How to Design a Proposal Vetting Committee Structure

A proposal vetting committee acts as a quality-control and risk-assessment layer within a DAO's governance process. Its primary functions are to evaluate incoming proposals for technical feasibility, legal compliance, economic soundness, and alignment with the protocol's strategic goals before they reach a full community vote. This prevents governance spam, reduces voter fatigue, and mitigates the risk of malicious or poorly constructed proposals being executed. Effective committees are not gatekeepers but facilitators, adding rigor and expertise to the proposal lifecycle.

The committee's composition and selection are foundational. You must decide on the number of members, their required expertise (e.g., smart contract security, economics, legal), and the method of selection. Common models include: - Elected Council: Members are voted in by token holders for a fixed term. - Expert Delegation: Recognized subject matter experts are appointed by a core team or existing council. - Sortition: Members are randomly selected from a pool of qualified candidates. Hybrid models are also popular, such as having a mix of elected and appointed seats to balance representation with specialized knowledge.

Define clear scope and authority for the committee. A common pitfall is creating a committee with ambiguous powers. The charter should explicitly state what the committee can and cannot do. Typical authorities include: - Requesting revisions from proposal authors. - Tagging proposals with risk levels or required expertise. - Escalating proposals to a security council for emergency review. - Rejecting proposals that are clearly malicious, technically invalid, or outside the DAO's mandate. The charter should also outline appeal processes for proposers who disagree with a committee's decision, often involving a lightweight community vote.

Integrate the committee's workflow into your technical governance stack. The design must be codified in smart contracts. For example, a proposal might follow a path like: 1. Proposal submitted on-chain. 2. Held in a "Pending Review" state. 3. Committee members (with specific addresses) can cast votes (voteFor or voteAgainst). 4. Proposal advances to a snapshot vote only if it receives a majority of committee votes and meets a minimum quorum. Tools like OpenZeppelin's Governor contract can be extended with a PreventModule that enforces this gatekeeping logic, ensuring the process is transparent and tamper-proof.

Finally, establish operational processes and incentives. Committees require clear workflows: how proposals are assigned, discussion forums (e.g., private Discord channels, encrypted forums like Cloak), and decision timelines. To ensure active participation, members are typically compensated, either via a fixed stipend, rewards in governance tokens, or both. Performance should be measurable against objective metrics like review turnaround time and the quality of feedback provided. Regular rotation of members, as seen in protocols like Compound and Uniswap, prevents stagnation and centralization of power.

The primary role of a proposal vetting committee is to act as a quality and security filter before proposals reach a full community vote. This structure prevents governance attacks, reduces voter fatigue from low-quality submissions, and ensures technical feasibility. A committee typically reviews proposals for criteria like code correctness, security implications, budget alignment, and legal compliance. The design must balance efficiency with decentralization, avoiding centralization risks while preventing governance paralysis.

First, define the committee's scope and authority. Will it have the power to outright reject proposals, or only to flag them with a recommendation? A common model is a binding veto for critical security risks and a non-binding signal for subjective quality issues. The scope should be explicitly encoded in the governance smart contracts, often as a pre-vote checkpoint. For example, a require statement can check a proposal's status from a CommitteeVeto contract before allowing it to proceed to a snapshot.

Next, determine the committee's composition and selection mechanism. Key considerations include size (e.g., 5-9 members for agility), expertise mix (security, economics, legal), and selection process. Members can be elected by token holders, appointed by a multisig, or chosen via a reputation-based system like Optimism's Citizen House. The term length and removal process (e.g., a vote of no confidence) are crucial for accountability. All member addresses and their permissions should be stored on-chain in an accessible registry.

The technical implementation requires smart contracts that enforce the committee's workflow. A basic ProposalVetter contract might include functions like submitForReview(uint proposalId), voteOnProposal(uint proposalId, bool approve), and getProposalStatus(uint proposalId). The contract state must track each proposal's review status. Integration points with the main governance module (e.g., Compound's Governor or OpenZeppelin Governor) are critical, often using a modifier like onlyAfterCommitteeApproval(proposalId).

