Introducing Orpolls

Orpolls is a new consensus game that enables communities to make decisions and express opinions together. It provides a simple, fun, and fair consensus process to coordinate the future of Optimism Fractal.

Table of Contents

Why Orpolls?

Orpolls is short for Optimistic Respect Polls. This polling game provides a consensus process that can be used to collectively make decisions and express community opinions. For example, these polls could be used to signal a community opinion to change the time of weekly events, the amount of Respect in an account, or the rules of Respect Games.

The Orpolls game enables any community or organization to form consensus using a soulbound Respect token, which can be earned by playing the Respect game at weekly events. The Respect game uses a meritocratic system to fairly award community members with Respect tokens, which provides the foundation for legitimate and democratic consensus. Orpolls can help communities make decisions and an express opinions in a highly respectable manner.

Orpolls is optimistic because because it trusts a minority of players who take the initiative to express a community opinion even if they’ve earned a relatively small amount of Respect. This enables the community to use consent based decision making, without needing much participation or discussion. There is a two stage proposal system with a time delay where each community member can vote against a proposal if they disagree, which helps ensure that community decisions or opinions are made with community consent.

How to Play

1. Anyone can create a proposal by making a poll in the Optimism Fractal space on Snapshot. A proposal can be any kind of question or statement with at least one poll answer.

2. Community members can vote on proposals with soulbound Respect tokens they’ve earned during the past 26 weekly Optimism Fractal events. Each Respect token provides one vote in each poll.

3. A proposal needs to pass a voting threshold during two consecutive weekly events in order to be approved. Suggested voting thresholds and details are explained below.

4. If the proposal meets the following requirements on Monday at 18:20 (during an Optimism Fractal event), then it will move from a ‘draft state’ to a ‘pending approval state’:

   1. It has received more than the minimum threshold of votes: 150
   2. One of the poll answers has at least 2/3rd of submitted votes
   3. The proposal was submitted before the Optimism Fractal weekly event starts Monday at 17 UTC.
      1. If the proposal wasn’t submitted before at 17 UTC, then the poll will be open until next week’s event.

5. If a proposal meets these three requirements, then a new poll with the same exact proposal is created on Snapshot immediately after 18:20 UTC.

6. Community members can vote on the new poll at any time in the following week with their soulbound Respect tokens they’ve earned over the past 26 weekly events.

7. If the second poll has also received more than the minimum threshold of votes and the same poll answers has at least 2/3rd of votes at 18:20 UTC during the next week’s meeting, then the proposal is approved by the Optimism Fractal community.

8. Each approved proposal is recognized as an opinion collectively expressed by Optimism Fractal. Approved proposals are saved in a document and community members may take actions based upon community opinions.

Variables

The community can tweak the following variables to changes the rules of the Orpolls. In the future these variables may be encoded in Optimism Fractal’s software, but they would be manually administered for now.

• min_vote_threshold = 150 Respect;
• respect_period = 26 weeks;
• proposals_due = Mondays at 17 UTC
• cycle_reset_time = Mondays at 18:20 UTC

Inspiration

Orpolls is inspired by OREC, an idea for an Optimistic Respect-based Executive Contract created by Tadas. You can read the original article about OREC here. Orpolls is designed to enable the benefits of OREC with a simple, fun solution that requires no technical development and is customized to the needs of the Optimism Fractal community. Orpolls is also inspired by optimistic rollups, consent-based decision making in sociocracy, and years of experiments with consensus processes in other fractal communities.

Future Configurations

Here are some potential improvements or adjustments for Orpolls in the future:

• The voting weight of Respect could decrease with a half-life function
• Different kinds of polls could have different voting weights. For example, some polls may give a larger voting weight to Respect earned more recently or earlier
• We could explore complementary consensus processes for different purposes, such as a council of top 6 contributors or delegates elected on a weekly basis
• Software could be built to facilitate an automatic transfer of certain roles and responsibilities based upon Respect, such as OREC
• In the future more features can be added to make the game more fun and , such as the ability to earn awards by creating helpful polls or other innovation in game design

Rationale

You can read much of the rationale behind Orpolls in Tadas’ article for OREC and see this feedback article where Dan explored some changes to better fit the needs of the Optimism Fractal community.

Branding Notes

I like the name Orpolls and think we can run with it, but am also open to different names if the community prefers. You can see some ideas for different branding below.

“Or Polls”: Another way to think of Orpolls is as ‘Or Polls’. This is a double entendre. After a poll is completed, an identical poll is recreated for another week which gives each community member an opportunity to say “Or…” a different option.