Please describe your proposed solution.
There has been much discussion this year in the Cardano community on CIP-1694 and the Voltaire governance era. What was largely absent from these discussions was a recognition and appreciation of the significant work already being undertaken by a variety of individuals and teams, each working on and solving their own governance issues. Official CIP-1694 discussions did 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.
In 2023, Governance Guild addressed these issues by running 3 successful “Grassroots Governance Community Forums” where individuals within Cardano and across other Web3 communities could discuss these issues. In this proposal, we are seeking funding to run 4 more such sessions.
Our solution will help the Cardano, and wider Web3, community as it advances on its decentralised governance journey, by bringing together individuals and teams from across Web3 ecosystems (including Cardano, sNET, the Internet Native Organisation, and more) for a series of grassroots discussions. They will be run on open-space principles, where any interested group can suggest a breakout room; and, as our previous sessions have been, they will be thoroughly documented and shared. It is our hope that this will support blockchain governance, attracting like-minded individuals to work together to address our shared concerns.
We plan to deliver 4 sessions over 6 months, with groups 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 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 have been successfully using so far 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 continue to 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.