This HIP will formalize a request to the dao for removal of Clement Lesaege as a Mission Board member and admin of Snapshot, given the latest and past events of anti-dao and anti-democratic maneuvers. To give a proper rationale and to clarify proper reasons for this, I created another post explaining what is my personal motivation to write this hip.
HIP: <Number to be assigned>
title: Removal of Clement Lesaege as mission board member
author: ludoviko (provisional, subject to change),
status: Draft
created: 2022-01-06
Simple Summary
This HIP proposes the removal of Clement Leseage from the mission board and the snapshot admin.
Abstract
Given the latest events regarding the actions of Clement as an admin for the Snapshot polls, and the overall attitude of constantly delaying any advancement or progress of any proposals that obstructs his own agenda, I am proposing the removal of Clement Lesaege from the mission board, based on the premise that he is not aligned with the values of Democratization and Decentralization and respect for privacy of individuals being registered in the DAO.
Motivation
Obstructing normal governance procedures. There is a recent incident in which the proposers for HIPs on Snapshot was unilaterally deleted, against the advice from the other admin of the platform Santi Siri, because it was being done without proper consultation with the DAO.
This later issue, along with the creation of HIP-34 itself (which dramatically decreases open participation for proposals), created a situation that now requires two different and new HIPs to solve the issue.
An unsuccessful attempt to remove a valid admin from the Telegram group (for the record, I was the admin asked to be removed).
Disregarding serious security threats to the registering process (metadata issue): When warned about this issue, Clement lowered the priority of a huge security threat in which personal georeferencing data was being leaked into the registry profiles. In a forum post he mentioned that having personal data leaked was “a nice thing to have”
Systematically obstaculizing any process that helps humans register (352, vouchallengers, etc) sometimes suggesting that challenges are good and vouch-and-challenge attacks are part of the normal mechanism:
Example 3, falsely accusing of being “undemocratic” a democratic poll [Hiring] Product Manager - #68 by clesaege and this is critical for someone holding veto power in snapshot.
Under-specifying regulations so that he can later interpret the normative as he unilaterally thinks (basically all the hips he authored, including HIP-34)
Lack of proper spirit of collaboration with the community, evidenced by lack of participation in main groups.
Stalling the hiring process to the point that the actuall hiring was put in hibernation [Hiring] Product Manager.
It is worth also noting the contradiction with other comments in which he stated that hiring should be done fast [Hiring] Developer - #5 by clesaege
Taking decisions in the background without proper consultation to DAO members, or disregarding alternative perspectives.
Not acknowledging the issues regarding the concentration and dominance of a priviledge few in the Kleros Humanity Court and not doing anything to prevent such an abnormal degree of centralization.
On the demand of another member Santi submitted a proposal on the official page.
The proposal stated that whoever voted for it will be added as a Snapshot proposer.
This proposal did not follow HIP-5.
This proposal did not allow people to vote against (there was no “make no change” option).
It lead to people being confused and someone asking me why she was unable to make proposals despite having voted on the proposal.
I’m against this proposal. The accusations are extreme, if you have any evidence of ‘anti-democratic maneuvers’, please elaborate. However regarding the context of HIP-34, Clement acted exactly as mandated by the HIP.
Clement is invaluable to POH. Here are some relevant posts from the HIP7 Mission Board thread and a follow-up post where I shed light on the value Clement brings to POH.
