Foundation Mission Request: Measuring the Concentration of Power in the Collective #183

opjulian · 2024-05-02T21:03:46Z

Foundation Mission Request - Measuring the Concentration of Power in the Collective

To take on this project, submit a proposal to this thread by June 3. Read more about Missions here.

Foundation Mission Request Summary: Develop a metric for concentration of power in the Optimism Collective
S5 Intent: Governance Accessibility
Proposal Tier: Ember
Baseline grant amount: 9,000 OP
Should this Foundation Mission Request be fulfilled by one or multiple Alliances: Multiple
Optimism Foundation point-of-contact: @elizarileyoak until Jun 10, @C-Emily-Furlong after Jun 10
Submit by: June 3
Selection by: July 3

How will this Foundation Mission Request help accomplish the above Intent?:

In order to reach our goal of governance accessibility, we need to understand how to reduce the concentration of power in the Collective. To recap, we refer to governance accessibility as follows:

“Accessibility” includes enabling a diversity of perspectives to participate in governance, facilitating better knowledge sharing to develop more informed voters, and lowering barriers to participation for more culturally diverse involvement in the governance process. Increasing the votable supply and reducing the concentration of voting power are important byproducts of improved accessibility.”

To understand how to reduce the concentration of power in the Collective, we need clear metrics that we can observe. The objective of this Mission Request is to have one or more measures of the concentration of power in the Collective. These measures will enable us to document the impact of various governance initiatives on concentration of power, including initiatives under the ‘Improving Governance Accessibility’ Intent.

What is required to execute this Foundation Mission Request?

Various approaches have already been proposed to measure the concentration of power or level of centralization of a decentralized governance system. Common approaches include the Nakamoto Coefficient, Voting Bloc Entropy, Minimum Quorum, or Shannon Entropy. We aim to build on these prior approaches to define a metric tailored to the specific design of the Optimism Collective.

In the Collective, there there are multiple parameters for consideration beyond token holdings, voting behavior, or correlation of votes, for instance taking into account that a voter might hold power in multiple governing bodies and councils across the Collective. There are also different voting mechanisms employed across the Collective, for example one-token-one-vote in the Token House but a version of one-person-one vote in the Citizens House.

The desired outcome of this mission is:

A metric that captures the concentration of power in the Collective and allows Collective participants to continually track performance on this metric (i.e. is accessible in a public location like a Dune dashboard)
This metric could take into consideration:
- Voting power distribution in the Token House + Citizen’s House (including the fact that some individuals are active in both Houses)
- Positions of influence across Councils (Grants Council, Developer Advisory Board, Security Council, Code of Conduct Council, Anticapture Commission)
- The social graph of voters (e.g., via Farcaster)
- How voting power distributions may be obfuscated via voting blocks, spreading voting power over multiple wallets, informal coalitions, etc.
A metric that captures the contribution of the Token House to the overall concentration of power.
A metric that captures the contribution of the Citizen’s House to the overall concentration of power.

The code running these metrics should be open sourced so teams can fork and measure the impact of their own initiatives on this important outcome.

What milestones will help the Collective track progress towards completion of this Foundation Mission Request?

1. Research and planning
a. At the end of this milestone share your proposed approach with the Mission Request authors for feedback, listing explicit assumptions that your approach relies on and noting how this improves upon prior approaches for measuring centralization.
b. The approach should include a suggestion for how to measure the performance of the metric.

2. Prototype development and testing
a. Applicants will test the performance of the metric with real and dummy data, that can be provided by the Foundation team.
b. At the end of this milestone share your prototype with the Mission Request authors for feedback

3. Production development
a. At the end of this milestone the metric(s) should be trackable and accessible to the public

How should badgeholders measure impact upon completion of this Foundation Mission Request?

If this Mission Request is successful, Collective stakeholders will be able to track the concentration of power in the Collective and measure the impact of initiatives against this important measure.
The quality of the metric itself should be measured by its performance on existing and dummy data. Changes to the real and dummy data should result in the expected effects on the metrics.
If the metric is implemented by the Collective, grantees are encouraged to apply for additional rewards in the August 2024 governance-themed Retro Funding Round 6.

Application instructions

To apply for this Foundation Mission Request, please complete the form in the expandable section below and leave your response as a comment on this issue thread. Submissions will be open until June 3, at which time the Foundation will review all submissions and select at least one individual/team to complete the work defined here.

Submission form

Copy the entire application below and leave a comment on this issue with your answers completed. A representative from the Optimism Foundation may reach out using the contact info provided to request more information as necessary.

