Governance Process

Summary

This page outlines the Balancer Governance Process from Request for Comment [RFC] through executing a result.

tl;dr:

1. Post a Request for Comment to the forum (template)

2. Facilitate preliminary discussion

3. Update and refine RFC to become a Proposal

4. Snapshot vote

5. Execute result

Outline

Step 1: Request For Comment (RFC)

Start a new conversation on the Governance section of the forum with the [RFC] tag. The message should contain the following sections. Click here for a forum post template.

• Background

  • What is the current state or what you're addressing? Is there any relevant information that the common reader might not know?

• Core Proposal(s)

  • What is your idea on how to improve the state of the art?

• Dependencies

  • What is needed to introduce the change?

• Risk assessment

  • What can go wrong? What is the impact of your proposal on the rest of the community, ecosystem, protocol?

• Open Questions

  • Any obvious discussions or things you are still considering?

Step 2: Discussion

• Monitor the discussion and gather feedback

• Message #brainstorming-and-ideas channel on Discord to draw peoples' attention to the RFC

• Encourage interested parties on Discord to gather their thoughts in a forum post

Step 3: Proposal

• After about two weeks, it's time to move to the proposal phase, assuming there has been some discussion and some preliminary consensus.

• In the same topic thread as your RFC, share your updated proposal.

  • The proposal should be a refined RFC that includes all the suggestions from the discussion.

• Change the tag from [RFC] to [Proposal].

• Collecting final feedback and get advice for changes.

• Wait for at least 7 days and make sure you have a general consensus among the others before moving to Snapshot.

Step 4: Snapshot

Now that we have a proposal, we can move into a Snapshot vote. If you are unable to post your Proposal to Snapshot, ask for help in the Discord #governance channel.

Step 5: Results

If the vote succeeds or a result has been chosen, follow through to make sure that it is properly executed. Depending on what the vote is about, it may require an action by the Multisig.