Summary

An issue was recently identified with the ‘Conflicting Votes’ process defined in the FOX Governance Process. If passed, this proposal will address the issue by updating the ‘Conflicting Votes’ instructions.

Abstract

The FOX Governance process currently includes the following instructions for how to handle Conflicting Votes:

“From time to time there may be conflicting proposals. To avoid issues, the Ideation phase can also serve as time for anyone to list their preferred alternative option on the forum. Each proposal on an associate topic will have a [TOPIC] block placed in its title.

After that time, a formal proposal will be put forward including all options available to move forward with that received majority support in Ideation.

This will ensure that everyone has the ability to surface their preferences while keeping decision timelines reasonably short.”

Fun fact: this language was forked from Gitcoin DAO’s Governance Process 💚

However, ShapeShift’s governance process differs from Gitcoin’s in that there is a mandatory 3-day phase prior to the Ideation phase known as Incubation.

Recently, while SCP-131 was in Ideation, a counter proposal, SCP-128, was submitted to the Incubation stage. By the time SCP-131 had passed Ideation, SCP-128 had not yet been submitted to Ideation. This begged the question as to whether SCP-131 could proceed to the official voting phase or needed to wait to see if SCP-128 entered and passed Ideation so the Conflicting Proposals process could be applied. In this case, the proposer of SCP-131 kindly agreed to wait for SCP-128 to go through Ideation, but noted that the Conflicting Votes process should be amended to prevent indefinite delays in the future.

Motivation

This proposal updates the language of the Conflicting Votes section of the FOX Governance Process to prevent indefinite delays in the Governance Process and to provide clear guidance to the community for when a counter proposal must be submitted in order for the Conflicting Votes process to apply.

Specification

If this proposal is passed, the Conflicting Votes section of the FOX Governance Process will be updated to the following:

Conflicting Proposals

Conflicting proposals are proposals that are active at the same time and address the same issue or are mutually exclusive. In the case of a conflicting proposal, the Ideation phase can also serve as time for anyone to post their preferred alternative option on the forum. For the Conflicting Proposals process to apply, counter proposals must be published in Proposal Discussion before the Ideation phase of the original proposal concludes, and should include "[Counter Proposal to SCP-X]" where X is the corresponding SCP#. To avoid delays in the governance process, any counter proposal that follows the format requirements of Ideation and is published before the conclusion of the original proposal must be included as a voting option when the Original proposal is put up for final vote.

Benefits

The proposed improvements to the Conflicting Votes section provide necessary clarity and time constraints.

Drawbacks

These changes would enable any properly formatted counter proposal to skip the ideation process and go straight to final governance, which could result in un-vetted ideas as proposal options or even passing. It also provides less space for feedback and iterations on counter proposals.

However, if a counter proposal isn't viable, it's less likely to pass. Further, counter proposals can still gather feedback and continue being iterated on until the final proposal is published.