I would encourage everyone to listen to this clip from the Bankless podcast discussing conflict in crypto communities.
when you’re talking to somebody
face to face
you have this real like human
interaction i think when you’re on
twitter i mean i’m
just as guilty as the next person but
it’s so easy to like fire a shot
um to somebody because it’s not like
it’s virtual you don’t even see a facial reaction
right and i think it brings out the
animal spirits and
and that it’s just so easy to fire these
shots i mean there was one that i
that i did today that i i wasn’t you
know if i
i’m sure if i was sitting next to the
person i would have been way nicer than
just saying
oh you’re just i’m sure you’re an
academic from ivy league school or
something like i said something like
that and of course it wasn’t like the
nicest thing but
um i think it’s more of a function of of
that dynamic than anything else i think
most people are well intended
um but as a human being
33:01
there’s gaps in everybody’s thinking i
don’t care who you are
like you’re a product of your past and
your interactions and the people that
you’ve associated with
in your preconceived notions and that’s
kind of led you to the place where you
sit today
so that’s where i sit that’s where you
guys sit and there’s going to be deltas
in the way that we see things
Let’s set aside our differences for the betterment of POH and UBI DAOs and let’s focus on constructive efforts to build cool applications for both DAOs.
This is not a removal of Clement from the project itself. It just revoking his veto power on normal flow of democratic procedures. He is free to continue to participate and bring useful opinions from a different role than the current one.
First and foremost I will say that I won’t support this proposal since I consider @clesaege essential to the growth and development of Proof of Humanity and UBI.
I effectively talked with him prior to removing the HIP 34 poll and recommended not to do it before we could address everyone openly about it. Since I have a Community Call scheduled next week, I thought that was a good opportunity. Clement moved forward with a Telegram announcement instead and removed the poll.
The argument that HIP 34 didn’t follow HIP 5 procedure is a reasonable one. The bottom line is that we need to find a mechanism we all agree helps to the free speech of our DAO. As a Mission Board member, I can assign delegate authors on Snapshot and will reach out to those of you who manifested interest in contributing to the DAO as author in that poll.
It’s very important we take good care of our Snapshot page since all our votes are expressed there. Any kind of action in the direction of erasing content, is a very sensitive thing to do. But also, we must all make sure we follow proper rules and procedures as we grow as a DAO.
As a PoH founder, I think it’s quite crazy to have to deal with sort of behaviour. But as a community leader (i.e. getting significant delegations) I believe that people delegating to me have the right to be informed.
I also think that the initial post highlights some point of the PoH which could be problematic.
In this post, I will in a first part answer all Luis accusations (but won’t spend much time after that as building is more important) and in a second part on how Luis accusations may be revealing or deeper set of issues with the current state of the PoH project.
This recent “proposal”, didn’t follow HIP-5. It didn’t have any option to vote against (no “make no change”), so people could not vote to reject. It was promising to give proposer role to people voting for it.
As a board member I was therefore mandated protect the technical implementation and the use of the resource that is the snapshot page. Here there was a misuse of this resource: using it to display fake proposals (which lead to people coming to me and asking why they were not put as proposer despite having voted the proposal).
Not removing it would have been antidemocratic (would violate the combined instructions of HIP-7 and HIP-34).
I didn’t restrict snapshot proposing. Santi did restrict snapshot posting initially. We worked on a way to have more proposer than the status quo.
Moreover I’m using the right of delegation given by HIP-34 to add as proposer everyone who:
Hasn’t made invalid proposals in the past.
Ask me to put a valid proposal to vote.
In order to increase the list of proposers.
I effectively recommended not to have Luis as admin of a telegram group that we run while proposing him that he makes his own telegram group (that he did and in which I even participate).
You can find this compilation of Luis behaviour which made me think that having him as a telegram admin was not appropriate.
This is far from being the case. As the result of some comments stating that it was a higher priority, we set up a tokenlog for people to vote on priorities using quadratic voting.
Note that when I qualified this of a “low” priority, this was in contrast with bugs and features not working. One of this feature being the in-browser recording which if used, solves the issue (if the interface makes the video, we would not run the risk of users uploading videos with metadata).
The “nice thing to have” obviously refers to removing metadata, not having the metadata public.
I did ask a Kleros dev to work on this but he concluded that it was quite difficult. Now the priority is more on Gnosis Chain expansion but I hope someone can figure out how to automatically strip metadata from uploaded images/video.
