Election conversations: what can we learn from other foundations?

Foundation Elections
#1

Hi all,

Something I am pushing for is to put together a task force to produce an analysis on governance models of foundations (how they operate) to incorporate best practices and strategies.

There is no better way to start this by going straight to the community to share ideas and observations.

There isn’t much on the Bitcoin and Ethereum Foundation website so am looking into seeing what are a few other foundations with a blockchain protocol and crypto we can look into. Of course, there are arguments whether they are actual blockchains or crypto! :wink:

Stellar Foundation

Foundation Website: https://www.stellar.org/
Official Website: https://www-stg.stellar.org/about/governance/

Mission: Stellar.org connects people to low-cost financial services to fight poverty and develop individual potential.

Analysis: Stellar displays key policy documents and bylaws in the website. It looks like they display a good level of transparency with regular and robust monthly’round ups’. The Foundation recently announced they will be giving away $125 million worth of XLM as an airdrop.

Litecoin Foundation

Foundation Website: https://litecoin.org/
Official Website: https://litecoin-foundation.org/about-us/

Mission: The Litecoin Foundation is a non-profit organization registered in Singapore with the mission to advance Litecoin for the good of society by developing and promoting state-of-the-art blockchain technologies.

Analysis: they have aboard, a few directors and have also listed volunteers. It looks like a very lean foundation based on what the website shows. They also display their unaudited financial statements on a monthly basis. As Litecoin is pushing to be the cryptocurrency of choice for payments, they have displayed a list of consumers, merchants and payment processors on their website.

Dash Foundation

Foundation Website: https://www.dashfoundation.io (last updated in 2016)
Official website: https://www.dash.org/

Mission: support development, empower the community, educate and promote and represent Dash.

Analysis: It has published bylaws, meeting minutes and provides updates, but the latest update looks like in 2016. Things are more updated in its main website with their governance model shared here. They have a robust Dash Proposal platform as well.

All the above is a very preliminary view on an analysis of a few foundations but am sure when we develop a team to find the best models to operate, we can take the best practices to develop as solid foundation for NEM. Let us go strong on governance!

Opening this conversation to research on other foundations or best practices that you would like to encourage for NEM.io Foundation.

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#2

DASH was criticized as use too much money for marketing.

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#3

They are spending a BOMB here in Bangkok to sponsor parties and get small merchants to accept DASH. They’ve hired an “ambassador team”, as well and spend…A LOT. A friend of mine is their ambassador here. In Venezuela, they bought tens of thousands of mobile phones with the DASH wallet pre loaded for people to use. Not saying that’s a good or bad move, but I’m not comfortable with a burn rate like that.
L

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#4

Conflict of interest policy in Stellar

Conflict of interest in Litecoin
https://litecoin-foundation.org/conflict-of-interest-policy/

Harassment policy in Stellar

WHISTLEBLOWER POLICY in Stellar

Financial statments in Litecoin
https://litecoin-foundation.org/2018/07/unaudited-financial-statements-2018-05/

Examples of doings things much better than NF in terms of transparency and probably governance.
Whoever get elected has to change a lot of things inside NF. Question to @Xpedite (Actual Interim President and to @schia and @n3lz0n actual council members and candidates for Presidency and VP). Any reasons for this lack of transparency and governance last 2 years inside the NF? And now including @Inside_NEM candidate for presidency. What’s your specific plans for this?

Thanks

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#5

Top of the page - invitation to devcon, dev ethereum conference.

Next paragraph: Build unstoppable applications
Next Paragraph: Learn Solidity
Next Paragraph: Kickstart a project with a trustless crowdsale
Next Paragraph: Create a democratic autonomous organization
Next Paragraph: Build a new kind of decentralized application
Next Paragraph: Get the command line tools

and so on… You got the vibe?

I would love NEM project to be focused so much on people wanting to build on it the same as ethereum Foundation. They have grants for working on EIPs and ERCs, on wallets, on eduucting. In NEM after Jeff left there was no develpment on offcial mobile wallets.
https://github.com/NemProject was totally neglected and in https://github.com/nemtech there were only around 5 core people active with meaningful contributions.

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#6

Yes! You are spot on with this and I’ll discuss this in more detaill soon. Thanks for pushing this out to candidates for feedback.

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#7

Nice one Jason. Definitely lots to learn from other foundations. Fair play for bringing this up!

#8

So, 10,000 phones at maybe $100 a piece… that’s $1,000,000… that’s 10,000,000 xem. That’s also how much it costs to keep the supernode rewards program going for 71 days…

I think giving away 10,000 mobile phones would provide a better ROI on the burn NEM already has.