Foundation Mission (RFP) Application

Please verify that you meet the qualifications for submitting at the above Tier

Alliance Lead: Please specify the best point of contact for your team
Contact info:
L2 recipient address:
Please list the members of your Alliance and link to any previous work:

Foundation Mission (RFP) Application

Alliance Lead: Ari Juels in his role as Professor, Cornell Tech / University, Co-Director of IC3
Contact info: Contact info at www.arijuels.com
L2 recipient address: 0xe89bc14DD5C83f1bd7Bd978aF035d74Fc300ca09
Please list the members of your Alliance and link to any previous work: Sarah Allen, James Austgen, Kushal Babel, Andrés Fábrega, Mahimna Kelkar, Jay Yu, and Ari Juels; most previous work listed here

What makes your Alliance best-suited to execute this Mission?

Our Alliance proposed the concept of Voting-Bloc Entropy (VBE), one of the key concepts outlined in the RFP and we believe the most suitable metric for its objectives.
We have made extensive contributions to the literature on electronic voting, including one of its most highly cited papers. That 2005 paper (“Coercion-resistant electronic elections”) proposed what is now the standard definition of collusion / vote-buying in e-voting, namely coercion-resistance.
We have extensive practical governance experience as an active Uniswap delegate representing Stanford Blockchain Club, and will become an active delegate for Optimism Token House starting in Season 6

Please describe your proposed solution based on the above Solution Criteria (if applicable):

We propose to tailor VBE to the unusual structure of Citizen’s House through an exploration of applicable clustering algorithms.
We will explore how VBE may be applied across Token House and Citizen’s House and how it may be employed in a combined and comparative study of the two.
We plan to create a public-facing dashboard that presents VBE statistics across a swath of the DAO ecosystem.

Please outline your step-by-step plan to execute this Mission, including expected deadlines to complete each piece of work:

We will first explore new clustering algorithms for voting-bloc identification in Citizen’s House.
We will publish a dashboard with an ecosystem-wide view of VBE across DAOs.
Using findings from the dashboard, we will explore ways of comparing DAOs and combining VBE measures, including across Token House and Citizen’s House.

Please define the critical milestone(s) that should be used to determine whether you’ve executed on this proposal:

July 2024: Proposed new clustering algorithm for voting-bloc identification in Citizen’s House based on ballot contents.
July-August 2024: Published dashboard with an ecosystem-wide view of VBE across DAOs.
August 2024: Preliminary proposal for VBE measurement across Token House and Citizen’s House.
Future work: Enriching VBE with side information, including social graphs, LLM-based analysis of voter discussions, etc.

Please list any additional support your team would require to execute this mission (financial, technical, etc.):

Ongoing collaboration with the Optimism Governance team will be essential to successful completion of our work.

Please check the following to make sure you understand the terms of the Optimism Foundation RFP program:

☑ I understand my grant for completing this RFP will be locked for one year from the date of proposal acceptance.
☑ I understand that I will be required to provide additional KYC information to the Optimism Foundation to receive this grant
☑ I understand my locked grant may be clawed back for failure to execute on critical milestones, as outlined in the Operating Manual
☑ I confirm that I have read and understand the grant policies
☑ I understand that I will be expected to following the public grant reporting requirements outlined here

diterra-code · 2024-05-21T10:23:12Z

hi @elizarileyoak I hope all is well,

A friendly reminder for the unanswered questions posted above. And two additional questions:

Is the 9.000 OP amount the maximum or the minimum amount the OP foundation is willing to give?

And, what is the expected completion date?

Hope to hear from you soon.

Tagging @opjulian as there has not been a response from Eliza in a week.

elizarileyoak · 2024-05-24T14:01:12Z

Hi @diterra-code thanks for your questions and apologies I missed this. Appreciate you following up! I'm currently checking on your question about applying as a Fledgling tier if you've already been approved for a builder grant under the Ember tier. To respond to your other questions in the meantime:

9,000 OP is the baseline amount of this grant. If the metric ends up being implemented long-term by the Collective, grantees are encouraged to apply for additional rewards in the August 2024 governance-themed Retro Funding Round 6.
A completion date of Aug 2024 is a preference rather than a set expectation -- we will align with the selected team(s) on a timeline that makes sense.
If we select multiple alliances (eg, two separate teams), the teams would each receive 9,000 OP for completing this mission request.

