(Deprecated) HSP-006: House of Stake - Mission, Vision & Values

House of Stake Proposals
1

Frontmatter

hsp: 6
title: House of Stake - Mission, Vision & Values (MVV)
description: Agree on the Mission, Vision & Values (MVV) to guide all of NEAR House of Stake’s activities
author: Hack Humanity (@HackHumanity)
discussions-to: (Deprecated) HSP-006: House of Stake - Mission, Vision & Values
status: Review
type: Sensing
category: Legitimacy & Engagement
created: 2025-11-21
requires: No dependencies

Abstract

This proposal seeks to put in place ratified Mission, Vision & Values (MVV), guiding all of NEAR House of Stake’s activities:

  • A Vision that is a powerful and motivating articulation of the future we are creating.
  • A Mission that guides concrete and directed activity towards that vision.
  • And a set of Values that give us detailed guiding principles to stay on course as we all continue to build and learn.

House of Stake Mission Vision Values
Version: v1.0
Audience: NEAR Community
Archive: Version.0.1.1

Mission Vision Values Policy

VISION:

Decentralised governance for the user-owned Internet and humanity-enhancing AI.

MISSION:

To establish an evolving governance system,
that is incorruptible, uncapturable and sovereign by default,
co-created, co-governed and co-operated
by an AI-augmented NEAR stakeholder community.

VALUES:

  1. Credible Neutrality
  2. Experimentation with Safety
  3. Builder and Business Centric
  4. Autonomy with Accountability
  5. Adaptive Governance
  6. Meaningful Participation
  7. Transparency with Dignity
  8. AI-Augmented, Human-Governed
  9. Public Goods as Growth Engines
  10. Cultural Stickiness
Principles and behavioural tests behind the values

1. Credible Neutrality

Principle: Governance must be built by, with and for the community, augmented by community-aligned AI that enhances transparency, intelligence and fairness, ensuring freedom from control and capture by individuals, institutions, or closed groups.

Behavioral Test: Does this action avoid risks of concentrating power e.g. protecting against a few top stakeholders gaining overbearing control over the rest of the community?

2. Experimentation with Safety

Principle: Governance models, funding mechanisms, and AI agents and tools are tested, via rapid prototyping and iteration, in lower-stakes environments before being merged into the main system.

Behavioral Test: What’s the worst that could happen if an experiment we are trying fails? Can it do so without risk of endangering the overall ecosystem’s health and integrity?

3. Builder and Business Centric

Principle: Governance must create the conditions for both individual developers and institutions to thrive — from the developer experience to enterprise-scale adoption. This includes funding the infrastructure, tools, and programs that make NEAR the most attractive platform for adoption that scales.

Behavioral Test: Does this decision improve NEAR as a place where developers, entrepreneurs, and enterprises can build great products and lasting businesses?

4. Autonomy with Accountability

Principle: Workstreams and contributors have freedom to innovate, balanced with clear success gates and measurable outcomes. Community-governed mechanisms should be in place for setting and regularly reviewing these objectives, in a fair and transparent way, keeping human and AI activity oriented towards our mission.

Behavioral Test: Does this program have both the freedom to act and clear metrics to evaluate success?

5. Adaptive Governance

Principle: Governance should evolve iteratively, guided by feedback loops and data-driven continuous learning systems that sense and respond to changing ecosystem needs and emerging opportunities.

Behavioral Test: Is there a mechanism to review and adapt this process if it no longer serves the ecosystem?

6. Inclusive & Meaningful Participation

Principle: All stakeholders — large and small — must have meaningful ways to engage in governance. Decision-making influence may be proportional to stake, and our governance system must also provide opportunities for all community members to contribute, keeping people engaged and invested.

Behavioral Test: Are we creating real roles for all interested community members to contribute value, even if they don’t have significant stake-weighted voting power?

7. Transparency with Dignity

Principle: Decisions, funding, and performance are open and legible, while respecting privacy and personal boundaries.

Behavioral Test: Can this be shared with the community to enhance collective intelligence, without compromising anyone’s right to privacy?

8. AI-Augmented, Human-Governed

Principle: We embrace AI as a tool for fair, representative, efficient, and adaptive governance at scale. AI agents can be core participants in our governance processes. We build such agents in a decentralised, open-source and permissionless way, requiring that they operate transparently and in adherance with all of our values, so they can act as neutral, community-aligned governance participants.

