Ending the GIVgarden 🥀

Well, as you may have inferred from the title, this post is to discuss the possibility of shutting down the GIVgarden. This post will cover the following:

  • A quick explainer of the purpose of the GIVgarden
  • Why I believe it should be shutdown
  • Steps needed to shutdown the GIVgarden
  • A proposal system that could replace it

GIVgarden speedrun :keyboard:

The GIVgarden was launched at the outset of the GIVeconomy in 2021. It was designed as the proposal engine for the GIVeconomy & Giveth. Community members could propose initiatives that supported Giveth’s growth and mission and receive funding in GIV tokens to accomplish the work.

This primarily used Conviction Voting to gather “votes” from GIV holders. We had a series of proposals come through, almost all received funding, however a few proposals failed to provide the value they promised.

Why shut it down :electric_plug:

The GIVgarden has been neglected for the last 1.5 years and nobody uses it anymore, the original team of developers from 1hive/Gardens have stopped actively maintaining it and moved on to other projects.

Giveth DAO also hasn’t had the appetite for fielding external funding requests for quite some time and I am under the impression this has not changed.

The GIVgarden also holds a considerable sum of GIV and after observing conviction voting in action in not only our Garden but also in 1hive and TEC we found that this voting type allows proposals to pass too easily.

All these points above have convinced me that the GIVgarden is a looming liability to the GIVeconomy.

Steps to shut it down :teacher:

If the DAO agrees to shut down the GIVgarden it would require:

  • Create a new multisig which will only hold the GIVgarden funds and disburse future proposal funding
  • Create a transaction from the giveth main multisig transferring the GIVgarden’s GIVstream to the new multisig
  • Create a vote from the GIVgarden which will:
    1. pause the voting apps on the GIVgarden (prevent more proposals and prevent voting on proposals)
    2. Send all of the GIV it holds to the new multisig

After the technical side of shutting it down is complete we would also need to:

  • Remove the GIVgarden page from the website
  • Remove references to the GIVgarden in our website and documentation
  • Deprecate the GIVgarden documentation
  • (?) Notify the community via Discord (?)

A new proposal system :ballot_box:

We can use our existing Snapshot to handle any incoming proposals to the Giveth community. Still relying on our covenant and terms of service as guidelines for proposals.

Our community will be able to request GIV for their Giveth-related initiatives through snapshot and depending on the outcome funding will be disbursed from the given multisig, manually done by the multisig signers.

We can adapt our current proposal process documentation to make it clear for members who wish to make proposals. Given the amount of proposals we’ve seen in the last 1.5 years (literally zero) I don’t think engineering a robust proposal system is a priority for us.

Moving Forward :next_track_button:

This proposal will remain up for at least one week for Advice Process - after which will move to a Snapshot :zap: vote to decide the outcome!

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Great idea and I support it

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Thank you so much @mitch for taking the initiative to move this forward. I totally agree with deprecating the Garden, moving the funds to a multisig & creating new documentation around proposals through snapshot.

Some things I want to make sure we do too:

  • Edit the covenent (it says all kinds of stuff about using Gardens & Celeste… we need to agree on what our new dispute process will be with the snapshot)
  • Check out proposal processes & documentations of other DAOs using snapshot for this because, as you mentioned, I think we don’t have a lot of an appetite for willy-nilly funding
  • Clearly define the parameters of the snapshot & new gov processes & make a new forum post about it (explaining/defining what is required to post a proposal [rGIV?], etc.)
  • Clearly communicate this with our community - maybe it’s worth it also from a DAO-education perspective to make a blog post or explainer about the evolution of giveth governance and why we’re stopping to use CV.
  • Comment out/remove/modify the givgarden page on the dapp

Anyway, just ideas. I appreciate this so much, the garden has been gathering dust for some time, and I am so grateful that you’re driving it forward.

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Proposal is up on Snapshot for the next 7 days!
https://snapshot.org/#/giv.eth/proposal/0x09a6a267025a1ea94878e04a5b2b1a08436920c3a7f0ef6647a40ac9a2df770b

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snapshot proposals (and votes) would be a discussion worth having separately.
Some of the issues there to be aware of.

Glad we got a chance to discuss mitch. :slight_smile:

Epic… this is a great list @karmaticacid of all that is entailed in “Remove references to the GIVgarden in website and documentation” … lots of process updates and community education involved… even though it’s not really been used, the intention and underlying purpose of the GIVgarden as part of the governance transition from rDAO to GIV holders in general is shifting through what’s been learned in the past 2 years of the GIVeconomy.

Timeline for deprecating, communicating and replacing may be less about the dev and docs and more about the strategic re-alignment to be defined in the process.

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