kylefox1 · 2024-05-27T21:52:01Z

Foundation Mission (RFP) Application

Please verify that you meet the qualifications for submitting at the above Tier

Alliance Lead: Charles Adjovu
Contact info: Twitter: https://x.com/CAdjovu, Email: charles.adjovu@protonmail.com
L2 recipient address: 0xc7978F8Cb4d826E209911237676d1eeAF17942F4
Please list the members of your Alliance and link to any previous work: Charles Adjovu, Xule Lin, Valerie Spina; you can find links to our previous work in the following list: 1) https://joan816.softr.app/, 2) https://explorer.gitcoin.co/#/round/42161/0xa7608d95a93cc684f2719323d40cbd0f59afe7d4/0xa7608d95a93cc684f2719323d40cbd0f59afe7d4-26, 3) https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1Tg0421j_ktrorTFGYNdhaVx_wzZ0Fow359DI1uiAdR4/edit?usp=sharing, 4) https://ledgerback.pubpub.org/pub/3zn9f6v6, 5) https://ledgerback.pubpub.org/pub/cdh8nbdp, and 6) https://journals.aom.org/doi/10.5465/AMBPP.2021.16429abstract

Foundation Mission (RFP) Application

Please verify that you meet the qualifications for submitting at the above Tier

Alliance Lead: katerinabc
Contact info: k_bc (telegram), katerina@togethercrew.com
L2 recipient address: 0x51092a250891637d036E4617a1E38A70309FEDcb
Please list the members of your Alliance and link to any previous work:

This alliance has received grants and completed work for [Aave](https://aavegrants.org/check-out-our-grantees-wip/untitled/community-health-analytics), [Aragon](https://forum.aragon.org/t/real-time-community-health-analytics/3472), [Celo](https://mirror.xyz/prezenti.eth/lQi3cg5CwTXVFeOGODSB3JYUPNAxRzNufPo20D-khfw), [MetaCartel](https://forum.metacartel.org/t/grant-request-community-health-a-project-by-rndao/2354) and Optimism. The following proposal builds on top of this previous work.

This Mission is led by the following alliance members:

Katerina (contact person) - Co-lead TogetherCrew. Ph.D. using social network analysis. Since 2016 she is co-instructing a graduate course on data analytics for HR at Northwestern University. She has also co-organized the Learning in Networks sessions at the International Conference of Social Network Analysis (2018 - 2020), and previously advised a people analytics company on social network metrics.
Twitter: [twitter.com/katerinabohlec](http://twitter.com/katerinabohlec)
Linkedin: [linkedin.com/in/katerinab](http://linkedin.com/in/katerinab)
Github: https://github.com/katerinabc/

Danielo - Instigator at RnDAO and CoLead at TogetherCrew. Previously, Head of Governance at Aragon, 8 years experience in Organization Design consulting (clients include Google, BCG, Daymler, The UN, and multiple startups), and visiting lecturer at Oxford
University.
Twitter: https://twitter.com/_Daniel_Ospina
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/conductal/

Tjitse van der Molen - Contributor at TogetherCrew. MSc degree in systems biology, focussed on large scale biological data analysis. Currently, he is obtaining his PhD in dynamical neuroscience where he is using graph theory and advanced statistical methods to study how neurons self organize into interaction networks. He is applying the same techniques to study community member interaction networks.
recent project: analyses for this paper https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-022-32115-4
Code and data are openly available in this github: https://github.com/KosikOrganoid/Intrinsic-activity-code
Github: https://github.com/TjitsevdM

Cyrille Derché - Contributor at TogetherCrew. Bsc. Computer Science. Ex-Accenture, Co-founder and CTO of SaaS company helping medical device manufacturers deliver product data + documentation to healthcare professionals (handling of sensitive data). Builder of products, processes, and teams.

Read more about Alliances here

What makes your Alliance best-suited to execute this Mission?

With TogetherCrew, we are measuring social concentration of power in web3 communities using the most common social network influence measure (Freeman degree). This measure of concentration is based on who is talking to whom. We are measuring communication patterns as it’s through interactions and conversations that people learn and form opinions.
We are already in the process of providing individual community reputation scores, which measure a person’s involvement and history with a community. This is a stepping stone towards measuring how much power a specific individual holds.
Since our inception, we have been championing community health by giving communities metrics to understand where they are on their journey towards decentralization. We have learned on the way that a metric is only useful if people understand what is being measured. Only then do they trust the metric and are willing to change their behavior.
Our team includes two PhDs with deep expertise in social network science, behavioral and team analysis.
We’ve already built data pipelines for Discord, Discourse, Github, etc. which allow us to analyse this data for Optimism (see off-chain activities reference below).

Please describe your proposed solution based on the above Solution Criteria (if applicable):
We propose that concentration of power consists of two facets: Concentration of on-chain activities (e.g., voting coalitions), and concentration of off-chain activities (e.g., social influence, lobbying, coalitions of like-minded people). We propose a simple decentralization metric that takes both facets into account for the collective, while also allowing users to dig deeper into the metric, and see how much power subgroups and individual accounts hold. This approach understands that hard voting power is but one component, and the ability to influence those with hard power can be even more important.

