Many layers to this problem, including election practices and structures; funding models; legal entities and agency; implementation bodies.
Proposers would submit things like research papers; positions of legal advice; or open source code to contribute to ongoing dialogue.
Submissions should be concrete and detailed, certainly more than just simple advice or ideas.
Some ideas on the sorts of submissions that would help the community move forward:
- An open source library of code that can add one or more capabilities to an on-chain DAO, such as elected positions, multi-sig voting, periodic funding release.
- Protocol level research into how Treasury funding should be released through wallets that have key holders.
- Academic research into different governance systems that people can be elected into along with various pros/cons on what sort of 'balance of power' mechanisms they create.
- Lawyers from specific jurisdictions (Wyoming? Switzerland?) that would venture some legal opinions on how to structure a not-for-profit foundation with a constitution/charter that requires them to ensure the existence, integrity and election of a DAO that could function as its 'Board of Directors'… or other such scenarios that integrate on-chain models with the real world legal systems.
- Research into how open source foundations (particularly anything blockchain related) protect themselves whilst still moving forward into the future… e.g. copyright, trademarks, law suits, funding models.
There will be many more avenues of interest to pursue… these are just to give people ideas about the types of 'deliverables' we might expect to see.
For Community Advisors, I am proposing the following scoring categories for this challenge:
- Impact. The proposal should be tightly focused on governance problems that are of relevance for the Cardano community and/or the Catalyst project. Avoid proposals that are overly vague or try to solve only 'real world' election problems without grounding them in a Cardano context.
- Reusability. The proposal should not be putting forward a solution that cannot be picked up by other teams in later rounds as part of a larger governance framework. e.g. Technical proposals that are not open source, or too specific (like focusing on running a small club).
- Auditability. The proposer has provided some verifiable details on why they are a good person to undertake this work, along with some mechanisms for the Voting Committee to perhaps release funding in a staged way. e.g. an academic paper might consider exposing a rough outline and/or early drafts at a set of date milestones to the Voting Committee.
The premise of this challenge is based on the idea that the Cardano Community must move forward (in a structured way) towards increasing self-governance. This process should be inclusive of both 'The Big 3' (Cardano Foundation, Emurgo and Input Output Global) and the community at large. We should celebrate both submissions and involvement from these organisations.
I am suggesting this will be the first of 3 rounds of challenges:
- Governance Symposium to canvas for ideas and building blocks.
- Constitutional Convention. Once we have seen the research and ideas from the community and professionals we would invite submissions which propose a 'complete solution' that puts these building blocks together for the community to vote on. There would be little funding (maybe none?) for this challenge, but submitters would be invited to propose projected implementation costs and stages. We would have a single 'winner' from the community vote.
- Implementation. The exact details of this would flow from the outcome of round 2, but with the community now understanding the desired 'end goal' we can break out the different pieces needed to move forward and invite multiple parties to propose how they would build/implement the specifics.
The exact nature of the proposed 3 rounds might change as the community responds, but awareness of this should help frame the mindset for responders to this (the first) round. Having said that... these building blocks will still be independently useful to the community's self-governance journey, even if we change our approach in a more fundamental way.
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