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#9

I think we should also consider traditional political structures. For example:

  1. Committee and Executive votes should not happen at the same time or they will be shaped by the same issues and result in unbalanced direction.
  2. There are systems such as one region one vote, or having representatives appointed according to population to represent at the council that can give fairer/more balanced representation.
  3. The two party system should be avoided (though it seems to have already begun to form), it makes people lazy decision makers.

This is actually a political science issue and we are not equipped to solve it ourselves. Hiring polisci consultants is something that will not be given as much consideration by whoever is voted in as it should. It would require strong leadership that is willing to stand up against the community when many of them inevitably reject whatever is proposed. Still this is IMV essential for the long term stability of NEM if it chooses to retain community voting as one of it’s core tenets.

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#10

In my eyes, especially in the case of Dash, not wrong. Marketing for a new payment option is not outrageous. The ultimate goal is to establish a broad mass for its currency. Dash is trying to be nothing more than simple digital money. In addition, not always the best product prevails, from time to time it is the best known.

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#11

Very interesting, exploring a political structure. Will have to take this into consideration. We just need to make sure we don’t create a political organisation… can take it as a best practice.

#12

Certain Dash expenditure was extremely well directed. It cost them a $50,000 payout/bribe to get listed on Kraken which must’ve paid back countless times over by now. NEM would be a lot more entrenched in the market if we’d done the same.

The Cardano foundation is undergoing growing pains/bunfights. Plenty to be learnt there - https://iohk.io/blog/an-open-letter-to-the-cardano-community-from-iohk-and-emurgo/

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#13

Dash and litecoin are going much better direction than NEM. We are like a ship with no compass. We don’t know where to go. We only have very few active members. We pay low to our regional teams but we still keep them in the loop with no specific ROI. Don’t want to blame anyone here but we can do better than this. Let’s focus on building a new tomorrow. We

#14

Jason, i would be happy to join the working group with you. I can put in a couple of hours a week. I think that looking at other foundations is interesting, but i think it must first be acknowledged that decentralization is a tool, not a goal. what is the specific role of decentralization in the governance of the foundation? is it a decision maker, a watchman, a crowdsourcing tool, a defense against corruption? or is it the other way around, that the foundation is only the hands and brains to do the communities bidding?

once it is established the scope of the foundation and purpose of community in this system, then we can start looking to other foundations for inspiration on how to implement. of course there may be a back and forth between these two steps.

some interesting things can be done with blockchain governance if there is funding for devs to build the architecture necessary. if there isn’t, then we need to just be realistic also. for example, we could have voting season once every six months where candidates anonymously submit proposals for funding in whichever direction they want to develop. Funding for conferences, devs, marketing, building NEM centers, funding projects, whatever. the community would be given a budget and allowed to “go shopping” for each of these proposals. the community could also submit it’s own suggestions and members of management could chose to champion them (anonymously) if they believe in them. such a system would avoid many of the issues the community has had with the foundation. of course this idea would need tweaking to allow for long-term direction to be maintained, Just an idea.

#15

Agree on this. We cannot come to a conclusion but at least we are making progress in this conversation. Will be good to have a team onboard like yourself who will look into this for the betterment of NEM.

Yes this could come in a proposal or bounty format, whichever works as long as it meets the intended goal. Using POI + member voting as the ideal option of course.

This is where we change it with the right policies, incentives, performance management tools to make this work. I alone can’t do it and that is where everyone’s support comes in.

I’ve been following this as well and there is indeed much we can learn… the fact that we are having a NEM election is the best step forward already. Interesting how they have different organisations working on various areas. Not different from us, to an extent.

Thanks, in fact, would really like more candidates to bring up more areas like these. Best way to discuss ideas/strategies and bring the best (and let us hope not the worst) out of people.

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#16

Hi @tresto @LauraBKK ! Dash is also considered as a model for community fund management. I think that @jason.lee’s point is not about looking at the finality but rather at the mechanisms

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#17

really like Litecoin’s Financial Report.

VeChain also has quarterlies they release on finances.
Ex. https://medium.com/@vechainofficial/vechain-financial-executive-report-vol-1-46d307dc6f4

That being said, which account(s) are under the Foundation’s control?
http://explorer.nemchina.com/#/accountlist

And who has multi-sig control/access over these accounts?

#18

This is quite a decent report, good info and great visuals, def can take it as a best practice to consider, thanks @greentea

Will have to find out, not something I would know now.

#19

Please, the community as a whole I’m sure is eager to know this…

Also, how will the multi-sig change with the new Foundation election?

#20

I don’t think that it’s good idea to reveal publicly names of Foundation Fund key holders. It can put them in danger. This should be well thought out.

But I agree about financial transparency.

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