Active Participant Definition: Ideas Wanted

we should add the reference votes in the telegram community, we won’t necessarily get that result but it will be worth our reference, actually the telegram community is quite large. On the Hopr forum I saw less active members, so it will not convey all the information to everyone.

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Seems hard to justify all the work that would take, when the forum here works really well for this job.

I think any metric should take into consideration the age of the account and the regularity of posts as well as the number of positive reactions, replies and likewise age or “trustworthiness” score of the people interacting with the message.

However, ultimately I’m afraid any automated solution will eventually be gamed. Even posting quality content can’t be used as a reliable metric because ChatGPT can produce better contributions than most actual users. People can just create a few sock puppet accounts, space them over time and run a script to have them like, reply, etc. at random moments. You can quickly build a small set of seemingly reputable participants to push your proposal through.

So I would suggest either adding:

  • Human curation. This can be in the form of a popularity score, elections (fixed term) or co-optation by people currently in authority roles (mods, team, etc.) Maybe not the most decentralized or transparent but the safest
  • Proof of humanity types of scores. I believe Sismo, gitcoin and others offer something like that based on various metrics for a wallet (link to SNS profiles, on-chain activity, etc.) There could be a requirement for a PoH lowest score.
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Here I think age of account could make sense as a parameter. I’m reluctant to modify token holdings by age, as tokens in HOPR are quite fluid, especially for node runners, but your forum pseudonym is a different matter.

ChatGPT is interesting. I’ve certainly noticed a lot of ChatGPT content in the past two discussions (some of it disclosed). I think it’s a useful to help articulate people’s thoughts (especially non-English speakers), but I’ve also seen people just dumping the proposal topic or the thread content and pasting the output.

I was an editor before crypto (hence my pseudonym) so I can quite easily spot these. But that might not be the same for other people, and I expect by this time next year things will have improved exponentially.

I’m interested in automated and AI-assisted forum moderation, but I can’t see a way for humans to be fully replaced here safely.

Proof of humanity is a fraught issue where HOPR is concerned. There are limits to how much metadata analysis we should condone. But Sismo is certainly interesting. I talked to the founders in Amsterdam and there’s lots to admire there.

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For the activity part of this discussion, I’ve had issues staying active in the past governance discussions due to simply missing the announcements, not being able to keep track of the actual HOPR Announcements. I am subscribed to a ton of announcement channels, more than I’m sometimes able to read, and sometimes some slip through the cracks. But even if they weren’t I don’t think a Telegram announcement is always enough.

On that note, I’d propose a mobile app integration for HOPR Governance/Discussions iOS/Android. Would be much easier to keep track for users (at least for me), and easier to follow and participate in the discussions than it is through just this forum (I personally go through extended periods of no PC access)

As for participation, I don’t think you can go without human curation, as you can have participation in the form of simply stating support, or actively discussing and arguing something. Not sure there’s a foolproof way to quantify those, unless maybe some AI solution can help, but I have doubts that’d be foolproof either.

You could have different ways of interacting with proposals. Directly “voting” at discussion phase Yes/No through some UI option, which would be the most basic level of activity, coupled with critical discussion which would elevate the level.

And I think the parameter for activity, if there is one, should be per discussion, not per forum. Don’t see how a forum wide one would help identifiying involvement in a particular discussion.

agree with this - posts such as ‘I support this’ aren’t really participation - especially if participation is incentivized buy tokens/nfts etc - ‘I support this because I agree with x point and y point that were raised’ isn’t much more to write but at least it take a bit of effort

good points re human curation. but especially with the number of update channels etc we all are part of - All project info should be accessible in one place , and that place should be somewhere we all go anyway so for me that is the network dashboard because we are generally node runners and generally pretty obsessive about checking our nodes performance

Hi,

Whilst being a long term HOPR member, I’m no expert on DAO’s or how best to add value to this discussion, more questioning how metrics and processes have been arrived at. I guess thats just the engineer coming out in me.

As other have said participation shouldn’t IMHO be restricted to doing certain things, as I have no idea what proposal I could put on this discussion unlike previous ones other than spamming the forum just to achieve a higher rank. We all have strengths and weaknesses so a more rounded review of anticipation which doesn’t affect contributors that don’t have a proposal shouldn’t be marked down.

also likes should count for zero! over on Torum one of the daily missions in to like 5 posts, so ppl just like the first 5 posts without reading them, which means they are then more likely to be in the 5 for the next person etc etc

  • What actions should qualify as participation?
  • How should we measure these?
  • How active should someone be to qualify here?

Definitely post creation and replying to a post.
Now the question is those who are not allowed to create a post and replying a post (those who has less than 1000 HOPR)
It could be a combination of the number of “Liking”, pages the person viewed and how long and how often the person visit the forum. We can come up with a formula and a threshold.

