TLDR

Let's kickstart the Prop House (PH) open rounds again by branding them as the "Nouns Garden" (to make them more fun and memeable) and run a mandated PH round to elect 24 "Gardeners" to vote on the DAO's behalf in these rounds.

Note: This prop was ideated by Noun 40 and was developed in collaboration with seneca. Artwork was created by Facu.

Context

Early in Nouns' history, PH open rounds served an important role within the Nouns ecosystem. It was a place where new builders could receive a few ETH for their early to mid stage ideas with less governance overhead. It was also a way for the DAO to create open competition around a not-too-big commitment of ETH spending, and allow the DAO to harvest the long-tail of ideas rather than being limited to what makes it onchain.

However, over the rounds, voter attention waned and PH open rounds started to show its governance weakness. Unlike onchain props where every large voter ultimately paid attention to every prop and voted when necessary, PH open rounds started to go largely unattended. What's worse, rounds increasingly ran the risk of being arbitrarily determined by whichever large voter decided to engage in a given round.

As a result, the PH open rounds lost much of its legitimacy and we were unable to continue funding through it. Towards the end, we were running 2.5 ETH single-winner rounds every other week, funding a grand total of 5 ETH(!) per month through PH. The last round's outcome—Open Round 21—was determined by a single large voter as the sole voter of the winning prop.

Proposal

Let's kickstart the PH open rounds again branding them as the "Nouns Garden" (to make them more fun and memeable) and run a mandated PH round to elect 24 "Gardeners" to vote on the DAO's behalf in these rounds.

Representative voting should allow for a more attentive class of voters to vote on each open round while the election ensures that the DAO voters still indirectly maintain influence over the outcomes of PH open rounds.

More details:

The Art: The gardener art work was completed by Facu and funded using PH team's funds.

Minting & Distribution: This proposal mints 24 Nouns Gardener NFTs initially going to the garden-admin multisig managed by Noun 40 and seneca. If this prop goes through, the PH team will run the Gardener election mandate round. The winners will then be sent the Gardener NFTs which will serve as the voting token in the Nouns Garden rounds.

Gardener Selection: The Gardener position should be open to nouners and non-nouners alike and everyone that's interested in having fun doing civic service for the dao is welcome to run for the position!

It's desirable that the PH layer doesn't end up with an entirely disjoint set of voters from the onchain prop voters. Ideally, there's a lot of overlap and as a result the props that win funding at the PH layer will have a good chance of success receiving continued funding onchain if they continue to execute well.

The Gardener position will be re-elected at a 3 month cadence. 6 months or a year feels like forever in Nouns time. 2 months feels too frequent.

Gardener Compensation: The Gardener position will be volunteer roles without specific compensation (outside of the NFTs!)

There's a notion that delegate positions should be paid b/c reading props and voting is "work". However, not all civic service positions are better performed when paid, and there's also definitely fun and prestige in serving as a PH delegate of the DAO. This proposal intends to explore the potential of representative voting at the PH layer without adding financial incentives into the mix.

Gardener Voting Power: Each Gardener will have the equal voting power (10 votes to spread across props in each round). If we start to observe bad behavior amongst Gardenders such as collusion or self-dealing, then we could institute quadratic voting where the cost of voting for the same prop multiple times goes up linearly such that it is harder to effectuate collusion or self-dealing. We're proposing to start with the simple voting scheme so that we don't unnecessarily introduce complexity.

Gardener Count: 24 was chosen as a size that is materially larger than committee sizes we explored in the past with NSFW (4-10) and DCS pod (5), as to assuage the concern (or perception) that a few people can be influenced to sway outcomes, while also ensuring that the Gardener election is likely to be competitive. It is not hard to imagine that we can elect two dozen worthy candidates. It is not clear that we could elect fifty.

Garden Rounds: Nouns Garden rounds will start off as 5 ETH x 2 winners (10 ETH) rounds every other week.

Two 10 ETH rounds a month still amounts to a very small percentage of our overall funding allocated through PH open rounds. We spent around ~900 ETH per month the past year, so 20 ETH would be ~2% of our spending rate. Ideally, the open-ended, lower friction, competitive, mid-tail funding the PH open rounds promise can scale further to be 10-20% of our spending, but we likely shouldn't start where we want to end up. We should scale up as builders return to PH and rounds remain competitive even as more funding goes through.

Once the PH protocol is launched, the DAO could vote on these parameters concretely. For now, we have to trust the PH team to execute these rounds.

Garden Funding: Nouns DAO has granted the Prop House team a total of 550 ETH over the last 2 years to direct towards Nouns DAO related rounds of which 160 ETH remain. These funds will be used towards the first quarter of Nouns Garden (60 ETH).

Miscellaneous: If the Nouns Garden is successful and continues after the first quarter, each quarter we will mint new Gardener NFTs such that Gardeners can continue to own their old NFTs as an object that holds provenance of their service. We would not expect Gardeners to transfer or sell their NFTs to someone else before the quarter is over given their reputation is at stake.