Finally, establish clear, transparent criteria for evaluation. These should be documented off-chain in a public charter but referenced in the proposal submission guidelines. Criteria often include: - Technical Soundness: Are the contract changes audited? - Financial Impact: Is the budget clearly defined and reasonable? - Ecosystem Fit: Does the proposal align with the protocol's roadmap? Using a standardized template or checklist, like those in Aragon's governance apps, ensures consistent and objective reviews, reducing committee bias and improving community trust in the process.

The first step is to codify the committee's mandate. This charter must explicitly define what types of proposals require committee review. Common scopes include: treasury requests above a certain threshold, smart contract upgrades, changes to core governance parameters, and high-risk partnerships. A clear mandate prevents scope creep and ensures the committee focuses on high-impact decisions. For example, a DAO might specify that all proposals requesting over 50,000 USDC or modifying the quorum variable in the governance contract must pass committee review.

Next, establish the committee's powers and limitations. A committee typically has one of three power levels: advisory (non-binding recommendations), gatekeeping (binding approval required for a proposal to proceed to a full DAO vote), or executive (ability to execute certain actions directly, like emergency pauses). The chosen model should be explicitly written into the DAO's smart contracts. For an on-chain implementation using a governor contract, this often involves setting the committee's address as a proposer for certain functions or integrating a modular contract like OpenZeppelin's Governor with a custom TimelockController that has the committee as a guardian.

Define the membership model and selection process. Will the committee be elected by token holders, appointed by existing stewards, or consist of subject-matter experts hired through a working group? The process must be transparent and resistant to capture. Consider term limits, staggered rotations, and clear removal mechanisms. On-chain, member addresses should be managed via a dedicated module, such as an AccessControl contract or a Multisig wallet (e.g., Safe), where membership changes are themselves governance events.

Operational rules are crucial for consistent execution. This includes defining a quorum for committee votes (e.g., 4 of 7 members), decision thresholds (simple majority vs. supermajority), proposal review timelines (e.g., a 72-hour review period), and recusal procedures for conflicts of interest. These rules should be documented off-chain in a publicly accessible handbook and, where possible, enforced or facilitated by on-chain tools like Snapshot for off-chain voting or specialized modules like Zodiac's Reality module for conditional execution.

Finally, implement transparency and accountability mechanisms. All committee deliberations, votes, and final reports should be published on a forum like Commonwealth or Discourse. For on-chain actions, every transaction must be verifiable on the blockchain. Consider requiring the committee to publish periodic reports on key metrics: proposals reviewed, approval rates, average processing time, and rationale for rejected proposals. This builds trust and allows the broader DAO to audit the committee's performance against its defined mandate.

The core of a proposal vetting committee is a smart contract that manages a set of committee members, their voting power, and the rules for proposal review. Start by defining the core data structures in Solidity. You'll need a mapping for members, a struct for proposals, and state variables for thresholds. A common pattern is to store member addresses and their respective weights, often using an EnumerableSet from OpenZeppelin for efficient membership management. The proposal struct should include fields for the target contract, calldata, status (e.g., Pending, Approved, Rejected), and the tally of votes.

Next, implement the key functions for member management: addMember(address, uint256 weight), removeMember(address), and updateMemberWeight(address, uint256 newWeight). These functions must be protected by an access control modifier, typically restricting calls to an owner or an existing committee vote. Use OpenZeppelin's Ownable or AccessControl contracts for this. It's crucial to emit events for all state-changing operations (e.g., MemberAdded, VoteCast) to allow off-chain indexers and interfaces to track committee activity transparently.

The proposal lifecycle functions form the heart of the contract. Implement submitProposal(address target, bytes calldata data) which stores a new proposal with a Pending status. Then, create voteOnProposal(uint256 proposalId, bool support) which allows members to cast their weighted vote. The voting logic should check that the member hasn't already voted and that the proposal is still pending. After a vote, the function should check if a quorum (minimum total voting power participated) and a passing threshold (e.g., 66% in favor) have been met to automatically transition the proposal to Approved.

For security and flexibility, design the contract to be upgradeable using a proxy pattern like the Transparent Proxy or UUPS (Universal Upgradeable Proxy Standard). This allows you to fix bugs or adjust quorum rules without migrating the committee's state. Store all mutable state in a specific storage layout contract inherited from an upgradeable library like OpenZeppelin Contracts Upgradeable. Always include a timelock mechanism for executing approved proposals; the executeProposal(uint256 proposalId) function should only be callable after a mandatory delay, giving the broader community time to react if a malicious proposal slips through.

Finally, comprehensive testing is non-negotiable. Write Hardhat or Foundry tests that cover all scenarios: adding/removing members, proposal submission, voting with weighted power, meeting and failing quorum thresholds, and proposal execution. Use forked mainnet tests to simulate interactions with real protocol addresses. The complete code structure should be modular, separating logic for membership, voting, and execution into discrete internal functions or even separate contracts, following the composition over inheritance principle for better maintainability and auditability.

A proposal vetting committee (or security council) acts as a pre-screening layer before a proposal reaches the broader token-holder community. Its primary functions are to assess proposal feasibility, security risks, code correctness, and alignment with the protocol's long-term vision. For example, a committee might review a proposal to upgrade a Uniswap V3 pool factory contract, checking for reentrancy vulnerabilities or unintended economic impacts. Structuring this committee requires balancing decentralization with efficiency to avoid becoming a bottleneck or a centralized point of failure.

The committee's composition and selection are foundational. Common models include: a multisig wallet controlled by elected experts (e.g., a 5-of-9 Gnosis Safe), a bonded committee where members stake tokens that can be slashed for malfeasance, or a delegated panel appointed by top token delegates. The size is typically 5-11 members to maintain operational agility. It's crucial to define clear eligibility criteria, such as requiring proven technical expertise (e.g., past audit work) or deep protocol knowledge, and to implement a transparent onboarding/offboarding process governed by the broader DAO.

Technically, integrating the committee involves modifying your governance framework's proposal lifecycle. In a common pattern, a proposal must first pass an on-chain check via a smart contract that verifies it has a valid committeeApproved flag. This can be implemented as a modifier in a Governor contract. For instance, in an OpenZeppelin Governor-based system, you could override the propose function to require the caller to be the committee's multisig address or for the proposal ID to exist in a whitelist mapping maintained by the committee.

The operational workflow should be standardized. A typical process includes: 1) Initial Submission of a temperature check forum post, 2) Committee Review against a public checklist covering security, budget, and scope, 3) Request for Changes (RFC) iteration with proposers, and 4) Final Approval signaling via an on-chain transaction or signed message. All reviews, discussions, and decisions should be documented transparently in a public repository or forum to build trust and allow for community oversight of the committee itself.

Finally, design checks and balances to prevent committee overreach. Key mechanisms include: a time-bound mandate requiring periodic re-election, a community override where a supermajority vote can bypass the committee, and clear recusal rules for conflicts of interest. The committee's power should be explicitly scoped in the protocol's constitution; it should filter for quality and security, not act as a content gatekeeper. Its performance should be regularly assessed based on metrics like proposal throughput, the incidence of post-approval bugs, and community sentiment.

To implement your committee structure, begin by formalizing the rules in a governance document or charter. This should detail the committee's powers, limitations, and operating procedures. For on-chain execution, you'll need to deploy smart contracts that enforce these rules. Key contracts include a membership manager for adding/removing members, a proposal registry to track submissions, and a voting module for committee decisions. Use a modular framework like OpenZeppelin Governor for building these components.

Next, integrate the committee into your broader governance lifecycle. A typical workflow involves: 1. A proposal is submitted to the public forum. 2. The committee retrieves it via an off-chain indexer or on-chain event. 3. Members assess the proposal using your defined criteria (security, feasibility, alignment). 4. The committee's approval, rejection, or requested revisions are recorded on-chain, often as a pre-check status before a full community vote. This creates a clear audit trail.

For ongoing effectiveness, establish metrics to evaluate the committee's performance. Track proposal throughput (time from submission to review), inter-committee consensus rate, and the community acceptance rate of committee-recommended proposals. Tools like Tally or Boardroom can help visualize this data. Regularly review these metrics and be prepared to iterate on the committee's size, expertise requirements, or incentive structure based on real-world outcomes.

Further learning is essential for refining your approach. Study successful implementations like Compound's Governance for its delegate model, Uniswap's 'Temperature Check' process for gauging sentiment, and Aave's risk and security committees for specialized mandates. The DAOstar standard and frameworks from Metagov provide additional research and tooling for advanced governance design.