Intro:

A brief of overview of the Progressive Decentralized Governance of PUSH.

The first step toward the Progressive Decentralized Governance was taken on 16th September 2021 with the successful launch of PUSH Governance Phase ZERO.

The initial phases of PUSH Governance allowed our community to vote and participate in three ways:

Grants Program: allocating grants to teams, projects, and initiatives across the ecosystem that are helping build around the PUSH ecosystem. The grant funds will come from the $PUSH Community Allocation.

Weekly Rockstar NFTs: currently running the second season - each week (starting April 19th, 2021), community members who continue to help us on our mission to bring Push Protocol to the Web3 are airdropped an NFT along with a bag of $PUSH tokens. Recipients of this NFT are also eligible to join the Rockstars of PUSH protocol Token Gated Channel on our Discord and get access to exclusive content before everyone else. Voting for the recipient is part of the governance process.**

Meta-Governance: token holders can pass and vote on measures affecting how the PUSH governance evolves past phase 0.

It must be noted that the current governance participation mechanisms are the initial stages of PUSH governance. However, as the protocol matures, PUSH Governance will further decentralize and include more categories giving the community more power over the protocol.

Governance Roles​

There are 3 crucial roles in PUSH governance:

PUSH Nominee: Active community members who strongly support the vision of PUSH can nominate themselves to be a PUSH Nominee. $PUSH token holders can then choose to delegate their voting rights to any Push Nominee, who can vote on governance proposals through Snapshot.

PUSH Delegatee: PUSH Delegatees are active members of the community who have at least 75,000 $PUSH delegated to them. They will be able to create proposals on Snapshot that are approved on the forum. To delegate your voting power to a PUSH Delegatee, to another person, or to yourself please visit https://app.push.org/govern

PUSH Holders: $PUSH holders can delegate their voting power to anyone, including themselves. They can also delegate it to a PUSH Delegatee to ensure their views and thoughts are well represented. The PUSH Delegatee can be changed at any time**.

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As Push DAO evolves and gradually delegates ownership of programs and organizational units to the Push community, we will actively explore additional governance structures.

Presently, Push DAO is in the process of formalizing the operational framework for the Globalization subDAO and the Grants subDAO. This empowers these subDAOs to function autonomously in conjunction with Push at the outset, with a long-term vision of transitioning to full community-led management.

Governance process:

An In-depth guide to understanding the complete governance procedures of Push

The Proposal Phase: This step encourages community involvement in enhancing proposals by incorporating community feedback and fostering discussions.

The Discussion Phase: Acting as a final check and an opportunity for in-depth discussions, this stage occurs before proposals are put to a vote.

The Proposal Phase

The Proposal phase may be considered as the initial step towards the governance journey.

For any proposal to be accepted and executed for PUSH Governance, the initial proposer needs to submit their proposal on the Governance Proposal Forum with the rules mentioned below.

Note: This is a Discourse-hosted forum for governance-related discussion. Community members must register for an account before participating. Proposals on the forum must be submitted following a template.

Submitting a Draft Proposals​

• Users need to post a new proposal draft under Governance Proposals.

• During this stage, we are in the process of incubating ideas, and the community is welcome to participate by sharing their opinions or proposing adjustments. This occurs prior to the ideas progressing into formal proposals.

• Topics/Posts/Replies with low information or inappropriate content will be ruthlessly moderated.

• Draft proposals are then promoted to the Governance Discussions section provided they meet the promotion criteria mentioned below.

What are the Promotion Criteria?​

Proposals from the Governance Proposals section to the Governance Discussion section if they meet the following criteria:

• Must be submitted under Governance Proposal section

• Must be live for 5+ days

• Must have 5 Likes (minimum)

The Discussion Phase

The next step in the governance journey is discussion. Draft proposals from the Proposal phase that meet the promotion criteria are promoted to the Governance Discussions Forum by the DAO Governance Lead.

Draft proposals in this phase should initiate discussion. We expect and encourage the community to debate them and express approval or disapproval.

Submitting a Draft Proposals for Discussion​

• The DAO Governance Lead can push draft proposals once they have met the criteria to Governance Discussion.

• This section is intended to serve as the last step before submitting a proposal to Snapshot.

• Proposals can be pushed through to this section once enough traction has been gained in the Governance Proposals section.

• From here, draft proposals become a formal proposal once promotion criteria is met and will subsequently be pushed to Snapshot for voting to commence.

• Only PUSH Delegatees (users who have 75k+ votes) (delegated or owned) can initiate the formal proposal. If the user doesn’t have enough votes, then it’s expected of the user to either find a Delegatee to submit their formal proposal or request a Champion to find one for them.

What are the Promotion Criteria?​

A draft proposal becomes a formal proposal if the following criteria are met:

• Must be live for 5+ days in the Governance Discussion category

• Proposal on Forum must receive at least 10 likes

• Proposal on Forum must have a minimum of 3 replies

Finally! The Governance Phase

Once the proposal on the Governance Discussion section meets the promotion criteria, It’s considered a formal proposal and requires formal voting which takes place on Snapshot. A formal proposal can be defeated or accepted as outlined by the rules below.

Votes on Snapshot are weighted by the number of $PUSH delegated to the address used to vote. A minimum of 75,000 $PUSH tokens are required to create a proposal.

Note: Only users who have 75k+ votes (delegated or owned) can initiate the formal proposal. If the user doesn’t have enough votes, then it’s expected of the user to either find a Delegatee to submit their formal proposal or request a the Push Governance Lead to find one for them.

Here below is the flow for the first version of the governance process:

Submitting a Formal Proposal on Snapshot​

The draft proposals that pass the promotion criteria of the Discussion phase are termed as formal proposals as they would be sent for formal voting. The rules for submission of a formal proposal on snapshot are as follows:

• Formal proposals need to be submitted to Snapshot and must be given at least 7 days for the community to vote on the proposal.

• Only the Push Governance Lead or a PUSH Delegatee can submit the proposals on the snapshot.

• All proposals on Snapshot must give at least 7 days for the community to vote on the proposal.

The Game Theory, Incentives & Rules

Quick overview on the game theory, the incentive mechanisms and the rules involved in the PUSH Governance.

PUSH Governance is designed keeping quality participation in mind and as a byproduct carries some incentives and penalties to keep the governance focused, active and be ever improving.

Incentives for users whose formal draft is accepted

• We believe that having incentives for the users whose draft proposal are accepted will greatly improve the quality of the proposal (and quantity as well 😅) as it’s in the best interest of the user to submit a draft proposal that can go through the entire cycle and be formally accepted.

• For this reason Push DAO approved and implemented PIP-02: Incentives for Approved Proposals.

• To counteract the quantity of draft proposals by a user, we have introduced rules which limit the number of draft proposals that can be submitted by the user in different phases.

Rules for users creating a proposal draft (Proposal Phase)

• Each user at https://gov.push.org is only allowed to submit a proposal draft once every 7 days under the proposal phase. Tweaks in the proposal can still be allowed at the discretion of the Push DAO Governance Leadership unit.