This is false, the linked post is an answer to someone proposing to penalize vouchers of incorrect submissions.
This is false, I never stated it’s the only way. I’m just pointing out that everything else being equal, lower challenger rates lead to higher security deposits.
Actually Luis is well aware of this, as in his governance call where he interviewed me, we discussed promising research path on how to have a challenger ecosystem even in the absence of mistakes (work on forced errors discussed with people of truebit).
I definitely think that mixing non HIP-5 polls with proposals is undemocratic, as it confused voters (don’t know if it’s a poll or proposal to be executed). But instead of unilaterally removing them, I proposed HIP-34 which restrict the main space to HIP-5 proposals.
This has to be seen from a protocol development perspective. When I designed the mechanism to withdraw a submission, I designed a mechanism to remove them in case that someone would not manage to find vouchers in order to make sure that deposits would not be lost forever.
No other TCR mechanism I designed allowed to remove a submission.
This has been used by some people to withdraw submissions to prevent the loss of a deposit. I believe this is great, but I didn’t have allowing people making mistakes the right to remove before getting challenged in mind when I designed this mechanism.
The thing is that disputes are a mean, not a goal. If there were no disputes, there would be no rampart against malicious submitters.
And no, I have no interest in making disputes for the sake of making disputes (and we worked to make/integrate pre-dispute mechanism in other projects like the escrow and reality.eth).
“What can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence.” (see Hitchen’s razor)
So I did argue against voter fatigue in case of:
Creating a bunch of elections, even for non important stuff.
Posting invalid proposals.
HIP-18 was not proposal cloning. Most of my modifications were actually implemented in the original HIP and I think they wouldn’t have been if there were not this proposal.
“What can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence.” (see Hitchen’s razor)
I’m more of a builder than a politician and do regret the drift of PoH to politics instead of building.
So no I don’t spend all the day discussing in telegram when building is more efficient. But even then, I believe that my participation in telegram/forum is significant.
Funny to be accused of stalling something that I was pushing. I actually even tried to spear fish candidates (contacting people individually encouraging them to apply) but finding talent in this market is hard.
“What can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence.” (see Hitchen’s razor)
“What can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence.” (see Hitchen’s razor)
I would also like to take this opportunity to alert on two potential issues that I’m seeing in the current PoH setup which Luis post has highlighted:
Focusing on PoH governance instead of PoH building.
Sure, you want effective governance and a high degree of decentralization. But ultimately protocols that wins are protocols gathering builders.
If we look at the HIPs, we have around 40% of them which are self centered, i.e. not about building something but about how we govern something.
I’m not saying that it should be 0%, that would also be bad. But that at current rate, it’s too high.
Tending far too much on the vetocracy side.
Luis accusations are also interesting as I can see the roots of it. Those are political and can be found in the
bulldozer vs vetocracy political axis (see Vitalik article The bulldozer vs vetocracy political axis).
Luis is probably a vetocrate. Even if the proposal clearly shouldn’t have been in the official page, he believes that we should have had a complex process to remove it (maybe even make another vote).
While I’m comparatively more on the bulldozer side (I insist on the comparatively, if I was a full bulldozer I wouldn’t even have made PoH a DAO): There are rules for being on the page, those rules are not respected, it’s just an administrative task to have those rules respected, not a governance one.
I believe that early stage projects have more to win being on the bulldozer side. There are way much to win than to lose. If we start seeing the simple tasks of junk removal as a governance issue, we will consume all the limited resources we have in discussions.
If the majority believes that the project should be a harsh vetocracy, I’d happily remove myself from it as I am not interesting in spending all the time in politics instead of building and believe that it would not be successful this way.
Other people believes the same and one candidate to PoH ended up making a competitive project instead. When asked why. One of the reason was that he believes it would be hard to get things done in the current PoH setup (too much on the vetocracy side).
