HIP: 73
Title: Removal of Clement Lesaege as mission board member
Author: ludoviko.eth, v4len.eth, vice, lauraleticialopez.eth (Lety), pablo, drlorente97.eth
Status: Phase 2
Created: 2022-01-06
Updated: 2022-10-15
Simple Summary
This HIP proposes the removal of Clement Leseage from the mission board and the snapshot administration.
Abstract
The event on EF Devcon VI where Clément produced an incident involving a violent and unsustained reaction towards Santi Siri as a speaker, has sparked debates about the fitness of Clement as a Member of the Mission Board. Based on this and previous 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, the authors of this proposal are proposing:
The destitution of Clement Lesaege as a Mission Board Member, based on the premise that, in our opinion, he is not aligned with the values of Democratization and Decentralization and respect for privacy of individuals being registered in the DAO.
Motivation
Here is a rundown of events that accumulated since the inception of the proposal:
Not acknowledging the issues regarding the concentration and dominance of a priviledged few in the Kleros Humanity Court and not doing anything to prevent such an abnormal degree of centralization.
Over-reaching MBM authority by numerous attempts (some successful) to demote, and then censor moderators from Telegram groups. An abuse of the mechanisms of those channels to supress dissent (36 warn actions in three days after a violent takeover of the now Kleros’ PoH group). The warns and the bans in the Kleros PoH group even included other Mission Board Members since then.
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. The best answer he could give about the priority demotion he replied “Because it’s a nice to have, not a bug or a core feature.”. This was the response of people having their ethereum wallets and their physical addresses exposed in the blockchain virtually forever. The issue is still unsolved in the Kleros front-end.
Gerrymandering attempts by creating a set of 438 ethereum wallets that automatically delegated to him, even that up to this day, les than one third is registered or even an active member of the PoH community. The alleged “Myanmar” community is as of this day, completely invisible and without any signs of these people having the full picture of how the DAO works or if they had any alternatives to delegate to other candidates.
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 2, falsely accusing of being “undemocratic” a democratic poll [Hiring] Product Manager - #68 by clesaege 1 and this is critical for someone holding veto power in snapshot.
Example 3, saying that having the opportunity to withdraw from a mistake where an innocent person is attacked by a vouchallenger is “perfectly fine” and that giving enough time for a person to correct a mistake “courtesy” and not a right.
Sabotaging or lack of respect to proper procedure:
Under-specifying regulations (proposals about hiring, about creation of proposals) so that can be later interpreted as he unilaterally thinks.
Lack of proper spirit of collaboration with the community, showing lack of flexibility when community wanted questions answered.
Taking decisions in the background without proper consultation to DAO members, or disregarding alternative perspectives.
The removal of administrative rigths over the Snapshot platform.
Rationale
Clément was, is, and will still be a key and most valuable collaborator in terms of technical skills. The accumulation of this and other events suggests that Clement is unfit to represent the DAO. This does not mean that he is unable to continue contributing in some other way, and this is not a lack of recognition that he created the protocol.
This is the third time this HIP is refloated. Originally the HIP was left on hold since its creation, but events at that time regarding removal of dissenting members of the DAO from telegram channels have sparked the interest of the community to move forward with this proposal.
Implementation
If Phase 3 binding vote is approved, the position that Clement Lesaege is occupying as a Mission Board Member will become vacant. Mr. Lesaege will not be able to be candidate for the Mission Board Member position (or any derivatives/equivalents from this institution, i.e., positions with executive functions) for the following 2 years starting from the Phase 3 voting.
In addition to this, Mr. Lesaege’s administrative rigths to the snapshot platform will be removed indefinitely
Same accusations, same answers. I’d advise you to look at this thread for all the conversation.
If some people don’t like us, let’s just agree to disagree and fork. But the way it’s going there is escalating to dangerous levels and even creating physical safety risks.
At the Devcon I got insulted by a known member of the community (saying “fuck off” multiple times and giving me the finger). Worse I even got physical threats of being “beaten up” by a person I never saw before.
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 false. I protested when Santi was falsely introduced as having launched Proof Of Humanity. I didn’t interrupt any talk.
This is a lie, after the talk which wasn’t following what Santi had announced, a Devcon organizer came and asked to talk to Santi about his talk not matching the description. I asked the Devcon organizer whether or not I should join the conversation and she asked me to join. Santi then left refusing to talk with the Devcon organiser and myself.
