Conviction Voting

"It takes but one person, one moment, one conviction, to start a ripple of change."

Conviction Voting will be the TEC fund allocation tool If the Hatch DAO decides to implement the CV app via Dandelion Voting. In the article here, written by Jeff Emmett he sums up Conviction Voting succinctly:

Conviction Voting offers a novel decision making process that funds proposals based on the aggregated preference of community members, expressed continuously. In other words, voters are always asserting their preference for which proposals they would like to see approved, rather than casting votes in a single time-boxed session. A member can change their preference at any time, but the longer they keep their preference for the same proposal, the “stronger” their conviction gets. This added conviction gives long standing community members with consistent preferences more influence than short term participants merely trying to influence a vote. Conviction Voting sidesteps sybil attacks, provides collusion resistance, and mitigates many of the attack vectors of time-boxed voting mechanisms.

The important principle here to understand is that in a proposal multiple choices can be presented and voters can weight their votes on one or multiple options based on their preference of outcome. Changing your vote will gradually decrease your "conviction" or voting power for one outcome and gradually increase it to the other.

Proposals can be executed only if there is enough accumulated conviction. The threshold at which a proposal can be executed is dependent on the proportion of the funds requested relative to the available funds in the shared treasury. This relationship between the funds requested versus available funds means that the threshold at which a proposal can be executed depends on the state of the Commons at any given time. As proposals pass and remove funds from the treasury, the remaining proposals will become harder to pass (because they now represent a larger proportion of the shared treasury). As new funds are added to the share treasury the threshold for passing existing proposals will decrease. This provides some natural self regulation to the spending rate of the Commons relative to its income.

The time based accumulation forces voters to prioritize where they place their conviction and may encourage members to more effectively converge on a mutually acceptable compromise to most effectively leverage their influence on the Commons' fund allocations.

Relevant Parameters:

Max Ratio (β) - is a value between 0 and 1 which represents the max % of total funds that can be discharged at any given moment. Max Ratio affects the threshold of a proposal. It can be thought of as an “upper ceiling” in asking funds proportional to the total holdings of the Commons. Deep Dive

Minimum Threshold - sets the minimum percent of tokens that are used for calculating the threshold to pass any proposal. Similar to Minimum Quorum. Deep Dive

Half Life - determines the time it takes to accumulate or reduce voting power by 50%. Half life, defined in number of days, represents the number of days it takes to accumulate 50% voting power or to reduce by 50% voting power. Deep Dive