Post creation and replying to a post is already limited to those who has more than 1000 HOPR. So, spam-like post might be already mitigated to some extent however manual curation might need to be available as an option until the AI-based solutions is introduced. The question is who will be the moderator. My suggestion is the extraordinary council members that is discussed here Emergency Process: Ideas Wanted - #10 by satopin
If such moderation takes place, it should be publicly visible to avoid any misuse of this moderation power.

The factor of “Active participation” is only used to authenticate the Proposal Validity and effectiveness of the Referendum. So, I think it is not much of an issue to set the threshold relatively lower.

  • Should this parameter be global (i.e., at any given time there’s a single figure for number of active participants across the forum) or local (i.e., different sub-topics or governance areas have their own participation figures somehow)?

I think it should be global at any given time, let’s say, 3 month. So, any activity that is 3 months old will not be counted.

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Thanks for the detailed suggestions here and elsewhere @satopin!

I’ll craft some more specific proposals for this and the emergency processes today, based on everyone’s input.

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Yes, it’s important to try and make the metrics match the actions and desired results, rather than just saying “well we can only measure x,y and z, so that’s what we’ll have to use”. Because in any transparent system with meaningful incentives, those metrics will become the goal themselves for many users.

I agree that likes are basically meaningless here. In all our experimentations these past few years, using likes to meaningfully measure engagement has been the least successful.

On an unrelated note, I don’t want to go too far down the AI rabbit hole (as an editor, I’m a lot less impressed with LLMs than many). Several DAO projects are going full AI management as their goal and I think it’s unlikely to work and very hard to make legal.

That said, while AI is currently bad at high-quality content creation, it is already good at gisting (extracting useful information from stuff). I think there’s scope for some interesting research in using AI to assess contributions and participation, as well as providing newcomers with high-level overviews (I’m seeing a bunch of people who had to join late and found there was a lot to take in).

But I would want to stick to the old fashioned way for a long while yet.

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considering telegram/discord “actions” sounds reasonable but how could that work from a technical point of view? on the other hand, discussed topics on telegram and forum seem to be different ones, as far as i can see it.

Yes at the moment they’re separate. Now would be the best time to change that, if people wanted to, but I agree that the technical considerations are a concern.

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Based on these discussion, I’m proposing the following definition:

Based on forum discussions, the following definition is proposed:

An active participant is any user in the HOPR Community Trust forum who has, within the previous 28 days, performed one or more of the following actions:

  • Created a proposal*

  • Created a post*

  • Replied to a post*

  • Signed a proposal

  • Voted in a Community Trust vote or temperature check from their registered forum address

  • Posted a bond for a Community Trust proposal from their registered forum address

  • Participated in a proposal audit for a Community Trust proposal

*If an Extraordinary Council were to be created (Proposal #9) these members would have moderation powers to nullify these actions in case of spam or Sybils.

If you agree with this definition, please vote YES in the upcoming vote.

If you disagree, please vote NO. This will trigger an immediate further discussion and vote to define this.

I think this is a good workable definition, but please don’t be afraid to vote no to give this important discussion more time!

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Thank you for sharing the proposal.
I have one question, though.
For those who have less than 1000 HOPR, it is only possible to be counted as an active participant by signing a proposal and/or voting, if I understand correctly.
That would mean that there is no way for them to be counted as a active participant if there is no proposal/voting to be signed within the previous 28 days.
Is that a deliberate choice? I can’t simply imagine that proposals/votings take place that frequently, so…

I think age of account could make sense as a parameter.

Is the community going to put proposals out every month, that seems like a lot and starts to become like a government whos elected member HAVE to do something and this IMHO leads to poor decisions and trying to hit KPI’s rather than sensible and well thought out proposals, votes, etc.

Just trying to get a sense of things moving forward as a lot of us have busy working lives as well to balance as well.

Not at all. No governance is good governance too, as long as everything is running smoothly.

The drop-off for active participation would just be to prevent people from being active at the beginning, ghosting, but their earlier participation affects thresholds down the line.

There’s also a liability protection angle. There have been (extreme) examples of people participating in DAOs over completely benign stuff, then a year or more passes, the DAO votes for something illegal, those people don’t participate or even notice, but their previous activity still exposes them to legal action.

So in fact this works well to your point: because people are busy and don’t have time to do lots of governance, it’s legally useful to automatically and regularly drop out of the system, as long as there’s an easy way to pick up again when you do want to reconnect

I heard a podcast with the founder of KaliDAO talking about designing AI agents whose role would be to encourage activity in DAOs, and it just seemed like a terrible idea: governance for the sake of governance will lead to bad decisions.