Please describe your proposed solution.
There has been a lot of discussion in the community recently regarding CIP-1694 and the Voltaire governance era for the Cardano ecosystem. What has largely been absent from these discussions is a recognition and appreciation of the significant amount of effort already being undertaken by a variety of individuals and teams, each working on and solving their own governance issues.
CIP-1694 discussions do not address more foundational governance needs, such as team organizational structures, development of roles and responsibilities, process and procedure development, or any process of reciprocal learning and peer support.
To support the community as it advances on its decentralised governance journey, the Governance Guild proposes to bring together individuals and teams from across Web3 ecosystems for a series of grassroots governance forums. It is our hope that this will be a launching point for blockchain governance that attracts like-minded individuals to work together to address our shared concerns.
To accomplish this, we plan to deliver 4 sessions over 6 months, in an open-space style, with a group of up to 50 individuals and teams from Cardano and beyond who are interested in the issues around how we govern ourselves in Web3 spaces.
Participants in the sessions will be invited to participate through several methods. First, the Governance Guild is well connected with other community groups such as Swarm, SingularityNet, Gimbalabs, etc. and will tap directly into these networks to distribute invitations. Second, participants may opt in to participate through our outreach, such as posting on Twitter, Telegram, and Discord. When invitees sign up, we will ask them to tell us about anyone else they think should be invited. Lastly, we will remain committed to involving other individuals through other Cardano events, such as After Townhalls.
The “Open Space” approach that we plan to use means that attendees are invited to run breakout sessions on topics of concern to them, which helps ensure that sessions are responsive and current, and the attendees are co-creators of each event. Each breakout room will be documented using text summaries on GitBook, and our documentation approach will give concern both to crediting people for their input if they wish, and preserving privacy and anonymity for those who prefer it.
We will share the documentation widely to the community via Twitter, Discord, Telegram, and the Cardano Forum, and will use the documentation from each session as the basis for planning the next. We will also conduct a short retrospective after each session, to understand in what ways it was useful, the key directions and ideas that are emerging, and which voices might be missing and might need to be included next time. All material will be publicly available to help anyone else who might want to run similar events.
Governance Guild is uniquely placed to deliver this proposal effectively because we are all very engaged members of the Catalyst community, each with our own wide network of connections that we can draw on to make these events a success, and each with our own insights on the complex governance issues that face Cardano overall, and particularly Cardano DAOs and communities.
How does your proposed solution address the challenge and what benefits will this bring to the Cardano ecosystem?
Currently, each community group or DAO is required to develop its own governance structure but often without the appropriate know-how or tooling available. By creating community spaces for broad governance discussions to take place, these groups can learn from their peers about best governance practices, innovative tooling, and/or community-driven solutions.
The DAO’s <3 Cardano challenge highlights that Cardano needs “Effective Collaboration Management Platforms to Organize Community Intentions and Actions”. Our proposal would be one such platform where we convene community members and projects to organize their governance intentions and work towards collective solutions.
Having individuals and projects working in silos will not deliver the true decentralization of the future. On the contrary, cross community and broad web3 ecosystem discussions on governance will begin to break down these silos and have us learning from each other.
In addition, all outputs of the grassroots governance community forums will be open for use by any interested individuals. Groups will also be able to use any of the discussions and outcomes from the forums, including any potential solutions and tooling that are needed to support a project or team, to launch their own governance initiatives. While teams will need to determine their own level of comfort making their solution open-source, the Governance Guild will encourage such behaviour.
The benefit of open source solutions is that we need to solve particular problems only once as a community.
How do you intend to measure the success of your project?
As we plan to conduct four grassroots community forums over a six month period, we will measure our successes in the following ways:
- Number of different Cardano community groups/projects or individuals who participate in each forum.
- Number of non-Cardano (other Web3 ecosystem) participants at each forum.
- Number of decentralised governance conversations, services, solutions, and/or tools resulting from the forums.
Please describe your plans to share the outputs and results of your project?
All grassroots governance community forum outputs will be shared on the Governance Guild GitHub, such as meeting readouts (key takeaways), community position statements on a particular governance issue or question, and decentralised solutions or tools resulting from the forums.
As this is a community-wide proposal, we will also share all outputs with meeting participants and distribute them through our network of Cardano community groups (e.g. Swarm, SingularityNet ambassadors, WADA, QA-DAO, Gimbalabs, Community Governance Oversight).