The most recent issue of Imprint includes a profile on specific members of UW Blockchain, in which they propose a project called GooseDAO, a replacement for a student union such as WUSA which is run entirely on the blockchain, making it (theoretically) more democratic, representative, and equitable.

On the surface, it’s an idea that might appeal to people. WUSA is, to put it mildly, pretty unpopular these days. Students seem extremely disengaged from campus culture and student governance at Waterloo. The idea of taking the power centralized in WUSA and distributing it fairly to the people is tantalizing.

I have several critiques.

What Is GooseDAO?

First, it’s important to get everyone on the same page about what a DAO actually is. DAO stands for Decentralized Autonomous Organization. The main idea is that there’s no governing body at all, just an automated system that administers rules and allocates capital based on how people vote. All voters and votes are recorded permanently on the blockchain, so the whole process is transparent. Since the voted-on actions are executed instantly, the whole thing is purely democratic. Every action was selected and voted on by a public poll.

The point of GooseDAO is to use a DAO to do the job of a student union. That means that which clubs get funded or which advocacy work is done is decided by the students collectively, instead of a theoretical central leadership.

What's Wrong With This Idea?

If you’re like me, you may have noticed some red flags even from that idealistic description. “Transparent voting” means complete non-anonymity. It’s pitched as a solution for opaqueness within WUSA’s leadership team (which is a real problem), but GooseDAO's transparency applies to everyone, including non-elected students, massively changing people's behavior. Imagine a queer student who couldn’t support the activities of LGBTQ clubs on campus for fear of that public interaction outing them to their relatives. Full transparency creates as many problems as it solves.[1]

To be extraordinarily clear, I do not believe that anyone from GooseDAO or the UW Blockchain is intentionally anti-inclusive here. I believe these consequences are entirely accidental.

Digging a little deeper, they mention that while every student gets a token (Goobi) that allows them to vote, there’s an additional token ("HONK"—these names are so stupid[2]) that gets distributed and does… something. Both the Imprint article and GooseDAO’s own website are unclear on what specifically HONK does, but according to Imprint, holders of more HONK have "more of a voice", and their online pitch deck mentions "weighted voting" on proposals.

After reaching out to the organizers for clarification, it’s clear to me that voting will not be a "one person, one vote" system. It’s likely that the political power you wield would be tied to the amount of HONK you hold. For people unfamiliar with DAOs, this can seem strange, undemocratic, and easily exploitable. It is all those things, but it’s also extremely common in the crypto sphere. For instance, the DAO for the theoretically popular Decentraland weighs voting based on how many specific tokens you own, and the rough prototypes that GooseDAO have already created have the functionality to weight the voting power per user.

The problems with this potential kind of system are obvious. This voting system would give specific individuals an outsized voice in student governance: the exact problem that WUSA has today. In fact, it would be worse than we have today: not only can HONK be bought and sold for money, allowing people to literally buy and sell influence, but more importantly, this behavior would be built into the system permanently.

The reason this institutional power lock-in happens in WUSA is because of a complicated series of institutional barriers that, crucially, can be changed. It’s a difficult task, but it's possible. In the GooseDAO, the lock-in of institutional power would be an intentional outcome of the system’s design.

Once that power is granted, it can only be revoked if those well-connected people decide to give it back. They have all the control over how the DAO operates. GooseDAO promises to strip power away from WUSA’s current executive class, but they won’t give it to the majority—they’d likely just create a new untouchable upper class, same as it ever was.[3]

Why It Matters

I’ll be honest, I thought hard about whether this was an article worth writing at all. It doesn't take a lot of thinking about GooseDAO to be able to poke holes in the idea. So what's the point?

It almost feels like I’m picking on them. The buzz around crypto has almost completely died out. Most NFTs are worthless. The only time I ever hear about crypto these days is when a project goes belly-up and a million people lose their retirement savings. This project will almost certainly not get off the ground, and I don't want to discourage new ideas, even if they won't work.

The reason I decided to go through with it is because I think people deserve a serious breakdown of why this won’t work. The passive, non-questioning language of the piece obfuscates what UW Blockchain actually intends to do. The worst thing that could happen is that the lack of detail tricks someone into thinking that GooseDAO is a good idea. I have nothing against the people behind it, I just fundamentally disagree that this would be better for students.[4]

WUSA is a severely flawed organization. It’s tempting to simply trash it all and start over. But we must be smart enough not to let those fears trick us into replacing something bad with something worse. The way we’ll improve this school isn’t by hoping a technical revolution will solve our problems as we just sit back and watch. We need to roll up our sleeves, get our hands dirty, and not stop until the job is done.

I believe that better student governance is possible. In fact, I believe it’s inevitable. I just don’t think it’ll have a name like Goobi.

~

1. According to the organizer I spoke to, visibility is tracked between specific crypto wallets, and not directly linked to any one uwaterloo.ca email account.
2. According to the organizer I spoke to, the name "HONK" is already taken so they won't be able to use it, but if I used "the token formerly known as HONK" I'd go way over my word limit.
3. According to the organizer I spoke to, the way they plan to avoid this is through tightly controlling the way HONK is initially distributed (ie: only to clubs) and regularly diluting voting power by introducing more HONK.
4. If you go and be mean to these people because they had a bad idea, you're a dipshit and a bad person and are henceforth banned from reading mathNEWS.