What you need to know about the Cosmos Governance Working Group
In the last weeks we have assisted to a lot of discussions regarding the current state of the Cosmos Hub governance mechanisms. Why has it revealed to be a problem only now? What is being done to fix it? Are we on the right path? After having taken some time to reflect on all of this, I’ve came to the conclusion that a blog post might be the best place where to write down my thoughts so that they can be easily discussed by everyone. Also, I think that having more people know about this problems is the best thing for the community as a whole. And so here we are.
The origins
To better explain what is the current situation, I think the best thing is to start from the beginning, even tho you might already know about it.
Everything started back in December 12, when the Cosmos Hub underwent an upgrade and released the possibility to everyone to create the so called “Community spend proposals”.
What are those? They are on-chain proposals that everyone can create in order to ask the whole community to take a part of the on-chain community pool and spend it the way they want. It’s the mechanism with which the community can fund whatever project or action they think will improve the community in the future or has made the community better in the past.
The first proposal has been created by me and Daniela Pavin, and with it we wanted to ask the community to fund our trip in Osaka back in October during which we hosted our first live event.
Unfortunately this proposal did not even reach the minimum deposit amount so that it could be voted for, and so we didn’t receive any grant from it.
While this might be a sad moment (and it surely was for both me and Daniela), it also sparked the willing of improving the overall proposals mechanisms.
Introducing the Governance Working Group
This willing is what led to the creation of the Cosmos Governance Working Group (in short, GWG), a team of people initially composed only by Gavin but that has later acquired other members ready to work towards a better governance mechanism.
The main goal of the group is to define a set of rules-of-thumb that should make it easier for people to create spend proposals that can read the voting period and even pass. The original plan was to ask for a 5,250 ATOMs (~20,000$) grant from the community itself to be able to deliver these specific items over the first three moths of 2020.
How is the GWG doing?
Two months have now been passed, and the time that the proposal set to deliver all the items is coming to an end. So, what have they done?
Currently, the things that have been done publicly and can be seen by everyone are the followings:
- A governance working group community
- A template for community spend proposals
- A best-practices document for community spend proposals, visible on GitHub
- An educational wiki for the Cosmos Hub parameters, visible on GitHub
- Three governance working group community calls
- Two GWG month-end articles
So, the following this still needs to be started:
- A best-practices wiki for the Cosmos Hub parameters
- One GWG month-end article
- A Q2 2020 GWG recommendations article
We can fairly say that completing the currently working-in-progress points as well as the ones that have yet to be started can be surely done in one month, so at a first glance it might seem the group is doing fine.
What will be the future of the GWG?
You might now be asking yourself:
“So, if the group is doing fine and it’s achieving the objectives it had, what is the purpose of this blog post?”
It’s pretty simple: I don’t think the work was worth the money, and I don’t think the GWG will have any future in the short term.
This opinion comes from the fact that inside the group there are currently very few people really active and willing to do something. All the other people are just there to see what the others are up to. This is obviously an unsustainable model for a working group, which should instead be composed of people really willing to take part to it. If the group keeps working this way, what we will see is all the current people inside it slowly leaving in order to purpose a cause they are more interested in.
In order to prevent all of this from happening, what I think should happen is the group should focus more on boarding new people and making them more interested about the governance process so that they can continue the work that has been done until now.
At the same time, the group should start prepare itself for the moment when Gavin and Figment will eventually leave, deciding who should take their place and how to better organize themselves internally.
Finally, I think the Telegram group should be dropped in favor of the already existing channel inside the Community-lead Cosmos Discord server. This would allow the group to have a higher exposure to the community as a whole, and would certainly allow them to attract more people. Also, it would make the whole process a lot more transparent and easy-to-understand to everyone who wishes to get involved.
Conclusions
In the end, I really think the work that has been (and will eventually be) made made from the group was needed from the community. On the other hand tho, I really think the proposal should have had a lower budget.
I would really love to see the group flourish in the upcoming months and lead towards a revolution about the governance proposals mechanisms and community participation. I hope this proposal and all the discussion that has generated will attract more people towards the mechanisms of the community funds spending allowing them to organize and create things that are useful for the community itself.
Thank you Gavin and Figment for this first successful community spend proposal. I really hope your work will enable other people to create similar proposals easily.
If you want to get involved with the Governance Working group, here are their contacts:
- Telegram: t.me/hubgov
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/CosmosGov
- Discord channel: https://discord.gg/ ZT7G5Ns
