RomeDAO: Gamifying Governance & Self Organization
Please note — the information in this article is no longer up to date. We have kept it online for transparency and reference purposes
Introducing the grand RomeDAO RPG that will guide and control governance and organization of the great houses.
RomeDAO is a community project with no central team. It’s a community project built by and for the community. This means it’s up to the community contributors to build a prospering Rome. If not them, then who?
The current paradigm of DeFi governance and community participation is centralized and has a low ratio of volunteers to output. We‘re running a grand experiment in gamification as an attempt at making governance both fun and engaging. Our key indicator then is not TVL but rather % of $ROME tokens participating regularly in governance. (III,III) is about more than just staking, it’s about building a better protocol alongside your friends.
The governance structure we’re setting up as a community reflects more closely with our principles as a community-led DAO.
As of this post, the DAO has already self-organized into “houses.” Each house is an organization of aligned contributors who work together to improve RomeDAO. Each house is a DAO within RomeDAO, sub-DAOs if you will. They build together, vote together, and hang out together. For now five houses have already organized which will be contributing to the future of Rome.
- House of Consuls: a high quality community of policy makers and trend setters
- House of Chaos: a group of Chaos DAO members whose focus is bringing Rome to the broader Kusama ecosystem
- House of Grapes: a neutral house that hosts events and provides Rome with its grape supply, upcoming event soon
- House of Kek: culture, historicity, and a place for the finest memers of RomeDAO
- House of Sempronia: a product focused house which focuses on design and engineering
In the coming days we will get the channel permissions set up to houses can self-moderate their own house Discord channels. Any community member will then be able to start figuring out which house they most align with. Hundreds of community members have already organized into houses. Which house will you join, anon?
We can’t wait for every house to share their family trees, lore, banners, constitutions, and self-organize into tight knit communities within the larger RomeDAO. Much of our community’s inspiration for gamifying and governance draw from titles like Crusader Kings and Total War.
Houses will self-organize and perform internal governance to their house to determine who performs what tasks, what proposals are put forward to the DAO, and other key decisions. The houses have agreed that governance will look like follows:
- Houses internally labor over policy decisions and proposals
- Bi-weekly two representatives from each house bring their house’s ideas to a public senate voice forum (reps decided by each house however they please)
- Votes are performed on Snapshot over disputed topics
- Any contract changes are executed by the community controlled multisig
We expect various houses to form alliances, collaborate on ideas, and sometimes vehemently disagree. We expect intrigue and disputes. We expect houses to poach family members from other houses and form alliances via fun community organized events.
House members are not forced to vote along house lines. They may either vote independently as they choose or delegate their votes to house representatives.
We are currently designing an element in the staking UI that will allow stakers to “back” the house they most align with. These developments are extensions of the Snapshot API. You’ll be able to view which houses have the most backing, which put forth the most passed proposals, etc.
In the future a threshold for House creation will be set up. We think a 1% collective ownership of ROME is sufficient ownership to start a house. We want to eventually create a permissionless process for house creation whereby if a collective reaches a 1% threshold the house can be permissionlessly created. For now, any collective can create a house as long as the other houses approve them.
And naturally, the war map will reflect the actions of the houses during each campaign. Total troops provided to the war effort, proposals, and campaign progress will all overlay against your allegiance to a specific house. Your participation in (III,III) should feel like you’re aligning with a tight knit group of friends to build, create, and play.
The houses are making a lot of progress on the map and will start integrating these elements inside the war map very soon. Here’s a quick sneak preview of some work one of our map designers has been doing, another dev/ designer has been collaborating to make it all happen in the web app via three.js.
We believe such a gamified governance setup is perhaps one of the first true DAOs — a decentralized setup with no key central parties, only the great houses collaborating to build a better future for RomeDAO.
For Rome. 🏛️
Twitter: https://twitter.com/romedaofinance
Discord: https://discord.gg/romedao
