FIP-96: Tribal Council Election

Proposals
1

Authors:

meertitan, DioDionysos

Summary:

Conduct an approval Snapshot vote to elect 9 Tribal Council members through the proposed process.

Motivation:

With the FIP-82 Snapshot already having passed the vote [2], the process can now move forward to the next step, which is the election of the 9 Tribal Council members.

This election will be managed by the community members and Discord Admins DioDionysos and meertitan, to ensure a neutral election process. The Tribe is moving towards true decentralization, by having the DAO elect community members for this powerful position.

Optimistic Approval will be deprecated and replaced with the Tribal Council and Snapshot requirements will be removed in favor of making it easier for the community to veto. The Tribal Council will be initially a 5 of 9 multisig, and membership should come from the community, Fei core team, and Rari infrastructure with no group representing enough to reach quorum.

The Tribal Council timelock will be 4 days and veto-able by the Tribe DAO, Guardian, and Nope DAO. [1]

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Specification:

The following process is being suggested to elect the Tribal Council members:

  1. Open nominations for Tribal Council on the 1st of April.
  2. meertitan and DioDionysos will open and maintain a dedicated Discord channel to discuss questions and comments. Information regarding the roles of Tribal Council, as per FIP-82, and about this proposal will be pinned.
  3. Nominations will be open for 1 week and closed on the 8th of April at 11:59 PM PST. Nominees will be able to post their nomination with up to 200 words max. in the Tribe forum.
  4. After meertitan and DioDionysos collect every nomination, an approval Snapshot vote will be conducted with the 9 highest voted candidates being elected. The Snapshot will start on the 11th of April and end on the 18th of April at 11:59 PM PST.
  5. A Q&A event will be held in a separate Discord channel, where community members will have the chance to ask candidates questions for a 24 hour timespan.

As a member of the Tribal Council, community members will carry on the tasks of Optimistic Approval. Furthermore, they will have the unique power to create Optimistic Pods.

To quote Joey, “The Tribal Council will maintain optimistic control over lower clearance roles, with the DAO having ultimate say over where power lies.”[1]

Bad actors within the Tribal Council can be removed by the DAO at any time with a Tribe DAO snapshot vote, which will remove the council member after passing the timelock.

Sources:

[1] Tribal Council - FIP-82: Governance Enhancements

[2] FIP-82: Governance Enhancements - Snapshot

7 Likes
2

what about originally proposed quotas?

The Tribal Council will be initially a 5 of 9 multisig, and membership should come from the community, Fei core, and Rari infrastructure with no group representing enough to reach quorum

upd: yeah, just noticed, it’s there

3

@Meertitan and @DioDionysos thank you for setting up the framework for this.

For transparency, please confirm whether:

  1. All current OA members will be disbanded and have to be re-elected (assuming they all want to continue);
  2. While both of you are stewards/facilitators of the election process, will you be expected to run for seats in the new Tribal Council?
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  1. Yes, that will be the case. Everybody that wants to be re-elected will need to re-apply.
  2. Yes. We will also have to apply in order to be included in the Snapshot. It is important to stress that every applicant will be included in the Snapshot vote and we would order the applicants alphabetically.
1 Like
5

Still, there is some ambiguity regarding TC composition quotas. The original proposal reads:

The Tribal Council will be initially a 5 of 9 multisig, and membership should come from the community, Fei core, and Rari infrastructure with no group representing enough to reach quorum

First, what is TC quorum and how is it different from the deciding majority? Apparently these are the same.

Then second, from the text you might figure that there are 3 chairs reserved for the community, Fei core & Rari infra each. Yet

an approval Snapshot vote will be conducted with the 9 highest voted candidates being elected

What if all 9 are from the community? How will the above mentioned quotas be implemented? Or there is some misformulation?

2 Likes
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  1. The quorum and majority is defined as 5.
  1. The text is saying that no group should be large enough to reach the quorum, so 5.
  1. I think the community is broader defined and does not really act as a group like Fei Labs. The same should be true for Rari Capital, as their core team is very broadly defined. Joey mentioned that the Fei core team will limit their applications during the TribalGathering yesterday, so it would be an open race for the other DAO members.

In my opinion, it is in the hands of the DAO, so I am curious to hear what other DAO members think about this aspect of the vote.

1 Like
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To clarify, this proposal has no quotas on seats for certain community groups. We still encourage Fei Labs and Rari Capital to limit their number of nominees in order to ensure that no group is large enough to reach the quorum in the Tribal Council.

2 Likes
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Is the Tribal Council expected to be able to read smart contracts, construct a Timelock proposal, and decode/perform due diligence on the proposals crafted by the dev teams ?

I think yes, because they have the 2nd highest responsibility in the system (after full DAO quorum), as to what gets queued on the privileged timelocks. If the Tribal Council does not perform these verifications, who’s in charge of checking everything that the council/pods queue, and spearhead Nope DAO proposals to cancel the Council/Pod’s action ?

A vote will ultimately decide this, but I don’t understand why this would happen. In my opinion, the Tribal Council members should be skilled DAO operators that understand how the various contracts work and what each parameters are for, what are the implications of changing a parameter, of introducing a new contract, and they should be accountable for it. I liked the mechanisms introduced by the OA multisig/timelock, but not how it operated. Sometimes, the devs queued black box transactions on it & nobody was able to check on them. This is higher stakes, so I think the requirements should also be higher. Between Fei Labs, Rari Infra Team, Volt, Midas, La Tribu, and other teams later possibly, the DAO has a lot of dev teams to pick from, these people know very well the various parts of the Tribe DAO and how to configure their smart-contracts, and I think the council composition should lean heavily towards 100% devs, or at least technically savvy people.

4 Likes
9

Agreed in general. Yet, objectively, most of txns were submitted without contract source code, as in your today’s ANGLE txns. Whenever there’s a link to GitHub and I am around, I check it. Plus there are operational issues as in the case with payments for code audit: OA should be able to see the report to authorise payment, yet some auditors want to remain anon → the report is private. As in the case with Spearbit, their payment is stuck as of now.

1 Like
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The nomination thread is up:

11

The TribalCouncil and Governance upgrade contracts are deployed now! However, there will be two more DAO votes.

  1. A first DAO vote will go live today to install the 9 elected members and authorise the various governance upgrade smart contracts with the relevant powers.
    For more information:
    https://github.com/fei-protocol/fei-protocol-core/blob/develop/proposals/description/fip_82.ts

  2. A second DAO vote to be staggered by a few days to reduce the risk with the transaction including more than 50 function calls. This vote will transfer a large swathe of protocol access controls to the Tribal Council so it and the pods can operate the protocol on an operational day to day basis.
    For more information:
    FIP-82b: Configure roles so TribalCouncil can operate by thomas-waite · Pull Request #678 · fei-protocol/fei-protocol-core · GitHub

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Speaking of the votes, the first one just went live!

Make sure to vote and be part of Tribe DAO history. :open_book: