The Kusama Supreme Oracle

CONTEXT

Kusama currently has three governance bodies:

1. The assembled stakeholders, as weighted by KSM controlled as well as KSM locked into the future.
2. The Kusama Council (who control the treasury and half of the legislative agenda)
3. The Polkadot Technical Committee (who are able only to fast-track proposals)

This is a proposal kick off for a new body: The Kusama Supreme Oracle.

This is a membership group of people with an objectively high degree of professional or social standing. Examples would be academics, journalists and lawyers, though other professions may also be reasonable.

** PROCESS AND COMPOSITION**

A small number of current group members (3-5) would be tasked with verifying the identity and the objective measure of professional standing for them (likely through a government-issued ID over video-link and using some professional score such as H-index). The identity of outgoing members is revealed publicly, to ensure that these identity verifications can later be vetted. The temporary anonymity is to protect against physical/online intimidation. The set of members would be paid weekly and re-elect itself monthly from a queue of people prioritised according to the objective measure of professional/reputational standing.

FUNCTIONS

The body acts as a kind of “supreme court” or oracle of last resort, allowing—for a small price—a statement grounded in physical reality to be evaluated with a high degree of confidence that any resultant answer would be correct.

The purpose would be to allow objective statements drawing upon real-world concepts (and thus not suitable for on-chain determination) to be judged as being accurate or not (or, perhaps, indeterminate)

The four potential initial use-cases that seem valuable:

1. A grand oracle that could act as a judge of other, lesser staked, oracles,
2. Enforcing treasury spending regulations (i.e. council or subcommittee spending),
3. Enforcing a general constitution (i.e. on any governance activity, even referenda),
4. Judging governance actions (in particular upgrades) to enforce and automate council members manifestos.

PENDING TASKS FOR DISCUSSION

1. Funding: how will experts get paid? What are the options we have in mind?
2. Get the first experts to be the first few initial oracle members: how and who to choose?
3. UI integration, maybe structured along a bounty or treasury proposal.
4. Extension of tasks to other areas of the network.
5. Decide on members' rotation and composition.