What is Hybrid Voting Power?
Hybrid voting power is an idea that combines voting power of delegate points and respect points. This page is an early work in progress and may be updated soon.
Notes from Eden Fractal Brainstorming Sessions - add to the page about vlalendas and maybe cagendas and hybrid voting
Delegate Points
What do you think about splitting voting power between delegate points and respect points?
I think this feature may help make Eden Fractal more democratic and capable in the long term. also include the links I shared about democracy from Gavriel Shaw and Daniel Larimer in Eden Fractal Meeting 25. There are also tradeoffs of leaning more heavily into Eden+Fractal delegation that are worthy to consider carefully. I think it might be best to split voting power between respect and delegates, but am not sure…
What do you think about splitting voting power between delegate points and respect points?
50/50
Eden + Fractal
50% Eden and 50% Fractal
50% of voting power from eden elections and 50% of voting power from fractally consensus
I think it may be best to do this for Vlalendas. It also could be best for voting on proposals instead all voting power from delegation. I’m not sure….
Potential Downsides to leaning too much on Eden+Fractal delegates
- If we vote on proposals with only delegate points and not respect points, then what use do respect points have?
- Currently the only utility of respect points is that you can use them to signal your opinion on Consortium.
- If we make it so that people can vote with delegation points, then would they still be able to vote with respect points to signal their opinions?
- How would the UI look?
- I think it is better for the game if respect points have some purpose.
- Imagine that you are a new game player, a new participant in Eden Fractal meetings. Imagine that you have no preconception about fractally and are learning everything for the first time. Someone tells you that you can earn more respect points helping the community and getting ranked at higher levels by fellow community members. Cool. You ask, ‘what do respect points do?’ Answer: nothing. It’s just respect points and maybe they’ll have some purpose later. Idk, maybe that’s the best answer for now. But it seems like it might be better for the game and new players if there is some purpose for respect points now….
- So far we often spend the majority of meeting time on the fractally process ranking levels of contributions and a minority of time of choosing delegates.
- So far we’ve had seven meetings with the Eden+Fractal process. In several of my rooms, the delegation process was done in less than five minutes.
- There is also This is also informed by prior history of course, it’s not making an entirely new decision in five minutes… our choices for delegates are informed by our history with each person. Of course, seeing other’s contributions during the time that we are choosing how to allocate respect is very helpful for determining who should be a delegate. So it’s not like we’re only spending 5 minutes on choosing a delegate- there’s lots of time prior to this delegate selection that indirectly helps us choose a delegate. But it’s generally true that we’re spending more time and focus allocating respect than choosing delegates. And we are only directly allocating about 5 minutes for delegate selection in several situations so far.
- Therefore they may be an imbalance if delegate points have much more power than respect points. I’m not sure if it makes sense if we are investing most of our time in allocating respect points that have no power, and investing less time in in allocating delegate points that have all the power.
- Should we make an effort to invest more time in meetings on delegate selection?
- Would the system be better balanced if respect points have some power?
- Should we do both of these, one of these, or neither?
- Currently the Eden+Fractal process only gives power to earn or distribute delegation power to people who participate in Eden meetings over the past four weeks, and anyone who hasn’t participated in the past month has no formal power in the system.
- (Find links) CAC made a point about how people who are not at the meetings don’t have any power in decision making. Tadas shared this during meeting 25 and I responded by saying that people who participate in the meeting should have the voting power (and that’s how it currently is with Eden+Fractal), though I’m not sure if I was right. I generally agree with my prior point that people who participate in meetings should have more voting power, but I also appreciate CAC and Tadas’ points about this.
- Eden+Fractal delegates (or delegate points) are entirely earned and distributed during weekly meetings over the past month. If you can’t participate in meetings for the past month, then you have no power to either earn or help distribute delegate points. This is probably not ideal. Voting with respect points provides some measurement of consensus for the past six months, for whoever has been able to participate.
- There are people who are doing great work that has been respected over the community for the first five months and have valuable opinions, but have not been able to participate lately. The community has already given them respect for their contributions, which is not as focused on decision making as delegate selection but does generally correlate with good judgement in decision making. It seems helpful if they have some power to get a better measurement with the wisdom of the crowds.
- There is a possibility of growing too fast with Eden+Fractal and diluting quality of delegates. I agree with Tadas’ points about this that we have weeks where current delegates can adapt if they see a big influx of people. I also appreciate that there is a high threshold to pass proposal in the current system (3/4 councils) and it’s possible for people to vote in delegates that will vote well while proposals are in a state of flux (not yet being approved by the council)
- In general I don’t think this is a big risk, it’s not a risk right now, and the eden+fractal system is quite resilient and adaptable. But I don’t know if there will be issues in the coming months as it grows more, difficult to forecast.
- It seems like there could be a lot of pressure in those couple weeks as we’re dealing with an influx of new people and potential of governance attack. If we have a huge influx of people, then the delegates only have a couple weeks to pass a proposal before the new people can essentially take over the council. So the existing council has power to make decisions to adapt before that happens, but there could be a lot of pressure to decide and agree to a rule change in that week or two while it still has power in the council
- Providing some of the voting power to respect points could provide a safeguard to prevent change that is too rapid. It provides some power to people who have been there for a long time. It could be seen like riding with training wheels while we learn to ride with the more fully democratic process in the long-term. Or it could be best in the long-term, not sure. Perhaps there could be some melding with the teams system in the fractally whitepaper as well.
- Most organizations have a much slower rate of change in leadership. The faster rate of change has many benefits, but also could be hazardous with unexpected problems. We are trodding a new path. Most organizations allocate voting power via shares. The founding team allocates a significant portion of the shares for themselves. Other voting power is allocated to investors, which can change quickly but often stays the same for a while. These centralizing forces provide stability for the organization because it’s generally the same people who make decisions for a long time. Generally there are not many changes in power of who directs the organizations in traditional organizations.
