[Phase-3] HIP-16: Make admin roles of communication platforms eligible

Rewriting of the proposal:
Replace

Admin roles are not moderator roles, therefore do not require to suppress their opinions in debates, as long as they follow the code of conduct established for that channel. Mere opposition to that admin’s opinion should not be grounds for the admin to ban that person.

with

Admins acknowledge that access to communication channels or profiled labelled as “admin” give them an additional power which comes with additional responsibilities:

  • They should refrain from expressing virulent opinions about Proof Of Humanity or related projects with their admin accounts.
  • They are subject to higher standards in term of good conduct (ex: avoiding excessive profanity).

This doesn’t preclude them from formalizing criticism on Proof Of Humanity but it should be done either in a purely technical manner or using a non-admin account.

And add

Elected individuals can allow access to communication channels to individuals helping them managing communication channels. Access to those assistants can be revoked at any time by the elected individual who granted it or by a majority of elected individuals.

I would like the candidates to burn UBI to become eligible.

The proposal can go to next phase.

I found out another issue with this proposal which is the following paragraph:

What does this mean?
It looks like it’s making an election system but it doesn’t specify how. Is is a proportional list system where the winning list cannot get more than 3 (or 1)? And where the winning list cannot get less than 3 (or 1) seat?
If so we’d need to specify the electoral method as here there would probably be some dispute about electoral results.

Moreover giving executive power to the minority conjointly to the majority is a really weird thing to do. Because it means that as long as a list gets 1 seat they gain executive power (having more than 1 admin does not give any extra power as all admins get access). This could have disastrous effects where a side want an action to be done while the other side doesn’t (we could have some sort of publish/unpublish ban/unban wars).

This (assuming it guarantees an opposition seat) would again seems a way for a proposer to guarantee his position as admin (since even if he loses the election he’d get the minority seat, unless there are multiple other lists running and he doesn’t end up in the largest minority which seems unlikely).

That also something I’d change on this proposal.

I would oppose the creation of “lists” to elect admins. I believe it could fracture the community. I would rather vote in individual candidates.

Is it possible to implement some kind of quadratic voting for this?

2 Likes

Agreed on first amendment proposed.

Disagree on the second, for the same reasons as before: if elected officials can choose others, then it would be senseless to make the role elegible. The vote in the DAO represents the will of that person to exert that position. Also, it would lead to proxy candidacies in which a “famous” person is used as a bait and then that person does not do anything in the role. That is completely against the spirit of this HIP.

Example of quadratic voting with PoH just launched:

Preventing people to delegate doesn’t make sense, election still preserve the democratic control even in case of delegation. If a “famous person” presents itself and then delegates some powers, the people he delegated some powers are very likely to be aligned with the elected person and if they were not, this elected person can remove the delegation.
For example, you don’t vote on each municipal employee, you vote for a mayor/municipal council. Asking to vote for each municipal employee wouldn’t make any sense.

1 Like

Yes! It can be done. Will work on the update to make this happen.

The current version is a result of an ongoing collaboration with several members of the community (@paulaberman, @santisiri and me, with help of others that prefer to remain anonymous) where we did our very best to integrate the critiques made throughout this thread. Thank you all for your collaboration. Once again, we reinforce our commitment to dialogue and collective construction as the best path towards an effective governance for Proof of Humanity.

Here’s a point-by-point explanation of each of the changes we made:

  1. A mechanism for the channels to belong to the “Community managed” status.

  2. A distinction between the Administrator and Moderator functions was outlined, in response to the important point raised by @0x00555dc77a343e205cb1c7755407c93470db3f91_Ethereum mentioning this absence made the proposal confusing. We hope these clarifications served to address your concerns.

  3. In response to the points raised by @0x6687c671980e65ebd722b9146fc61e2471558dd6_Ethereum , about the dangers of a monolithic culture emerging from having lists of candidates, we deleted this component from the proposal. In addition, our reasoning was that the upcoming Code of Conduct will serve to generate a cohesive approach among Administrators, thus making the use of lists dispensable.

  4. Elections: in response to the important points concerning voter fatigue, raised by @Justin and @clesaege, and the possibility of a malicious attack with a harmful candidate, raised by @jputzel, we designed a lightweight and adaptive model that will:

  5. Put maximum scrutiny on Administrators through a 24/7, ongoing evaluation platform which will allow the community to provide immediate feedback on their performance, as well as effectively respond to malicious attacks.

  6. Enable Administrator candidates to organically emerge and be validated by the community on an ongoing basis.

  7. Allow for a frictionless transition between Administrators that either choose to leave, or are deemed to be unqualified by the community (the next one in the rank is simply considered the new official admin).