Fortunately I hope that most people there are interested for the project to be in the right balance of vetocracy-bulldozer and that we can all work to make it successful.
This is a complete reply, now it is in the hands of the DAO to decide.
The only thing that I’d like members of the DAO to witness is how low you have to fall, that in order to defend yourself you have to attack the interlocutor (I’m speaking about the screenshots).
I’m not in the “accused seat” (for lack of a better word) in this conversation so I think here so if there are accusations against me I’ll address them in a different thread.
Hello Community. Recent events have clarified and added more reasons to go forward with this HIP.
As of the time of this reply, an informal poll posted on both spanish groups show sufficient support with this.
Este HIP formalizará una petición a la DAO para que se destituya a Clement Lesaege como miembro de la Junta de Misión y administrador de Snapshot, dados los últimos y pasados acontecimientos de maniobras antidao y antidemocráticas. Para fundamentar y aclarar las razones adecuadas para ello, he creado otro post explicando cuál es mi motivación personal para escribir esta HIP.
Resumen simple
Este HIP propone la remoción de Clement Leseage de la junta de la misión y el administrador de la plataforma Snapshot.
Resumen
Dados los últimos acontecimientos en relación a las acciones de Clement como admin de las encuestas Snapshot, y la actitud general de retrasar constantemente cualquier avance o progreso de cualquier propuesta que obstruya su propia agenda, propongo la remoción de Clement Lesaege de la junta de la misión, basándome en la premisa de que no está alineado con los valores de Democratización y Descentralización y el respeto a la privacidad de las personas que se registran en el DAO.
Motivación
Obstaculizar los procedimientos normales de gobierno. Hay un incidente reciente en el que los proponentes de HIPs en Snapshot fueron eliminados unilateralmente, en contra del consejo del otro administrador de la plataforma Santi Siri, porque se estaba haciendo sin la debida consulta con el DAO.
Este problema posterior, junto con la creación de la propia HIP-34 (que disminuye drásticamente la participación abierta para las propuestas), creó una situación que ahora requiere dos HIPs diferentes y nuevas para resolver el problema.
Un intento infructuoso de eliminar a un admin válido del grupo de Telegram (para que conste, yo era el admin al que se le pedía que eliminara).
Desconocimiento de graves amenazas de seguridad en el proceso de registro (problema de metadatos): Cuando se le advirtió de este asunto, Clemente bajó la prioridad de una gran amenaza de seguridad en la que se estaban filtrando datos personales de georreferenciación en los perfiles de registro. En un post del foro mencionó que el hecho de que se filtraran datos personales era “algo bonito”
Obstaculizar sistemáticamente cualquier proceso que ayude a los humanos a registrarse (352, vouchallengers, etc) sugiriendo a veces que los desafíos son buenos y los ataques de vouch-and-challenge son parte del mecanismo normal:
Ejemplo 3, acusando falsamente de “antidemocrática” a una encuesta democrática [Hiring] Product Manager - #68 by clesaege y esto es crítico para alguien que tiene poder de veto en Snapshot.
Subespecificación de la normativa para poder interpretarla después como él piensa unilateralmente (básicamente todas las caderas de su autoría, incluida la HIP-34)
Falta de un adecuado espíritu de colaboración con la comunidad, evidenciado por la falta de participación en los principales grupos.
Estancamiento del proceso de contratación hasta el punto de poner en hibernación la contratación actual [Hiring] Product Manager.
Cabe destacar también la contradicción con otros comentarios en los que afirmaba que las contrataciones debían hacerse rápidamente [Hiring] Developer - #5 by clesaege
Tomar decisiones en segundo plano sin consultar debidamente a los miembros de la DAO, o sin tener en cuenta las perspectivas alternativas.
No reconocer las cuestiones relativas a la concentración y el dominio de unos pocos privilegiados en el Tribunal de la Humanidad de Kleros y no hacer nada para evitar ese grado anormal de centralización.