Nation3 governance process

This document outlines the governance process that the Nation3 citizens, the Meta Guild multisig and the proposers must follow to engage with Nation3 governance.

Kinds of proposals

Meta: Proposal that modifies the current governance process (specs/N3GOV-v1.d.ts and GOVERNANCE.md).
Proclamation: Proposal for the Nation3 DAO to adopt a statement.
- Since multiple choices would be written in English and not encoded, this is the only kind of proposal on Snapshot that can use other voting systems other than Single Choice.
Expense: Proposal to transfer an ERC20 token outside of the Nation3 DAO's treasury, with the expectation that it flows outside of its control.
Parameter change: Proposal to perform a parameter change in one of the contracts controlled by the Nation3 DAO.
Treasury management proposal: Proposal to perform an on-chain treasury management operation.
Custodial treasury management proposal: Proposal to perform a treasury management operation, with the Nation3 DAO keeping the legitimate ownership over the assets but holding them through a third-party entity.

Stages of a proposal

flowchart LR
  REVIEW[Community review] --> FINAL[Final proposal]
  FINAL --> OFFVOTE[Off-chain vote]
  OFFVOTE --> ONVOTE[On-chain enactment]

Community review: The community provides feedback on a published proposal for the proposer to consider. After the minimum duration required for this stage, the proposer can freeze their proposal, advancing it to the next stage. After freeze, any further modifications to the proposal require restarting the process.
- Duration: >48h.
- Platform: Forum.
Off-chain vote: Citizens can vote. The Meta Guild is responsible for creating the proposal on Snapshot.
- Duration: 48h.
- Platform: Snapshot.
- Census: All Nation3 citizens.
- Voting weight: Token-weighted by $veNATION balance.
- Voting system:
  - Proclamation proposals: Single Choice, Ranked Choice or Weighted as chosen by the proposer.
  - All other kinds of proposals: Single Choice.
- Voting threshold: Simple majority.
On-chain enactment: $veNATION holders can ratify the proposal. The Meta Guild is responsible for creating the proposal on Aragon.
- Duration: 48h.
- Platform: Aragon.
- Census: All $veNATION holders.
- Voting weight: Token-weighted by $veNATION balance.
- Voting system: Binary (approve/reject).
- Voting threshold: Simple majority.

Census and voting weights are determined at the time of vote creation, both for the Nation3 space on Snapshot and the Nation3 DAO on Aragon. The Nation3 DAO, Nation3 passports and $veNATION are currently only on Ethereum.

gantt
dateFormat YYYY-MM-DD
axisFormat %d
title Lifecycle of a proposal

Community review: 1, 0000-01-01, 2d
Off-chain vote: 2, after 1, 2d
On-chain enactment: 3, after 2, 2d

Submitting a proposal

Once you are ready to submit a formal proposal, go to the Proposal Generator to generate an encoded version. Proposals need to adhere to the governance spec.
Open a pull request in the gov-proposals repo adding the proposal as N3GOV-X.json. Link the pull request at the end of your forum post.
Modify the proposal based on feedback, both in the forum and in the pull request.
Once the feedback period ends, you can tag it as frozen on GitHub.
A bot will automatically merge and assing it an ID after checking:
- All data types match the spec.
- The forum post is at least 48h old and contains the encoded proposal.
- In case of bot malfunctioning, or the bot not being implemented, at least 2 reviews by Meta Guild members are needed for a proposal to be merged.
The Meta Guild multisig creates the vote on Snapshot. The vote must start with N3GOV-ID: (where ID is the proposal's ID) followed by the title of the proposal's discussion.
If the Snapshot vote passed, the Meta Guild multisig creates the vote on Aragon.

Proposals with critical impact

The Nation3 DAO has an Agent app instance (called Critical Agent) governed by a Voting app with the following voting parameters:

Duration: 168h (one full week).
Platform: Aragon.
Census: All $veNATION holders.
Voting weight: Token-weighted by $veNATION balance.
Voting system: Binary (yes/no).
Voting threshold: >66% (supermajority) approval threshold with >20% participation rate.

Any proposal which would trigger a transaction from the Critical Agent app on the Nation3 DAO follows the same governance process as standard proposals, but instead of 48h for each step in the process, it's 168h (a full week).

Who can create votes

The Meta Guild multisig has permission to create votes, both in the Nation3 space on Snapshot and the Nation3 DAO on Aragon.

The Nation3 DAO can request changes in the signers and signing threshold of the Meta Guild multisig by passing a Proclamation proposal. The Nation3 DAO can replace the Meta Guild multisig from creating votes on Aragon by passing a Parameter Change proposal revoking the multisig's permission to create votes.

As a backup mechanism in case of multisig malfunction, the Nation3 Proposals Backup DAO can create votes on Aragon. The Voting app installed on such DAO is configured with the exact same parameters as the Critical Agent app, with the exception of any $veNATION holder being able to create votes on it.

thelastjosh / gov