  8. Allow for the number of Administrators to organically adapt to the size of channels, as well as the availability of candidates.

  9. Not require any overhead or points of centralization in the process: the simple rules we outlined in the Elections section can always be checked on by the community.

  10. Administrators obligations: in response to @Justin.

  11. Anonymity of Administrators: Our present model does not allow for anonymous Administrators. Our understanding is that these are positions of responsibility, and thus should be accountable to the public. That said, we have amended the proposal to include the Administrator obligations in order to ensure a professional conduct from the persons occupying these positions.

To all who have contributed with your comments to this thread on phase 1 and 2 (0x00555dc77a343e205cb1c7755407c93470db3f91_Ethereum, iafhurtado, clesaege Justin santisiri, HBesso31, federicoast waly_hh Nuwanda 0xc88920b0e3daab93e9b539a21764a2f50682c2ec_Ethereum, Nachobr), and also the countless members of all telegram groups. We thank you for your constructive input which served to help us construct what we hope is a well-rounded proposal.

3 Likes

The final, binding poll will start in snapshot on
2021-06-21T15:00:00Z

1 Like

This ongoing rotation and evaluation of admins sounds spectacularly useful. Is there any proposal for a situation where there are not enough Admins to manage the various channels? Can Admins manage multiple channels? Should they?

3 Likes

I commented on Paula’s tweet announcing the proposal so I’m quite late to the discussion - I wondered whether a human admin might be biased overlooking one type of discrimination but not another, for example, and how to control for that.

I believe point 5 of ludovico’s post quoted below satisfies my concern.

3 Likes

I think the proposal is great. It has fixed a lot of issues raised by the community. Good job!

3 Likes

Totally naive question, but how do we vote?

1 Like

@dogweather you can vote here: Snapshot

voting opens in an hour and a half. you have to login with the same address you used to register on poh :slight_smile:

you might also wan’t to vote against hip-18, which is the competing proposal:

https://snapshot.org/#/poh.eth/proposal/QmQkoRuTYPEEmSSHMWWxcGbsjY7CAA6xqXomPaSKWvyyZt

Despite some clarifications on the voting which are appreciated, the initial concern stays:

  • Preventing delegations will be prevent an efficient administration of communication channels.
  • Combined with HIP-7 which prevents board members from running in elections, this would have for effect of kicking out the current team from communication channels without any possibility for them to get access which will at best disrupt the normal functioning of communication channels and at worth lead to a communication takeover. The fine prints of this proposal are that the current team should be removed from communication channels.

It won’t. It will actually increase efficiency since admins will be dynamically assigned or removed.

That is a slippery slope and it was already explained in the Telegram channels that content generation would still be under control of Mission Board members. The scope of admin and content is clearly defined in the scope, so no real crisis here. Also, not having board members in admin positions is a “nice thing to have”.

  • Do you expect the elected admins to change frequently because they are voted in and out?
  • What happens when an admin changes position in the ranking during a heated debate?
  • Wouldn’t this generate a constant “voting pressure” that may lead to fatigue, with the main difference that it occurs outside Snapshot?

Wouldn’t it be better to establish a time period for re-evaluating who are the admins? Example: every Monday at 12PM. First day of every Month.

Is it possible to implement the ability to retract votes on tokenlog?

If there is a constant election going, it’s possible we will change our opinion, after having spent all votes. If we encourage being extra mindful about voting, then we might be rewarding users that do not think long-term and may use all their voting power to attack the system.

If I understand correctly, there is no “term”, right?

Isn’t waiting 24h too much if there’s a clear attack on the group?

I would have liked to include the ability to remove admins if they are inactive as well.

This part seems to me the dangerous and delicate to take into account. To propose that an Admin cannot express an opinion against poh or any “related” project is to bring to a decentralized democratic governance project, the worst of centralized governments in the world with dictatorial tendency authoritarianism and totalitarianism. Although at first glance it may seem something worthy of sanction for someone with a position in the Dao to make virulent expressions, the economic - political processes of our history have taught us that this mechanism is widely used to silence the opposition, any opinion can be transformed virulent in the eyes of the opposition. On the other hand, the code of conduct for an admin could simply be in line with hip 19 that reaches the entire community and seems much clearer and more precise, unlike someone with a position in the Dao would constantly submit and rigorous to community scrutiny.

If we look at the complete section, this looks way better. They can for sure formulate technical criticism or use non admin accounts if they want to formulate virulent criticism.
That’s what ambassadors should do.