Behavioral Test: Does this use of AI improve fairness, participation, efficiency or collective intelligence, while reinforcing our values and providing sufficient transparency and oversight for humans in the loop?

9. Public Goods as Growth Engines

Principle: We invest in shared infrastructure, tools, and governance systems, building out a data-driven governance layer for the use of humans an AI, as a powerful enabler of compounding network effects.

Behavioral Test: Will this investment increase the resilience, long-term potential and growth of the ecosystem beyond one project or cycle?

10. Cultural Stickiness

Principle: The DAO cultivates rituals, norms, and shared ownership that build loyalty across diverse participants.

Behavioral Test: Does this initiative make contributors more likely to identify with NEAR and remain engaged long-term?

Context & Alignment

This Mission, Vision & Values (v0.2.0) proposed above was Co-Created with the Community in October 2025, as documented in the Open Community Feedback Cycle Report, including a Community Co-Creation workshop.

This process built upon workshops with endorsed delegates in June 2025 and synthesised context from the evolution of NEAR’s Mission/Vision/Values (2019–2024).

Situation

We are currently in Phase One (Assembly) of the Governance Transition Program to progressively decentralize House of Stake.

A significant risk of decentralization is that different contributors, coming from a broad diversity of backgrounds and perspectives, might have very different ideas of the direction we should be going in. This can lead to lack of clarity of how to contribute, disparate initiatives heading in opposing or contradictory directions and necessity for excessive levels of re-work.

To progress with legitimacy to Phase Two (Alignment), a ratified Mission, Vision & Values, co-created by and for the community, will align the activities of all House of Stake contributors, so that effort, attention and resources are focused on complementary and reinforcing initiatives that maximise our momentum and progress towards shared goals.

This should be flexible enough to create space for different ways of thinking to achieve those goals, and foster innovative approaches, realizing the full potential of the diverse set of stakeholders in the House of Stake community.

Mission

Objective: A broadly-supported Mission, Vision & Values, ratified on-chain, that motivates passionate, purposeful and aligned activity from all stakeholders contributing to House of Stake.

Expected Outcomes:

  1. MVV helps motivate and create clear opportunities for a growing number of existing and new contributors to meaningfully contribute to House of Stake.
  2. MVV alignment is used as one of a number of key criteria for assessing new proposals e.g. by the Screening Committee, by delegates, and by AI tools and agents, including the Proposal Dashboard and Delegate Agent.
  3. Clarity of direction aligns activity, resulting in a high proportion of proposals being successful and a high rate of those proposals achieving their objectives.

Approach

We have used a participatory design methodology known as Co-Creation Cycles to engage the community in crafting and refining the Mission, Vision & Values, taking it from v0.1.1 to v0.2.0, which this proposal for v1.0.0 is based upon.

Running this process during October 2025, with contributions via the Forum and a Co-Creation workshop, we gathered and responded to 33 individual points of feedback.

Key themes that were surfaced included:

  1. Broad support for the overall direction and purpose, including the Vision statement.
  2. Stakeholders who consistently emphasized AI augmentation of human governance, rather than autonomy-replacing AI.
  3. Strong desire to inclusively articulate who participates in and benefits engagement in House of Stake with healthy debate around terms including users, owners, stakeholders and community.

In response, the MVV text was updated to:

  1. Emphasize community-centricity, including recognising the role of the full range of stakeholders in governance.
  2. Reframe AI as augmentative, governed by humans to ensure alignment with community values.
  3. Elaborate on the values to expand upon important details.

What are the risks and limitations?

Not all stakeholder groups participated in the co-creation process, which creates a risk of incomplete representation of perspectives. While the Sensing Proposal cannot fully resolve this limitation, it will validate broader support, gather critical signals from the community, and identify any elements that may require clarification before moving to final ratification.

Technical Specification (Implementation)

Once ratified, implementation of the Mission, Vision, Values is quite straightforward:

  1. Update the Mission, Vision, and Values page on the House of Stake website with the agreed text, clarifying that this has been ratified.
  2. Work with House of Stake Product teams to integrate the agreed MVV into products, tooling and AI agents.
  3. Over time, we could also create additional materials and run interactive sessions to introduce new and existing contributors to the MVV in thoughtful and engaging ways to embed these into the community ethos.

Backwards Compatibility

  1. This MVV aligns with and refines the Interim MVV v0.1.2 currently on the web site, as of 20th November, 2025.
  2. This MVV aligns with and adds greater depth and clarity to the House of Stake Mandate, which is included in the Interim Constitution.
  3. This MVV aligns with and complements the Values & Standards in the proposed House of Stake Code of Conduct.

Milestones

Milestone Target Date Deliverable
Successful Sensing Proposal Q4 2025 At least 1K veNEAR of votes, with >50% voting “For”, and clear and actionable comments to address any significant outstanding concerns.
Successful Decision Proposal Q4 2025 Quorum of at least 1K veNEAR of votes achieved and proposal passes with a simple majority of votes cast.
MVV implemented Q1 2026 All steps listed in Implementation taken.

Budget & Resources

Item Amount
Total 0 Ⓝ

Implementation will be carried out by @HackHumanity, under contract with NEAR Foundation.

This proposal does not request any additional budget or resources for its implementation, beyond what has already been agreed under the terms of that contract.

Team & Accountability

  • Responsible: @HackHumanity
  • Accountable to: House of Stake, HoS Head of Governance, NEAR Foundation

Security Considerations

No security risks have been identified associated with this proposal.

Conflict of Interest

The authors of this proposal work for @HackHumanity, which is under contract with and being paid by NEAR Foundation, including for the implementation of this proposal.

Hack Humanity’s engagement is aligned with and includes facilitation of the Governance Transition Program, therefore this does not represent a Conflict of Interest.

Copyright

Copyright and related rights waived via CC0 1.0.

Authorship & Acknowledgements

Authored by: @dancunningham and @klausbrave from @HackHumanity
Review and feedback from: @HumbertoBesso, @juankbell @disruptionjoe, @haenko, @lane, @AK_HoG

9 Likes
HSP-XXX: NEAR House of Stake Mission Vision Values
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  1. This Sensing proposal has been submitted to House of Stake’s Proposals GitHub Repo.
  2. It has been assigned an HSP number by the HSP Editor role @AK_HoG.
  3. Detail: HSP-006
  4. This Forum post has been update to reflect the HSP number
  5. The Mission Vision Values proposal has been submitted to gov.houseofstake.org for vote and is pending Screening Committee approval.
  6. It is visible in the pending proposal list here: HSP-006
  7. Once approved it will be live for voting at NEAR Proposals | House of Stake Governance
3 Likes
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For the record - HackHumanity delegate profile, and HackHumanity team members will not vote for this proposal.

3 Likes
4

I’ll be voting in favor of this MVV. It’s clear and straightforward, and it gives the House of Stake a solid place to start from. We dealt with something similar when we were putting together the Token Engineering Commons, where the MVV worked as an anchor for decisions. In the TEC, it was designed together by the community during the initial formation of the Commons, and even though it never did go through any future revisions.

It’s a good enough for now but the DAO SHOULD PLAN to update it. It would be nice if there was a clear plan to revisit it after a couple years… otherwise it might be hard to motivate evern changing it.

I’ve seen a lot of broken systems in DAOs persist simply because they were set up early and changing cost is real. Setting a sort of expiration date here would help.

6 Likes
HoS - Hack Humanity Highlights of the Week 20251210
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Having a solid, transparent, and open governance structure is absolutely fundamental and necessary in an ecosystem like ours, and this proposal moves us in that direction.

It was also vital to formalize the principles of HoS.

I appreciate the emphasis on decentralization, creating value for us stakers, and the clear definition of roles.

Other considerations:

While the voting process is simple and user-friendly, I suggest simplifying the lock-in process (currently too many steps to obtain veNear).

The rewards scheme should also be clarified as soon as possible to encourage participation. Investors and stakers appreciate transparency :slightly_smiling_face: .

‐———————————-

I hope this proposal serves as a base to continue growing and advancing.

3 Likes
6

Why HoS have to do anything with AI? It should be focusing on governing NEAR Protocol. Voting against it

1 Like
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I’m excited to support ratification of this MVV!

The values “Builder and Business Centric” and “Transparency with Dignity” really stand out to me.

Prioritizing sustainable incentives for developers, entrepreneurs, and enterprises will help drive real adoption and growth in the NEAR ecosystem. At the same time, pairing transparency with dignity fosters healthier, more inclusive discussions without the toxicity we’ve seen elsewhere.

This balanced, forward-thinking framework feels like exactly what HoS needs as its North Star. Great work to everyone involved.

