I actually did a lot of research on parliamentary procedures until I realized it’s not that interesting reading. Did the same for different electoral systems and came to the same conclusion. So instead of the boring stuff, I’ll just make this short and to the point.
One of the features of the legislative process (in US, at least) is that legislation is first considered in committees and after several procedural votes, the entire legislative body can cast a “yes” or “no” vote. The last part is what most people see or hear in the news and is what’s implemented in most DAOs.
Having procedural votes is helpful to ensure that all legislation have been considered in the same manner and meets certain requirements. For example, budget related bills can be required to have an independent audit before it can be considered for a full vote.
Why is this important? Not ever member of the DAO will have time to read every proposal in detail. Having standardized processes ensure that when proposals comes up for a vote, there are no surprises.
Example: Congressional Budget Resolutions cannot enact spending budgets, but sets targets for other groups to follow. If you don’t care about reading through the full budget, but do care about your priorities getting funding, just make sure to attend the budget setting meeting and vote there, instead of looking at every single proposal for items related to you.
A simple implementation of procedure vote is to have to classes of proposals, process proposals and execution proposals. The purpose of process proposals is to advance an proposal through a process that the DAO determines to be warranted while the purpose of an execution proposal is to execute the decision of the DAO.
For example, if the DAO have a budget. A simple process proposal could be to require at least N people to have sign the proposal. A more complicated process would be to at least N% of people sign the proposal with “I’m not opposed to this” (see previous article on what types of votes to cast). Members don’t have to support a budget proposal at the initial stage, they just have to not oppose it. Why? The proposed budget might have nothing to do with what a member is interested in, but you’d still want people to provide oversight of the budgeting process.
After the “not opposed vote”, the proposal could turn into an execution proposal. For execution proposals, the voting requirement might be 75% of the votes (doesn’t have to be 1 person, 1 vote) PLUS an executive of the DAO to approve. After which, the execution now falls under that particular executive.
Another example, an investment club might require limited partners to support and general partners to execute. The result of the investments could be distributed first to the executing general partner and voting limited partners, before distributing to the entire investment club as a whole. This creates an incentive for people to vote. How to avoid people voting “yes” on everything? Those who have voted will have to contribute a little more to the budget.
DAOs are the perfect vehicles for implementing logic based procedures that can be used for governance. Unlike in real life, where it’s hard to keep track of who has voted and what was the result, smart contracts can effectively keep track of what’s the status of proposals.
A simple implementation would be to require proposals with budgets to have no major opposition before an actual vote to execute the budget. This setups a nice check and balance system to ensure the DAO is functioning efficiently.
That’s it for this article. Stay tuned for the last one on thoughts on representation. That is, how does one person, one vote work if a voting entity is another DAO?!