens opens up the organization for economic attacks with utilizing a large-scale market operations like the most obvious example is uh flash loan attacks and we are obviously well aware of the fact that making a token non-tradable making a governance token non-tradable doesn't mean that we are protected against all possible economic attacks it just means that quite a lot of them are much less feasible which should be seen as a step in the right right direction so by tying the governance with usage we are trying to ensure that the

user-defined organization will be controlled by people with skin in the game interest in its future and also we are trying to reduce the surface of economic attacks that can be successfully launched against against it in the end what we really believe is that people who have practical everyday experience in what works and what doesn't work in a platform or a service are in the best position to actually decide how the platform should be developed what kind of future should be added what Integrations

should be established and and so on and you know one can say that basically everyone listens to um to the users so so there's nothing new in this regard with our design and yes it is true that you cannot be successful By ignoring your users but I would like to emphasize that there is a huge difference between listening to users and giving them actual control over the platform and with the UDR and proof of usage we definitely aim for the so Udo is going to be first implemented in

uh wide land which is a product project that is being developed and financed by the government Foundation it's a complex project but from the end user stand standpoint is very basically a very powerful data management app we've connected a marketplace where users can buy cloud storage for the data data so you can imagine it as a something like Dropbox but something that is back-end agnostic and has been designed with seamless data portability in mind Wyland has a lot of other very cool very unique features I'm not going to go into them right now if you intrigue enough just go

to wildland.io and check it for for yourself basically what we're trying to achieve with wide land is increase users agency over the Digital Data and we want this user first approach to be reflected in wide lands governance and this is why we are implementing this Udo design and this project and I'm what I'm going to present to you today in the next few slides there is the initial minimal design that we as a Golem Foundation are bootstrapping please not however and I need to stress this that users will be

able to redefine this organization if they think that it's going to be necessary in other words this design that I'm presenting is not set in stone it can be changed and if user wanted you wide land users will want to change it they will have not only the right but also all the all the necessary tools to to to do it so um uh wide land will come with an attached marketplace where users will be able to buy a storage cloud storage for the data and we believe that for the vast majority of users this Marketplace will

be not only that default but also the most convenient way of attaching storage to to Wildland we will be providing users with a possibility of connecting their own wide land compatible back-end to to the app for free but this in the future is going to probably be most attractive to power users and maybe power users only because it will require some know-how and some command line tinkering we will be providing users with step-by-step guides on how they can do it but it's still it's not going to be

something like really really safe seamless if you have uh interacted with the AWS as free console you know that it's user interface is basically as as friendly as Amazon could get away with it so so for most users we believe that they will not bother though but basically buy storage on the marketplace acquire a necessary credential and set up on this back end basically with a few clicks of mouse uh so uh most users will buy storage on this Marketplace

and this is important for how we envision the proof of usage is going to be generated so as you can see on this slide each payment made on the wide land Marketplace is going to be divided into three parts the service fee the proof of usage and the build fee the service fee will obviously go to the service provider that is to the provider from whom the user has bought storage for the data and who sent the credentials to the user the proof of usage is going to be generated by

swapping a part of a payment into glm and then burning it to a remote so that it is removed from the overall Supply and this Burning mechanism is going to be implemented at one to one ratio so for every glm burned user will receive one proof of usage token in other words the more you spend on the Wildland Marketplace the more the proof of usage tokens you will receive and we are using glms which is a native token for the Golem Network because wide land is being financed by Golan Foundation but if

someone would like to adapt this model for their own project they can obviously use other assets for this purpose let me however remind you that we believe that burning itself the burning mechanism itself is a crucial element of this whole system because the basically security of it very much depends and on on this mechanism if someone could generate proof of usage out of thin air then the system would probably collapse very in a very quickly and the third part of the payment the build fee will go into the

build fund from which the future development and maybe promotion of wide land is going to be is going to be financed and initially we as a gallon foundation will probably subsidize this fund without known resources through matching funding but we really hope that uh somewhere in the future hopefully sooner than later we will reach the level the volume of transactions that will enable the build fund to become are basically self-funded that is going to be funded in full from the fraction of every payment made on

the wide land wide land Marketplace and all spending from this build fund will require authorization through polls conducted among the proof of usage token holders only people only users who will have who have the proof of usage will be able to vote in in the UDR in wide lands udl the voting mechanism has not been decided yet but we are leaning very strongly towards quadratic voting as we believe it have a lot of interesting features

that work really well with our approach they build these strengthen our approach just in case um quadratic voting is a system in which users have voting credits with which they can buy votes as a general rule one credit uh one vote costs you one credit however if you are a little passionate about the subject and would like to cast more than one vote on this particular issue then you have to pay extra and this extra court is calculated as a square of the votes casted so if you would like to

