## Optimism Fractal
### Season 1 Retrospective

Optimism Fractal began meeting on October 23, 2023, and will complete its 12 week bootstrapping phase in January 2024.

The following is a summary of personal thoughts and ideas I've accumulated over the course of the bootstrapping phase so far. Overall, the Respect game is a novel solution in reputation-based governance models and onchain coordination that is designed to be fun and to scale. I chose to focus here on ways the game might continue to be improved and hardened against attacks (especially at scale). My hope is that these thoughts help guide and strengthen the Optimism Fractal community as it grows in the coming months.

### Respect Game Improvements :hammer_and_wrench:

#### Checklists
The Respect Game consensus tools allow for a fairly frictionless process of ranking participants and distributing Respect onchain. However, sometimes members new to Optimism Fractal or web3 struggle to complete all the steps neccesary for the game to work.

A checklist of things that partipicants could prepare for before each game could significantly lower barriers to entry and participation.

Some suggestions for items on the checklist:
- Having access to Optimism wallet address
- Ability to sign an onchain transaction (skill-wise or access to hardware wallet)
- Some ETH in your wallet to perform the onchain action

#### Visual Presentations

Visual presentations can be more informative and memorable than only spoken ones. Screen sharing and showing the work you did while you talk about it could help convey the value of the work better to other game participants. Encouraging use of visual props while presenting could help the best contributions be recognized equally (instead of the best presentation getting recognition over the best contribution).

A drawback could be technical difficulties inherent in passing along screenshares to so many people in a limited amount of time.

#### Note Taking

People process information in different ways. Assigning someone to keep notes while participants share, then posting them in the chat for the group to reference when voting could be a valuable and helps make the game more accessible.

These notes can then be included in the show notes of the recording.

There is an opportunity here to use AI to provide a summary of each session to post along with the recording for those that wish to read a summary rather than watch the enitre recording.

#### Absentee Ballots

Currently members of the community need to be present to participate in the game and earn Respect. So, if someone is taking a day off or is in a timezone that doesn't match well with the time the event is held, then there is no opportunity for their contributions to be considered.

One solution is allowing people to submit their contributions ahead of time to be included in the game.

Another solution is to allow abesent members to share what they did since they were last there, as opposed to what they did in the last week.

Further discussion and considerations are probably warranted here if this is something the community wishes to address.

#### Token Distribution Visibility

To date 1,673 OPF tokens have been minted and distributed ([source](https://optimistic.etherscan.io/token/0x53c9e3a44b08e7ecf3e8882996a500eb06c0c5cc)). Currently, it's rather difficult to view and understand the distribution of those coins, as the block explorer is clunky and doesn't support ENS.

Having some kind of dashboard UI to see a leaderboard of Respect holders would benefit the community, especially as the bootstrapping phase comes to a close and a governing council is formed.

This dashboard could be built from scratch, or use existing tools (such as DAOHaus).

#### Meeting Structure

Currently all meetings are recorded and distributed openly. This is good for visibility, posterity and transparency. The However, would people interct

how recording the unstructured part of the meeting effects effects participation.

structure around the meetings- going over time

### Respect Game Thought Experiments :thinking_face:

#### Transparent vs shielded voting
Currently Fractalgram utilises Telegram's "poll" feature for participants to vote on rankings. The polls are currently set to transparent, meaning as soon as you vote it is revealed who voted for whom.

An alternative would be to enable "Anonymous Voting", also referred to as shielded voting. This would keep all votes anonymous at all times. It becomes relevant during instances when the group has not yet reached concensus and it's apparent who is or is not chaning their vote, and it allows people to change their votes without any perceived social reprecussions. Shielded voting can also encourage self-voting, whereby in most cases voting for yourself (even if you believe you contrbuted the most) could be _interpreted_ as being seen as a self-serving act by others.

Overall, Respect distribution might be more evenly distributed over time if the Respect Game implemented shielded voting. Further discussion and considerations are probably warranted.

#### Seasons
The current deployment of the Optimism Fractal's Respect Game includes a 12 week "bootstrapping" period, but beyond that there is no schedule structure beyond meeting every Monday exists.

It might be worth considering splitting the year into seasons; relatively short periods of time (12 - 16 weeks) that have a defined beginning and end. This can allow for reflection, retrospectives, implementing improvements and establish natural rythems throughtout the year. It could also help define council terms (see Meta Governance below).

Some discussion of this happened during the bootstrap period, but further discussion might be worth having.

### Attack Vectors :scream:

#### Provably Random Breakout Groups
Currently, if more than six people are present in a game, the group is split up so that no more than six people are playing the game at once. This is an integral component to scaling the game past small groups of people.

However, an attack vector remains open here. Consider that the Facilitator (at this time I believe this role is undefined by name but could also be called Host), who hosts the overall game and is in charge of breaking out groups of more than six people, is compromised? This person could collude with Puppets (people not actually interested in playing the game, or perhaps incentivised in some way to accumulate hard power in the community) to place them on their own in a breakout room. If this happened over time, the Puppets could accumulate Dud Respect (fake or not truly earned Respect tokens that don't actually correlate to respect within the community) and use it to hold positions of power within the community.

To thwart this attack, the game could implement a provably random method for distributing breaking the groups into 6 or less. This would also have the direct effect of increasing the overall trust of Respect tokens both within Optimism Fractal and in the wider ecosystem.

#### Liars
Respect is earned by trust; the group is trusting that what the participants did what they are saying they did, and they earn Respect tokens based on the relative value of those contributions. If someone felt incentivised to lie about their work, however, it's not currently clear 1) how the group might know, 2) what the best course of action to take is if someone is believed to be lying, and 3) what to do about it if it's proven to be true.

#### Filibusters
What happen if the players of the game cannot come to consensus on ranking contributors? Or in a more extreme case (especially regarding high stakes scenarios) a group of participants are coordinating to block consensus?

#### Final note on attack vectors
While currently hypothetical, these attacks are possible within the current rules of the game. If we imagine incentives in the extreme (such as a council of top Respect holders having multisig access to a $10m treasury, for ex) then we can see how important they might be to consider.

In the interest of building a system to scale where Respect tokens can be trusted to correlate to the amount of trust and reputation within a community, then considering possible attack vectors early is of utmost importance!

### Meta Governance :classical_building:

Council terms are per season or rolling window?

What level of consent do participants have to be on the council? Do you become a member by default after reaching a threshold (top six Respect holder)? Or does reaching the threshold then qualify you to apply to the council?

### Respect Game Outside of OPF
For the purposes of the OPF Respect game we ask "what did you do this week for Optimism?" But when emulated in different groups the question can be designed in a way that is way more soecific or broad depending on what kind of work/outcomes you want to incentivise.

When ported to other communities the game can be tuned by adjusting the question.

For example, a DAO could ask "what did you do for [initiative x] this week" (specific), or "what did you do to benefit the community" (general).

### Optimism Fractal Quests
Currently, people play the game by sharing what they've done for Optimism in the past week and the real time distribution of Respect tokens incentivises more work for next weeks game. Those who are not already contributing to Optimism face an extra barrier to earn Respect tokens by needing to find something to work on, while those who are already "plugged in" to the Optimism ecosystem simply need to share what they've already been working on.

If there were clear opportunities for Optimism ecosystem engagement, participants who were new to both the game and to Optimism in general could more easily find something to contribute to. This supports Optimism Fractals mission of supporting the Optimism ecosystem!

This idea was inspired by the [Quests application](https://quests.com/q/01HASXRVGXV2FAHWM8FCEMT056) that Hats Protocol uses to track contributions and the "Describe how to get involved" section available on each Quest.