Hey Paul,
it’s inspiring to see your activism in this community! Thanks a lot to take leadership willing to move things forward. I have some things to add and comment about this proposal:
TL;DR; let’s move forward with it, let’s just use an erc20 minted and distributed with Collabberry in order to assure a fair innitial and continued distribution based on the intersubjective value contributors are bringing to Allo.Capital. This would imply an expected timeline of 2-3 weeks (might run in parallel with your suggested 4 weeks) for mapping stakeholders, choosing an initial distribution, agreeing on a process for continues distribution according to the value brought by contributors and the design and deployment (I don’t see the need of development) of a mechanism that provides sense-making (if necessary) to the funding pool of work (still need to understand what you having in mind there) in your proposal. Requested budget TBD, but it shouldn’t be more than 1 ETH
I’ve been following Gardens and Conviction Voting (CV) since it very beginning, while I was a fan back in the days, I have to admit that one thing that I haven’t like is how token distribution has been proposed. I understand that current Gardens version suggest communities to bring their own tokens, this is good in the sense that there’s not direct influences anymore towards token distributions that has leaded communities towards some problems that I find important to speak about before deciding to move forward with your proposal.
My main reference on this is Felix Fritsch, who in his PhD Defensio - “Emergence of the Crypto Commons” has studied communities like:
- Token Engineering Commons (TEC)
- 1Hive / Gardens.fund
- Commons Stack (conceptual and practical experimentation)
bringing the following learnings:
1. Low Engagement & Fatigue in Continuous Governance
- Even though CV is designed to reduce the intensity of “snapshot voting”, communities still suffered from participation drop-offs, especially over long proposal queues and limited clarity on proposal outcomes.
- TEC and 1Hive both reported governance fatigue and a need for greater UX simplicity in interacting with CV mechanisms.
2. Proposal Flooding & Signal Dilution
- Without effective curation mechanisms, too many proposals accumulated conviction slowly, causing gridlock.
- In Gardens.fund experiments, participants found it hard to navigate through dozens of underfunded or slow-moving proposals.
3. Social Trust & Off-Chain Coordination Remain Crucial
- CV only reflects aggregated conviction; it doesn’t capture social deliberation, qualitative context, or nuance.
- Communities often relied on informal off-chain discussions (Discord, forums) to make sense of decisions, suggesting CV must be paired with deliberative structures.
4. Wealth Concentration & “Silent Influence”
- While CV softens immediate whale voting, it still allows large token holders to dominate slowly over time by locking tokens in early or long-term.
- There’s no penalty for passive staking or low-quality conviction, which can skew funding towards better-marketed proposals over high-impact ones.
5. Disconnection Between Governance and Delivery
- In TEC and Gardens-based experiments, there was often no follow-up mechanism after funding approval to track project delivery, traction, or community value.
- CV lacked retroactive accountability, leading to a sense of drift or disconnected funding outcomes.
Positive Outcomes Noted
- CV encouraged a less adversarial and more fluid funding process compared to yes/no voting.
- It provided space for smaller contributors to build influence over time, especially in more closely aligned, community-native DAOs (like early TEC).
- The model introduced valuable experimentation in real-time decision systems that move at the pace of engagement.
Implications for Allo,Capital Garden
These insights suggest that CV is best used as a signal aggregation and prioritization layer, not as a standalone governance or funding or token allocation system. Still, even after sharing these insights, I consider your proposal a “good for now, safe enough to try”, although I’d like to bring some suggestions in order to avoid the past pitfalls other communities have suffered:
- Even after sharing these insights, I consider your proposal a “good for now, safe enough to try”. Let’s just add
- I’d suggest to take a commitment towards exploring tools to function on deliberation and contextual filters (e.g., AI-assisted consensus) to include in the governance proposal. See section II. Governance Design for Allo DAO in G.S. Allo DAO Design
- Integrate retroactive accountability mechanisms for the erc20 distribution you are bringing into place. Please do read this post: Bootstrapping an Organization through p2p accounting mechanisms
- Can you please @paul ellaborate further what do you mean by “A Funding pool for work on the Allo Protocol”? Is it to launch it on a platform like platform like Juicebox? Do you see Collabberry covering the needs of what you intend by a "funding pool for work?
I’d be happy to jump on a call Paul if you want to dig deeper here and work together towards greater alignment.