SPS Governance Proposal - Community Proposals Rework

The purpose of this proposal is to address one of the biggest concerns and criticisms I've received about our proposal process since becoming the DAO Project Manager. Currently many players are unaware of how to participate in the preproposal process entirely and many feel that they are not able to participate in the Community Proposal process. I suggest a change in how we are handling preproposals and I will outline my suggested requirements for the Community Proposal process going forward.

We would like for the Splinterlands team to make use of the "Upcoming" section of the Proposal tab to alert users when a new Preproposal has been created. To prevent annoyance for those that do not wish to participate, it is also recommended to add the ability to turn on and off notifications for Proposals as has been requested by many players in the past.

Getting more visibility should encourage additional participation in SPS Governance as well as allow users to visibly track how much stake is in support of an idea. Stake weight is what will ultimately decide any decisions the DAO makes, so it's important to let it speak loud and early. This ties in to my suggestion on how to clearly define the Community Proposal process below.

Community Proposals were never meant to be for small groups of players to push an agenda and bypass the DEC burn. I've done my best to redefine the guidelines and make do with the temporary Discord suggestion forums several times, but it is clear that they have outlived their usefulness and are arguably doing more harm than good.

If this proposal passes, the guidelines for creating a Community proposal will be as follows: A player can share a well formulated draft of the proposal they would like to discuss publicly and tag me (clayboyn) or message me directly. I will review the draft to determine if it is something within the scope of the DAO and if it is an actual proposal.

Any drafts submitted for review will need to be directly related to the DAO and the SPS token. For example, how we are distributing inflation, how we are managing tournaments and their related guidelines, management of the DAO treasury and similar related issues at the DAO Project Managers discretion.

The purpose of Community Proposals is not for UI requests or changing Splinterlands gameplay and design decisions nor are they for running personal agendas and random ideas through the DAO. Some would argue that is not the purpose of the DAO at all. If you'd like to submit a proposal for something along those lines, you will need to burn the 100,000 DEC and do it yourself.

Some of this will ultimately be a bit subjective and I'll have to use my best judgement on whether or not a draft meets the criteria for a Community Proposal. The original purpose behind them was for me to be able to run Proposals that I needed to be able to do my job, like asking for funding for a Market Maker or asking for funding for an exchange listing or guaging interest in a partnership request, expanding beyond that should be clearly structured and hopefully this proposal does that.

Going forward, if a draft meets the criteria above, I will submit it for preproposal to allow for a stake weighted show of support as well as allow for community discussion on how to refine it. The burden of proof for a Community Proposal will be higher than normal proposals and require at least 10% of staked SPS voting in favor and having at least 2/3rds positive sentiment to advance to a full vote after the 7 day voting period.

Community Proposals in the Preproposal stage should be treated like polls on whether or not the DAO feels an issue is important enough to bring to a vote and also wants to pay for it. That said as this is likely to encourage more polling, the DAO will no longer pay for Community Proposals unless they make it past this stage and go to a full vote.

This should alleviate the concerns that the DAO is wasting it's DEC running too many proposals, remove as much of my personal bias as possible as I'll simply be judging the drafts based on whether or not they meet the criteria above, and then letting stake decide if there's enough support for the DAO to pay for and run the draft as a full Proposal.

I know this has been a long read and if you're still with me thanks for your time and consideration. My goal is to be of service to the SPS DAO and it's participants. The way we have been handling Community Proposals was flawed and always meant to be a temporary solution until we got a better system in place. These are my suggestions on how we can improve and if ratified by a DAO vote, how I will proceed with Community Proposals going forward.