assign two votes to a certain proposal you have to pay with four credits uh three votes with nine credits forward four votes with 16 credits and so on as as it is Illustrated on on this slide here you can see user have 10 credits it can be 10 proof of usage token and the user can assign them in a different manners but he has to be able aware that there is an extra cost involved if he wants to put several votes on that same issue and the beauty of this uh design is that it enables users not only to express

their preferences but also the intensity of their preferences and this is why many people believe and this is also shown by some experiments that has been conducted recently a quadratic voting is probably the best way of gauging the true interest the true priorities that is of the of the community which is pretty cool if you really would like to involve all users in your in in the governance another cool thing about quadratic voting is that it can be seen as an anti-plutocratic measure because quadratic voting red reduces the outsize

influence of the large token holders it doesn't eliminate it but it definitely reduces it so it also like a pro-democratic measure in in that in that sense however and this is uh something that everyone has to keep in mind quadratic vaulting has at least one but very serious problem challenge vulnerability however you want to call it it's very suspectable suspectable to civil attacks so if you want to deploy a quadratic voting in the UDR or any other system we need to figure out how to defend against

sock puppetry and which which means that we need to figure out some proof of uniqueness on a solution we're not going to work on this Solution on our own we've been basically looking for what's already there we checked several already existing Solutions and right now it looks to us that bright ID makes the most sense it is relatively non-obtrusive it's easy it's relatively easy to use especially compared to a lot of other projects within this space and it's all also which is also very

important it is privacy preserving so we haven't decided like uh on this particular issue yet but right now it looks like uh bright ID makes the most uh sense here so only people who will be able to verify the uniqueness to us through a bright idea we'll be able to vote on how the funds from the build build fund will be spent okay so to sum up uh with the user defined organization we basically want to give governance over wide lands to wide land users

we developed proof of usage to make sure that only users will have power over the platform and this power will stay with them and with not some outside entity and the build fund was basically designed to ensure that users have access to a steady stream of funding that is independent from us as a investors initial investors in Wildland so if you find this idea interesting you can basically obviously talk to me and other people from our team but you can also check the wide land website

there's a paper that explains this setup in a much detail if you think that this is something that you can actually adapt to your own needs or maybe you if you think that you can improve on this design which may very well be the case go to the Golan Foundation websites and then you will be able to check our grant program uh yep that's it thank you very much if there are any questions [Applause] okay I think we have a bit of time for questions if there's anyone in the audience would like to ask a question I have a question if no one else wants

ah we've got a question here I was wondering um with the proof of usage you use as a form of um voting power do you determine the nature of the usage as in do you differentiate between potential sabotage in the Dao in that way um okay I only heard the first part of the question so I'm not sure if I'm I'm not not going to answer directly just repeat the the question um again so yeah we've noticed that when we describe how proof of usage Works within this design many people say that this is not really a proof of usage but proof of payment and in a sense that

that is true but as I I was trying to emphasize um in our setup most Wildland users will probably pay for the to the access to the back end so this distinction although like in theory makes sense in practice will be meaningless is this is this the is this the answer for a question because as I said I hired only the first part um yeah yeah my question was if you differentiate between the types of usage within the platform yeah uh so not with nowhere within this setup but it is also obviously possible to award proof of usage for other kind of activities like for example I can

imagine that we will award um proof of usage to people who contribute to wide land for example uh by um uh providing help to users on on some our channels or maybe translating the documentation into different languages but it will still require some burning mechanism which is not included in this particular design but yeah you can probably assign proof of usage tokens for different kind of activities not only for the being active on the marketplace so so to say but this the the be buying something from the marketplace is definitely like the default way of acquiring proof of

usage tokens within the wide land thank you I think there was a question as well over here thank you uh just a quick question how do you modulate the amount burned compared to the fee and and to ensure that as you said there's an Econo economical um penalty well not penalty but economical aspect to it whenever the preferred usage gets minted how do you modulate that amount uh okay so yeah uh as I shown you on the slide that the every payment is divided into three parts but the actual fraction the actual division has not been decided yet we basically need to

do some economic research economic modeling to to figure out how this division should look like uh our uh like intuition is that the service fee will be probably around 90 percent and then the 10 of the payment will be split between the proof of usage and the bill fund but you know this is uh not something that we tested it definitely requires some some economic analysis and right now um UDR is still a concept something that we we are still researching that changes possible to eat so it's at this stage it's impossible for me to say but also

again the initial division will be decided by us as a Golem Foundation but then users will be able to change it if it's necessary all day that are willing to do so okay I guess you had okay any more questions from the audience okay I have just one um you talk about user defined organization when when you're thinking about this and about a user like sometimes people do like user profiling and like defining users but then sometimes people just say I want this to work for every user how do you think about this yeah user defined for us means that the users are in complete

control over the uh organization that they are able to redefine it in however they they would like so I wouldn't say it's a synonymous to user managed organization or user control the organization by absolutely nothing to do with user profiling or something like this understand okay okay but yeah white line is for everyone like that that's definitely for sure like uh no question about that great okay if there's no more questions then thank you very much [Applause]