Questions: governance and the transition to mainnet

[mochet]

olympia and incentives v3 are launching soon. I do not want to confuse or complicate those, so this is entirely separate. The initiative I'm working on is still a WIP but some critical mainnet questions have come up and there's never going to be a better time to ask them--the questions are placed first.

Questions

I realize that it may be a little too early to give definitive answers on some or these but requiree clarity. Answers would definitely help to better inform myself and the community about the next phase we will be going through--some of the questions are interconnected which was unavoidable.

1. If/when/how/where does the formation of governance begin in a way that will impact mainnet?
2. Where exactly do governance agreements end up? I am a little unclear on this myself when it comes to proposals vs constitution and want to ensure that efforts I am taking are consistent with what others are thinking.
3. What content transfers to mainnet has been answered partly in this issue: Key Mainnet content transfer questions #3012 However, some parts weren't asked at that time... Will any proposals transfer to mainnet launch?
4. Similar to above: I have read this issue and it obviously relates: Initial mainnet constitution #1894 The question here being will the community "own" the constitution prior to launch?
5. If it isn't agreeable to have the constitution transfer entirely to mainnet, is it possible to have at least some defined areas of it do so? I have explained further below, but it is ideal and somewhat critical (IMHO) to future organization purposes of the DAO that upon mainnet launch some core things are agreed upon for the governance system to start on the right foot and work well--I believe that these are mostly apolitical, paperwork, processes, report, document or common sense topics and are not really involved with deeply opinionated things.
   • In relation to this, I want the mainnet launch to have at least some form of organization and not be a chaotic learning experience where 500 proposals have to be created upon launch if I could just implement the same thing over some time period prior to mainnet launch. I would much rather that we at least have the core things defined, agreed upon and in a good state so that the Joystream DAO functions well in the vital period that will come after the genesis event and also so that these core things are not dependent on any one person to action.
6. What I am essentially trying to figure out is how to interconnect the "Building a/the governance system" section (which is below) and do it in a way that is in tandem with other expectations and plans for mainnet launch so that it can be beneficial for everyone (I hope).
   • If areas are considered out of scope I can put them in other areas--everything I've done so far is in very early stages and really up for interpretation and before I involve the community it would be far better to start the discussion here since it is heavily dependent on many of the questions asked here.
7. I vaguely recall that one of the testnets after olympia may involve another "fresh state" but I can't find any information on this topic and it was from long ago, so is another "fresh state" still on the table prior to mainnet launch?

Other relevant info

• The community is a little disengaged currently for a variety of reasons and incentives v3 will hopefully reengage some people as well as bring new voices to discuss governance topics.
  • I am keenly aware that much of what I'm discussing in "Building a/the governance system" requires discussion from a variety of voices.
  • I have a dominant, largely unchallenged voice when it comes to governance on this project simply because its a personal interest of mine and I've been extensively involved since very early on. So while I've created lots of ideas and discussion surrounding governance I do not wish to attempt to define it for others.
  • Everything I'm talking about will have to go through governance--I am just unclear of how and most importantly when is the best time to do this when.
• This can be figured out later but is worth mentioning -- We also have documents and templates and the best current place for them is https://github.com/Joystream/community-repo but obviously the ownership of this after mainnet is unknown.

"Building a/the governance system"

I have created an issue which fully explains what the "build a governance system" initiative is and I have also briefly summarized it below: Joystream/community-repo#710

An attempt to reduce wordcount (although I would suggest reading that issue!):

1. At the earliest stage of considering what seems imperative to the moments immediately following post-mainnet and based upon the experience of the incentivized testnets so far I've come to the conclusion of how important the basic structure and organization of the Joystream DAO's governance will be--this hasn't been effectively dealt with or defined up until now nor do I think it has been critically examined but I think there is a very real need for this to happen and that there are substantial benefits if it is effectively structured.
   • The goal here is to drastically, hugely improve the readability of our governance system far beyond where it stands right now. The impact of this isn't something that will be felt 2 months after mainnet launch but something that will just be an afterthought once the platform is operational instead of a headache.
   • This initiative is about taking the paperwork, documents, templates and other items which humans use to "do" governance and trying to define some critical concepts, standardize critical things where possible and effectively label and categorize information for the benefit of future users just as much as current users.
   • It is an initiative to create the building blocks necessary for organizing the current chaotic mess we have ended up with from testnets so far: a huge, undigestible amount of information generated from 1000+ proposals.
   • I have identified numerous shortcomings and prior to this there really hasn't been an attempt at creating an effective organization system for the governance system before, I'm trying to make one. I know about the shortcomings because despite Pioneer v1 lacking a proposal search feature, I still have to exert effort to find information.
   • Although there are runtime and pioneer v2 features to assist with this, there also has to be an agreeable basic set of documents to ensure users move from the testnet phase into a more consistent way of dealing with core proposals.
     • It also has to be ensured that people are assigned to keep things organized and that this tedious, boring task is actively dealt with and not ignored.
     • This is the boring paperwork aspect that if done well can pay dividends in the future in terms of value and if not done well will create an ever increasing amount of chaos and complexity and make the governance process unreadable for new users after launch.
     • If people cannot "read" the governance process, then they cannot read the value. Tokenomic diagrams and search tools with Pioneer v2 are extremely welcome and help significantly with all of this, but the text also has to similarly be organized--it will not work the way it is currently done.
   • I have begun the initial work of collecting relevant things and building and organizing the initial structure for the system. There is still much work to be done and the community will have to be involved.
2. To emphasize the importance of what I'm attempting to do, this initiative is not only for council members, voters or proposal authors but each and every potential user or non-user. Understanding the runtime of the Joystream DAO is complex enough, and at some stage it will be trivial to use and learn.
   • 1000s of proposals on the other hand do not become any easier to read or understand over time. There is no tutorial that can be created to improve this. It requires using an organized way of dealing with multiple components that is a forward thinking system.
   • Unlike a traditional organization that might put out quarterly statements, a DAO has to do not only this but provide a usable explanation of what is happening now--we may have chains of proposals + discussion threads for a single core idea that involve 50-100+ individual items.
3. "Building a/the governance system" is a component of this: https://github.com/Joystream/marketing/issues/199 It is not publicly shared yet and is my own interpretation and playground for exploring how "post-mainnet" might look.
   • This component will be publicly shared and the GitHub issue links to all the things that have been included so far--Notion is just far easier for organization and I don't want people to fully see something that is a complex governance topic right now because there are too many other things going on and it would be too distracting.

Just to share what this all looks like on Notion I'm including a screenshot:

[mochet]

Another question:

• Will social tokens transfer to mainnet? Obviously the value cannot, but does it sound feasible or realistic for the distribution of these to do so?