- There are of course many issues with this and organizations need to become more adaptable and able to change faster. The innovations that we’re pioneering with Eden+Fractal can be profoundly helpful solutions to help organizations become more adaptable. However, we should be careful to avoid going too far and optimizing so much for adaptability that we lose our stability.
- The fractally whitepaper also designed a system that would be slower to change because the top 12 teams who have earned the most respect will have power to make group decisions. This is also much more stable and less change than Eden+Fractal
- Generally speaking, giving more voting power to people who have earned respect in the past by helping the community is a way to provide a stabilizing function for the community. Allocating power to people who have earned respect makes the system more resistant to change of leadership and policy.
- There is a right balance, and that balance can change over time with Eden Fractal. At this point I think it’s best for people to have some signaling power with respect earned. So I think that Vlalendas should either have
- What if delegates don’t attend?
- Review my original notes about Eden+Fractal. I had some potential downsides there as well. I love the process, but want to make sure we don’t lean too heavily on it too fast. I think I had this saved in several different notes. Find these
What is best in the long-term?
I’m not sure….
What is best now?
1) We use a hybrid approach for Vlalendas where voting power is equally distributed between respect points and delegate points. For voting on proposals, we continue to use the current Eden+Fractal system of 1 delegate, 1 vote.
This enables us to experiment with two different methods. It makes Vlalendas more democratic than just using respect points, and it provides some solutions to the concerns above about being too reliant on delegation.
Then we can play it by ear. If we want to go full democracy, then we can make Vlalendas work entirely with delegate points and not respect points. If we want to provide more power to people who have been helping the community for a long time, then we could provide some voting power in voting on proposals. This could be 50/50 like Vlalendas, or we could decide different ratios. Like 60/40, 80/20, etc
Formula and experience in Consortium:
Each person just votes with 100 votes. They don’t need to consider how many respect points or delegate points they have during the voting process. Everyone simply gets one hundred votes.
Below the 100 votes in the UI, there is a text element that shows ‘vote multiplier.’ Maybe it shows like 17.6x or 3.2x, etc.
There is a little question mark in a circle next to this number. You can hover over it or tap it to see more details. When you do this it shows the formula for how the multiplier is determined. Maybe it also links to a blog post with more details and description of the engine that determines voting power.
The formula could be something like this
(your delegate points / all delegate points) = 50% of your voting power
(Your respect points / all respect points) = 50% of your voting power
Voting multiplier = 5 * (your delegate points / all delegate points) + 5 * (Your respect points / all respect points)
This would mean that 10x is theoretically the highest multiplier, but practically it is impossible to have 10x because this would be split amongst everyone. It would also be practically impossible for voting power of 1. But then again this system would arbitrarily introduce potentially unwanted decisions. Ie if you set it to 5 like above then this naturally makes a choice that people who do more should have no more than like 3x vote? Ie if you choose 50 instead of 5, then that changes the balance of power?
2) Another option may be to simply enable the feature for splitting votes across topics in Vlalendas. That might be the simplest solution that effectively balances the system well enough. Then 50% of voting power is respect points in that the selection of topics is decided entirely by respect points, and 50% of voting power is delegate in that delegates in that the adjucation of topics is decided entirely by delegates.
Hmmm… what is best?
I think it’s best to use .5 instead of 5. And call it vote weight rather than multiplier.
Vote weight = .5 * (your delegate points / all delegate points) + .5 * (Your respect points / all respect points)
Using proportions like this fixes prior issue with arbitrary ness. And it’s simple.
Perhaps
We could potentially use the branding of Votes proposal? Votes v2?
Earlier Notes
What counts as vote?
Here are some thoughts I wrote before releasing Vlalendas. You can see more context about this in this draft article about Cagendas Game Modes.
So for one thing it brings up the question of how do we count the votes or what counts as a vote. I think using Consortium as best as for how to count the votes and as for what counts for the votes… Currently the only thing that works with consortium is total respect points. This is not a great metric and someways because it doesn’t really reflect current contributions that much but it does give a pretty good approximation so it’s not a bad metric and it’s a pretty good metric for right now but it does have some flaws. People who have joined more recently like Eric it makes sense for them to have more say because they are more active and Erika also really smart and thoughtful
So currently going that works with Consortium is total respect points. We could also use Google docs or something like that, but then that brings up additional challenges and is not on chain. So that could be worth exploring but I think it’s best to build the features for Consortium for a better measurements sooner rather than later.
The other option for what counts as a vote is the Eden plus fractal delegates. Like Jorge suggested, each delegate could have 100 votes. I could ask Brad if he can build this feature. I think we would want this feature fairly soon either way and this would probably be the fairest way and the most democratic way to pick agenda items. There are Still some deficiencies here and it’s not a perfect system but I think it would be quite good. So perhaps I should propose this for this week and maybe Vlad could build that pretty quickly. The thing that it would need it’s just a way to have all of the delegates in a table and some sort of system where they each get 100 votes for the four weeks that they are elected. So that would take some development work but maybe if I could do it within the next week or two and then I think that would provide quite an organ system that would work quite well.
And of course this would also provide a valuable signal as well. In either case I think it would provide a good option to allow people to vote with both Respect Points and Delegate points. I’m not sure about this but I think it would be helpful for signaling purposes and just measure in consensus. Also eventually it could be helpful to use respect points over in just the past six weeks or 12 weeks, so I should also ask Brad about this if that is a feature that can be built with Consortium fairly easily