This metric will be based on:

How far someone’s influence in the collective reaches (concentration of power)
The number of subgroups needed to sway a vote in a direction (coalitions within the collective)
The number of bridge-builders/gatekeepers in the collective (network weavers and gatekeepers within the collective)

We propose a dashboard which will highlight decentralization scores for the collective, and let users drill down on specific subgroups and token holders within the collective (i.e. filter the data by ‘tags’ for accounts of token house, citizen house, committees, etc). This gives users the ability to understand where power is most concentrated by showing scores for subgroups and for individuals as well as being able to see the impact on power concentration of different memberships.

Please outline your step-by-step plan to execute this Mission, including expected deadlines to complete each peice of work:

Developing and testing the metric [8 weeks]

We will use our expertise in behavioral analysis, team dynamics, and social network science to research a mechanism that reliably measures the three aspects of our metric. This step will go beyond scientific literature and involves interviews with users to test their perception and trust in the metric.
Develop and test a performant clustering algorithm using social graph data (Farcaster) and voting data [8 weeks]

Developing the dashboard. [12 weeks]

The metric will be included in our existing dashboard. This allows us to make use of existing data pipelines and analytics, such as permission management, log-in and merging of identifiers of users, and merging of activity across platforms.
Integrate log-in with Farcaster for the dashboard
Design a Governance Accessibility page with three layers of information: (1) The overall score, (2) information about the subgroups and their power, (3) information about delegates and their power.
User testing of dashboard internally and with delegates

Please define the critical milestone(s) that should be used to determine whether you’ve executed on this proposal:

Milestone 1.1: Research and planning [6 weeks]

Research and propose a series of metrics that will be presented to Collective participants. We will balance reliability of the metric with ease of understanding it and sensibility to changes in the input variables. The end result will be a metric that is reliable and actionable
We will conduct user interviews with Collective participants to ensure that our metric is easy to understand and will be trusted by users (user acceptance testing).

Milestone 1.2: Prototype development and testing [2 weeks]

Sensitivity analysis: We will develop different scenarios to understand how sensitive the metric is to changes in the communication, voting behaviour, and token distribution. This will provide insights into the feedback-cycle of the metric by demonstrating the impact specific individuals and groups can have on the metric

Milestone 2: Dashboard development [12 weeks]

Develop a data pipeline for Farcaster and integrate it into our existing analytics script
Design and test a Governance Accessibility page

Please list any additional support your team would require to execute this mission (financial, technical, etc.):

A contact person at Optimism governance to help promote the user testing of the metric
Information about who is holding what badge, and insights into the result of the RFP badge holder analysis

Grants are awarded in OP, locked for one year. Please let us know if access to upfront capital is a barrier to completing your Mission and you would like to be considered for a small upfront cash grant: (Note: there is no guarantee that approved Missions will receive up-front cash grants.)

Please check the following to make sure you understand the terms of the Optimism Foundation RFP program:

I understand my grant for completing this RFP will be locked for one year from the date of proposal acceptance.
I understand that I will be required to provide additional KYC information to the Optimism Foundation to receive this grant
I understand my locked grant may be clawed back for failure to execute on critical milestones, as outlined in the Operating Manual
I confirm that I have read and understand the grant policies
I understand that I will be expected to following the public grant reporting requirements outlined here

curialabxyz · 2024-05-31T09:50:35Z

Hi @katerinabc @kylefox1 @ajuels, it's exciting to see so many teams interested in this Foundation Mission Request. If any of you need OP governance data for your work, I’d be happy to help. We’ve already built the data pipeline this functionality into our voting power dashboard and delegate dashboard which include also partial delegations. We can provide the necessary data to support your work.

Feel free to reach out if you need any assistance or access to our API.

opjulian added Foundation Mission Request A request for proposals for a specific work item. Intent: Governance Accessibility labels May 2, 2024

opjulian added Research Contribution and removed Research Contribution labels May 30, 2024

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Foundation Mission Request: Measuring the Concentration of Power in the Collective #183

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Foundation Mission Request: Measuring the Concentration of Power in the Collective #183

Foundation Mission Request: Measuring the Concentration of Power in the Collective #183

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opjulian commented May 2, 2024 • edited by elizarileyoak

Foundation Mission Request - Measuring the Concentration of Power in the Collective

Application instructions

Foundation Mission (RFP) Application

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Foundation Mission (RFP) Application

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Foundation Mission (RFP) Application

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Foundation Mission (RFP) Application

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