4 Likes
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The purpose of any blockchain and its governance is shared ideas and moving forward together.

The key point here is to move forward in the same direction. I believe this proposal should be approved, because it will effectively align the community under a single path and give us a clear direction — instead of being distracted by things that don’t really matter.

3 Likes
9

i would be voted “for” to the mission, vision & value proposal.

Currently I do not see anything wrong the current proposal. If anyone has any feedback or things that they want see changed, please join the cocreation workshop and provide feedback moving forward.

3 Likes
10

I would vote in favor of the proposal. I don’t see anything wrong with it; as far as I’m concerned, it will only improve things. Everything should be transparent, and the direction should be clear.

3 Likes
11

I supported this initiative because it focuses on credible neutrality, transparency, and long-term growth, which are all important for building a fair and resilient governance system on NEAR. I also like that it encourages safe experimentation and includes both builders and regular users in the process.

3 Likes
12

This is an important point that we should further consider, thanks.

“Good enough for now, safe enough to try” is a mantra that has come up a few times as we put in place the foundational policies for House of Stake. Though I think we are aiming for a slightly higher bar than that!

While working on the MVV, we did take certain decisions with the aim of having it stand the test of time. For example, saying “evolving governance system” to emphasise it would continue to evolve, rather than “new kind of governance system” which sounds like once it’s invented, we’re done :wink:

I think the Vision and Values should probably have the most longevity, but the Mission in particular could shift and transform over time, at least on timescales of years.

How might we hold ourselves to account as a DAO to revisit policy on a periodic basis? Has anyone else seen examples of this done well (or not so well!) elsewhere?

For example, could we set a “revisit-after” timeframe on all our policies? So when that timeframe passes, it could trigger us to put up another very simple sensing proposal along the lines of “Is the Mission, Vision, Values still serving us well or is it time to revisit it?”

Of course, by design, anyone could put up a proposal anytime to propose a change, but would a more explicit mechanism to remind us to revisit be a good thing?

And if we did, what feels like a suitable timeframe for revisiting the MVV? Every 2 years?

3 Likes
13

Hello everyone!
The risks of decentralization described in the proposal are indeed very dangerous.
For HoS, this will be more coordinated, with clear guidelines and distribution, which will inspire user confidence.

By voting YES, I hope this decision will allow decentralization to work effectively.

1 Like
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Thanks for the feedback. I want to respond to these two points.

I agree. It’s too complicated and involves too many steps. We intend to fix this, and we’ll get there, but it involves redesigning the smart contracts, so I want to be honest that it will take some time. If you have any more specific feedback here, e.g., on specific steps that can be eliminated or combined, I’m all ears.

More information on this coming very soon!

L

2 Likes
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Thanks for the great feedback @Griff!

What about a blanket “expires after” that defaults to something like a year or two? Defaults are powerful, and in general I think governance would be better if policies all expired by default if not renewed.

Granted, in the case of “living” documents such as these, it’s unclear what it would even mean for such a document to “expire.”

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I see ‘good enough’ as safe to try at this point in time or a way to say i dont see anything clear that could broken. What I believe is that the MVV needs a follow-up roadmap document on how to achieve those goals, especially the mission. In my opinion, action > perfect plan.

3 Likes
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thank you for this feedback, about “roadpam” I forwarded below a message from the Telegram chat from @AK_HoG - Head of Governance.

" Review a comprehensive HoS DAO Ops roadmap, with priorities and budget, coming Q1 2026 "

2 Likes
18

Voted FOR this proposal.

The Mission, Vision, and Values are grounded, well-articulated, and community refined — establishing legitimacy in HoS governance. Ample opportunity was provided for the community to engage with the MVV and Hack Humanity incorporated feedback throughout the revision process.

At this point, the MVV is sufficiently mature and ready for ratification.

3 Likes
19

Voted for this proposal! We’re headed in the right direction.

2 Likes
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Yeah I like categorizing these sorts of governance policy votes some how and then requiring a retrospective and upgrade in 1 or 2 years time. Sort of like how Monero schedules a hardfork every 6 months. Making feedback cycles naturally part of the design will be a huge move.

It means there should be space given to debate, modify and vote on a new version of this MVV, or in general, this policy.

Seeing our governance framework as a product that could benefit from regular retrospectives will avoid a lot of issues. The chances we get things right the first time is very low, no matter how hard we try.