Currently the VDAO charter does not specify who in the community can serve as a governor on the VDAO. As this governor position involves participating in making potential changes to the Harmony blockchain code; the governor requirements should be clearly captured in the charter.
Please review and vote on the attached poll, there are several options to choose from. We definitely want feedback from the Harmony community and look forward to your submissions!
Who can serve as a governor on the Validator DAO?
0 voters
My take is elected and unelected but on mainnet. At some point during their term a govenor may lose a large delegation and go unelected. Does this mean they can no longer serve and must leave the DAO? This almost happened to me.
This is an interesting poll because we know that some validators may just join the VDAO to secure an election and then not contribute to the team. Also, there is the gray area of validators that are falling in and out of election like myself. I would consider myself an unelected validator since I am currently not stable. How would we handle these instances?
For me, the only requirement is the want to be a governor. The dao does a lot of things that require no experience of being a validator. Of course it helps but elected or not should not matter. I would be surprised if the community votes to exclude potentially amazing candidates based on election status.
Remember, you have to be voted into the dao, it’s not an automatic thing so the community has to give you support a well. And yes, you could do little or nothing but that would also mean not being paid as well.
Sorry, what?
Perhaps we should limit candidates to senior devs in that case 
In all seriousness though, I’m with @Maffaz. I think candidacy should be open to everyone with voters determining who makes the cut.
Anyone in the community should be able to submit an application. At the end, it is the community taking decision of who should be a governor. Why limit the applications to elected and unelected validators? There is no reason to.
Also it is a team of people. So having only technical governors is not a good idea for me
I chose to vote for anyone in the community. Simply because that is the truly decentralized way of doing things, not restricting things or limiting who is qualified for what. There could be some of the best governors that we could possibly have, that are just invested in Harmony and have no idea about validators or running them or even the opportunity to be a governor.
What I mean by this is that good help for our DAOs could come from anywhere. And teaching someone that would make a great governor about running validator nodes honestly isn’t that hard if they have even half a brain. In ways, it does make sense to sort of “vet” our VDAO governors, but at the same time, that might eliminate some of the best potential candidates we may ever see, and IMO it’s not the decentralized way. I say let anyone run, and let the community both validator and regular community vote them in.
Anybody that cares about Harmony should be able to run
There should be no arbitrary restrictions put in place
Non-validators/Everyone in the community is affected by everything that goes on here
I also believe anyone should be able to run. We can’t limit it, especially since we have term limits.
After getting to know some of the dedicated community members who are active every day even though they do not run validators, I cannot see limiting governors to only validators. We would be losing some amazing potential candidates.
I think if the requirement for VDAO governor was to change that the voting process itself would need to change. If anyone could become governor under the current system, they would not be able to vote for themselves in the election or on any proposals until they are a validator.
Personally after seeing the chaos some DAOs go through with their voting process (problems with botting) and what they had to change their election process because of, the VDAO voting process has lesser problems with voter manipulation.
Let’s also remember that the requirement is to have a validator, not an elected one. So anyone with 10k ONE and the ability to run the hmy program to register the validator qualifies. You don’t need to be elected and you don’t need to be running an active server. Technically the validator can be in ineligible status (such as if 10k ONE was withdrawn) and still qualify.
With proposals to lower the requirement to 1000 ONE, it will be even easier. Yet the extra steps will keep out the manipulations that happens with other Harmony elections.
I thought the plan was that “governor” was being changed to signatory?
If this is the case and the elected entity has no role other than to sign transactions, then the only thing that matters is that they are trusted by the community.
My understandings as well but I guess there is an exemption until participation is higher? Maybe someone else can clarify more. I missed the meeting about it unfortunately. I wished I could of gone to it cause I have a lot of questions about what is going on.
That’s a great point. Eventually we will be there. The more DAO tooling that we’re able to implement to help streamline the process the better right now. Then we’ll just need more participation.
I think participation will grow as the DAO is opened up.
Originally we were electing governors to run the DAO. I had thought maybe I’d misunderstood this until I read back this blog post giving the governors actual roles: The Harmony Validator DAO: Fully Elected and Funded. | by Samuel Harrison | Medium
Moving topics of discussion into the forum and decisions from conversations amongst governors in to open proposals and public bounties will bring more transparency to the DAO and I expect more participation.
I come here to find out what’s going on in the DAO and it doesn’t seem to give me the full picture.
Personally I find it hard to take part in Twitter spaces (especially at 3am) so I don’t really feel I know what’s going on and so can’t participate much at the moment.
I agree!
I’ve always thought that there is a need for two different Twitter Spaces to accommodate the different time zones.
The community DAO just made the weekly meetings open for people to join and listen on Discord. I think it would be a good idea to do the same with the VDAO, it makes it a lot easier for people to be involved.
Having the Twitter Spacer to cover so many time zones and then making the discord meetings accommodate the other time zones might help