off-chain-process
Off-Chain Proposal Process
A proposal cannot be modified to incorporate criticism or new information once it has been placed on the chain. Giving a proposal time off-chain to garner comments, suggestions, and modifications is vitally crucial before bringing it up on-chain and soliciting votes.
If you have a proposal idea, we suggest to follow this simple two-stage process:
- Share your idea with the community, specialists and stakeholders, collect their feedback and gain confidence in your idea,
- Turn your idea into a draft of xExchange Improvement Proposal (xEIP) on the Agora, discuss with the community and converge to its best version.
Why proceed in stages? It's a more cautious strategy to conserve resources. Prior to allocating more resources to the development of your plan, it is a good idea to consult with important stakeholders at each stage. You can directly draft your xEIP if you are certain about your idea.
1. Gain confidence in your idea by engaging with the community
Not yet confident about your idea?
Great! Numerous parties could be impacted by governance suggestions. Before spending time and money on crafting a proposal, share your concept with well-known community members. If you still believe that your idea is essential, don't let any negative criticism stop you from researching it.
Write a few succinct lines about your idea, e.g. a brief summary of your proposal or suggested adjustments, minimum elements (name, value to xExchange, timeline, and any finance requirements). And engage with stakeholders and specialists who are actively involved in xExchange discussions or developments. Double-check with them:
- Does the idea make sense?
- Are there critical flaws?
- Would there be unforeseen consequences?
You can share your idea with the community on social media (Twitter, Telegram, Reddit, Discord), or in the "General discussion" category of the Agora.
Confident with your idea?
Great! However, keep in mind that governance suggestions may have an unforeseen influence on a wide range of stakeholders. Before devoting money to creating a plan, share your concept with the neighborhood.
In order to avoid confirmation bias at this point, you should seek out and carefully examine critical input. Because putting a poor proposal on-chain will waste resources and have reputational implications, now is the perfect time to spot a key issue.
Even if you have no personal links to any stakeholders or concerned parties, posting your concept to the Agora is a terrific approach to obtain widespread feedback and perspective.
Are you ready to draft an xExchange Improvement Proposal?
Regarding what your proposal brings and your plan for executing it, there will probably be disagreements. It may be worthwhile to create a proposal if you've thought carefully about the feedback from all angles, believe that what you're doing is worthwhile, and believe that your strategy should be effective.
A vociferous minority isn't necessarily indicative of the outcome of an on-chain vote, so keep in mind that the biggest Energy holders have the biggest vote. You may decide to be cautious and postpone crafting the specifics of your proposal until you are reasonably confident that you have the backing of a majority of the voting power.
Alternatively, you might put up the suggestion or lay out the issue and let other community members come up with alternative solutions.
2. Draft your xEIP and converge to its best version
The "xEIP discussions" category on the Agora (https://agora.xexchange.com/) is the perfect place to write down a draft of your proposal, discuss it with the community, collect feedback, evaluate pros and cons, improve the proposal and iterate again and again. The xEIP discussion is the natural step before possibly publishing an xEIP on-chain and having it voted by governance.
The essential components for crafting a proposal are outlined and described in the following section. Make sure you've thought through your plan and the likely questions the community will have. You won't be able to edit your proposal once it has been published on the blockchain.
Drafting your proposal
Creating proposals requires finding a balance between being concise and detailed. Briefness facilitates review of proposals, while providing enough information for voters to understand the changes and their impacts.
Each submission should start with an overview, detailing the critical aspects of the proposal, which should encourage people to form opinions without further information. The submission can also include any relevant link to other information, for example to related previous proposals and discussion in the Agora, or to GitHub repositories containing implementations of the changes.
You can start an xEIP discussion on the Agora by opening a new thread and posting an xEIP draft. This is a message following the xEIP draft template (see below), that describes and motivates the proposed improvement. People will reply and discuss this draft, its author might decide to update it, and eventually, might publish it on-chain for a governance vote.
xEIP draft template
An xEIP draft should follow the xEIP template:
Title
[Provide a title that best describes the proposal.]
Summary
[A concise description and motivation of the proposal, in a short form.]
Description
[A complete description and motivation of the proposal, with no ambiguity on the changes proposed and all the arguments for why the proposal should pass.]
Creating engagement around your xEIP draft
Engagement is probably essential to a proposal's success. Your level of community involvement should be commensurate with the potential effects your idea might have on the stakeholders. Although not all forms of engagement are included in this handbook, here are some ideas:
- Alert the community about the xEIP draft on platforms like Twitter, tagging accounts like the xExchange account, and other governance-focused accounts.
- Answer messages in your xEIP discussion thread in the Agora.
- Engage discussions in Telegram groups.
- Host an AMA on Reddit.
- Directly solicit comments from influential community members.
We advise you to try new things and play to your strengths when presenting proposal ideas and getting feedback.
Try out your idea on devnet or testnet
If it is possible, implementing and testing your idea on devnet or testnet can be an excellent opportunity to make your idea absolutely concrete in the eyes of other users, and check if it works exactly as you would want or if there are further needs to be tweaked.