Forced Proposal Migrations - Analysis & Resolution

Governance Project Catalyst
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The Catalyst team are attempting to force proposals in the Catalyst System Improvements to be migrated to other categories.

The Catalyst team created this category themselves without community consent, have submitted proposals in the category to try and get funding and have now used the IOG legal team to execute a proposal migration process to move proposals in that same category to other categories when they believe a proposal does not address the category brief.

Some of the core issues around the situation include:

  • Incorrect & insufficient migration rationale - The rationale provided by IOG’s legal team is not correct nor sufficient for them to authoritatively migrate the Web 3 Association’s proposal to another category. This outcome may also be the case for other proposals in the same category.
  • No process checks & balances - The migration process currently does not have any checks and balances to ensure that the actors who are executing the process are doing so correctly and fairly. The full authority is being given to a small handful of people to make these decisions without any external moderation.
  • No ability for proposers to defend their proposal allocation - Proposers are unable to provide any rationale to disagree with the outcome from this proposal migration process and justify why their proposal is correctly positioned in the right category.
  • Conflict of interest - The Catalyst team from IOG have proposals in the Catalyst System Improvements category and legal team from IOG were responsible for handling the migration process. IOG has a direct financial incentive to reduce and remove competition from the category they are competing in as the funding can be used to pay for IOG employed staff.

The following areas provides more depth around this issue and the surrounding decisions and processes that have been adopted by the Catalyst team.

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Record of events

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Proposal migration process flaws & suggestions

The analysis helps to highlight how the proposal migration process has not been well designed.

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Catalyst system improvement category brief flaws & suggestions

The analysis highlights how the category brief is not well scoped and has been unnecessarily made more exclusive and overly specific which reduced competition and benefited the Catalyst team.

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Web 3 Association proposal & addressing the category brief

Further analysis helps highlight how the Web 3 Association - Treasury System Knowledge Resources proposal is highly relevant and applicable to achieving the intent of the category brief.

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Community resolution vote

After you have read the analysis above please join in participating in this vote to share your opinion about how this problem should be resolved by the Catalyst team.

The vote is happening in two places and will be shared with the Catalyst team:

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Really well laid out and documented :+1:

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Perhaps you could propose an alternative solution yourself?

It is very easy to complain about a system, but unless you have a better one that can be implemented, the point is kind of moot.

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The alternative is simple: Just leave the proposals alone and let the voters decide.

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The analysis for the migration process points to actually having no solution being more beneficial to the ecosystem at the moment for learning about the extent of the problem. It will give us actual data on the extent of the issue before and after the voting stage. This data becomes even more useful after the funding categories improvements are made based on my previous analysis, as then categorisations should be well defined and scoped and easier for proposers to allocate their proposals into them correctly.

Centralising power without actually making a good well thought through process is what can and should be removed from the process immediately.

I’d happily look at analysing a new solution in the future once the concern has proven itself to be actually be a problem that needs resolving.

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I think the proposal belongs in the DAOS love Cardano challenge.

It certainly doesn’t belong in open source developer ecosystem.