This proposal was not designed in a vacuum, and it should be legible to people who already think in the field's categories. Two reference points matter most: the trade-off vocabulary of the Project Liberty Institute & BlockchainGov Blockchain Governance Toolkit, a published framework for designing and comparing online governance systems, and the live governance experiments running in major DAOs — decentralized autonomous organizations, online communities that vote directly on their own rules and treasuries. The two compared below, Arbitrum and Optimism, are large public blockchain networks whose users vote on how the network is run and what its treasury funds.
The toolkit asks designers to position themselves on three trade-offs, then to safeguard against their own dominant tendency. This design takes strong positions and carries the matching safeguard for each:
Heavily participatory — open agenda-setting, the public verdict on every policy, citizen custody of the meta-rules. Safeguarded by caps and floors:
Adaptive by default — every policy reviewable and challengeable; nothing survives on inertia. Safeguarded by a constitutional layer:
Discretionary at the core — human judgment is the confirmation signal — with determinism exactly where capture pressure peaks:
The toolkit's feedback-loop chapter urges designers to "leverage humans as sensors." That phrase could be this proposal's epigraph — the sensor network of chapter 3 is humans-as-sensors, wired by chapter 7 directly into the pay of the people being sensed.
| arbitrum dao | optimism collective | this proposal | |
|---|---|---|---|
| who proposes | Token holders above a threshold | Agenda largely shaped by the Optimism Foundation, the nonprofit stewarding the network | Leaders, from a scarce proposal budget with their own standing staked on it |
| who decides | Token-weighted vote, direct or via delegates | Bicameral: Token House (weight by tokens held) + Citizens' House (one verified person, one vote) | Delegates with earned, revocable weight |
| who removes | Elections; DAO can restructure the Security Council | Both houses jointly remove Foundation directors; the Citizens' House, the person-weighted chamber, vetoes protocol upgrades | Citizens hold the verdict and the gates; emergency review open to citizens and delegates |
| weighting basis | Capital (holdings of ARB, Arbitrum's governance token) | Capital + attested personhood (a verified claim to be a unique human) | Persons; weight inputs set by the broadest tier |
| constitutional layer | Constitutional AIPs (Arbitrum Improvement Proposals), higher thresholds | Working Constitution, Foundation-stewarded | Meta-rules: citizen custody, slowest cadence |
| review / sunset | None — decisions persist by default | Seasonal reflection, informal | Reconfirmation at widening intervals (1, 3, 7, 15 years) + emergency review |
| emergency powers | Security Council (12 elected; 9 must agree to act) | Foundation + Security Council | Short scope-locked class; sanction is personnel |
| proposer pay | None structural | Retroactive funding rewards impact, not passage | Civic wage + persistence pay while confirmed |
The skeleton is recognizable — Arbitrum's delegates-plus-constitution, Optimism's separation of chambers, and older ancestors too: Switzerland's facultative referendum — where enough signatures force a law parliament has already passed to a public vote — is the direct model for chapter 8's interrupts. But four things exist nowhere in current DAO practice: person-weights set by the governed themselves, pay bound to confirmed durability, the public verdict as a standing power over every policy, and subsidiarity as a discovered quantity with an asymmetric ratchet.
01The citizen petition valve that mints a proposal from below — threshold design open (chapter 5).
02Tally visibility during voting windows — engagement public, direction sealed, is the leading candidate (chapter 6).
03Who certifies spillover claims for subsidiarity routing — who rules that a local decision's effects cross into neighboring jurisdictions, which is what licenses moving the power upward. The adjudicating body is undecided; false claims must cost their claimants either way (chapter 9).
04The boundary algorithm's objective function — the criteria it is told to optimize when it draws jurisdictional lines — held in the meta-rules, on the slowest cadence; the function itself is open (chapter 10).
05The enumerated scope-locked portfolio class — explicitly listed, and short (chapter 9).
06The weighting inputs for delegation — deliberately left to the meta-rules layer itself (chapter 12).
07Whether the base unit is territorial or affinity-first — the cell size is settled at Dunbar scale, the substrate is not (chapter 10).
08How assets and standing obligations are apportioned when a unit splits or dissolves — they must travel together; which of territory, beneficiaries, or contributors they follow is open (chapter 10).
09How much of the boundary machinery runs autonomously versus leader-steered — a meta-rules slider between anti-gerrymandering strength and the handling of novel cases (chapter 10).
Part Two of this series, The Energy Standard, takes up the settlement layer — a kWh-backed currency completing the coordination substrate: governance as the decision layer, energy-denominated money as the layer it settles on.
Chapter 14 exists because we want it attacked. Follow the work, or come take a swing.