After that, there was a group of people (approximately 10 people, including people both from “founder side” and “Santi side”) debating the talk, I joined. Santi and another person on their side were trying to prevent me from talking. Santi shouted me “Shut up” multiple times and gave me the finger before leaving.
I reported this behavior to Devcon organizers which advised me to avoid Santi which I did.
As accusations of harassment are (and should) be taken seriously, if those accusations are not removed, I’ll consider with my counsel whether or not a defamation lawsuit should be engaged.
Note that it is not the first time Santi has been falsely accusing people of harassment. He also accused Cooperative members of having harassed him at the conference as seen in this chat:
(Also after that, Santi asked for an invite to the Kleros party and went there. If you get harassed by a group of people, asking to take happy pictures with them and coming to their party is one of the last thing someone reasonable would do)
I’m not gonna pretend I’m a fan of Santi, but for example I wouldn’t try to kick him from the mission board. People can be political opponents while still being respectful.
Also looks like there are new allegations.
This one particularly crazy as it looks like a Mandela effect. Santi is the one who removed the posting rights on Snapshot without a vote. Not me.
We are at the point of polarization where Santi fans believes I did the actions done by Santi that they disapprove.
I removed those because we had a spam attack. I wanted everyone to post. Your proposal only gave the MB power to post (and their handpicked delegates). I voted in favor of proposooooors. I moved forward the proposoooors HIP and Problem solved for our free speech. Let’s not twist history because we all remember. Everyone can check Snapshot.
No, you didn’t just removed those. You restricted posting to admins.
Here your point is: I removed the rights but I didn’t want to. Clément wanted to remove those.
It doesn’t make sense. Action speaks louder than words. I also wanted to restrict those to avoid spams. But I didn’t use admin power to enforce a proposal which was explicitely rejected by the DAO.
You can’t sanction someone for making a proposal.
However you can sanction someone for abusing his admin powers.
Yeah, spam attack with countless posts flooding the snapshot were happening making it entirely unusable. We advanced on a democratic way to elect proposors. Thus our reality today anyone can move forward HIPs, not just the MB.
Clément made two proposals. The one that fixed the issue was also created by him and it was used by Luis to ask for his removal in his first attempt. That’s the level of distorting the facts that we have on this proposal.
What kind of leader is someone that inspires the community to kick him out 3 times? Someone that has to fabricate lies about others because the real issues exposed cannot be addressed?
We should be talking on how to improve “IncorrectSubmissions” yet demonizing dissent is the consistent modus operandi towards those who dare to criticize flaws in order to improve things.
Also worth noticing the silence of the rest of Kleros management with regards to his actions. Assaulting a conference is not okay and a limit was crossed.
What kind of leader supports a HIP which had their first attempt including distortions of the truth like the one below?
Literally Clément wrote the HIP that fixed the problem, and it was used against him. If we don’t stand up for the truth at these opportunities, of course there will be many removal attempts because people will believe in this false narrative. THIS IS DEMONIZING, it has been going on for months and this example is a microcosm of what we saw. And you are supporting that.
I bring some thoughts. I’m aware that i’m not here since the beginning and my pov could be totally wrong.
<imo>
About the HIP, I have voted “Make no changes”. @clesaege: I do think that the intervention at devcon was totally wrong. I would like to respectfully ask you to make an expression of apology for the intervention at devcon. Leaving aside what you think its true or not, it would be a great example of reflection. Keep the personal discussion about founders / launchers with Santi as you wish, but that specific intervention need a reflection from your side.
Why “make no changes”?
I just see that voting this only add fuel to the fire and i really wish that the community stop the fights. Not the debates, just the fights. Also, I don’t think that the mission board is working well at all. So, for a structure that has low value for me, I don’t have too much engagement to judge who is better for the seat or not. Clement will continue being Clement, with his decitions, statements and thoughts. The main argument for me to consider “removing clement” is the “representation”. But I have considered that when I vote the first mission board election. I haven’t voted Clement. Just for researchers:
The act of removing is really strong. If I had voted for Clement and then he had “disappointed” me, perhaps I would vote to remove him. As a “correction” to my previous vote. But that is not the case. I’m not comfortable voting for removal.
