I’m Phil, co-founder of the Govmos initiative. We are dedicated to reform governance by trying to research solution to update the current system and participate in the overall debate toward a better one.
We are also builders and we will soon introduce a toolkit that we think is going to help supporting better participation in governance.
Today’s first post is a signaling type of “hello world” and expose our long term commitment to this task that we putted on ourselves. So here it is hello cosmos, we are govmos and we want to make governance in cosmos better !
Oh and by the way, we know there is an existing project in Juno that wears the same name already. But that project seem to be dormant (maybe dead) and frankly govmos sounds a lot more like a governance project name than a defi one. So we decided we would take it as it seems more appropriate to our context. We will of course think about renaming if that project were to come to light and justify reasons to keep it called govmos !
In order to make our first post appealing, we have to post some images. I’d like to ask @lexa if she can grant us the permission to include links (I assume image posting block is also related).
Will do my best to respect the codelines of the forum and bring valueable content on the table; hope this will be the case with the first post that should be public in a few minutes now that I have all the tools to make it happen ! Thx for the quick assistance
Smart question ! Well we are actually an independant initiative, we kept quiet and looked around. Waiting to see things evolve in the right direction. But at some point we just saw it wasn’t the case and that it was needed to just stop looking and commenting, to turn to action. Since then the whole purpose was to design an economically viable model for DAO’s to be truly decentralized and durable democratic debate places. On the other hand we also worked on a set of tools meant to facilitate user’s participation in governance, that is the govmos hub which will be introduced later if our governance model & our initiative is taken seriously. Because we also accept if that’s not the case. If the community doesn’t want us we won’t force our way in. We have ideas that we think can help, we hope that either someone will improve on them, or just comes with better one instead !
Well I won’t spoil the fun part, but first we introduce our research and taste the temperature, as a way to learn how to properly use this governance forum. Then we’ll move to the most interesting part if the first steps are conclusive. But without giving up everything that’s under the hood, we want to do more than just exploring governance concepts
As a first reaction to seeing how governance works, one of the issues that stands out is the lack of participation from the higher ranked validators and the low quorum required to pass votes that affect the entire network. Not sure if these are impossible to address since they are probably related but I would say this stands out to me as a newbie to this forum.
I agree with you on that, but in our thesis we see that as a symptom more than the actual cause of the disease. The lack of participation is the key point, but we also enlighted in our first research paper (page 2) that the largest cohort (stakers) is the one where people have the least amount of time to participate in governance (if they even do it in the first place). Where on the opposite end, foundations & team are few dedicated people who would quickly push to take centralized control without even noticing they do. That’s actually exactly what happened with cosmos 2 and we now have the same issue with Evmos. A sign that this is a general problem. We need to increase vote participation, surely, but we mostly have to structure DAO organization first. That’s our main focus atm at govmos. But don’t worry once this problem is fixed, we already have plans to increase governance participation, but we’ll release that part later.
first we have to formalize the DAO structuring, via these councils system. And introduce as a rule of law that nothing can be called a DAO before having registered at least one participant in each “council type”, which are by the count of 4 : foundation council, validator council, developer council & delegator council.
Next will be formalizing the infrastructure required to make this happen. Many options there, and we are exploring to find the best route, then we will build it if no one else does.
Update 21/12/2022 :
After a month spent into trying to reform governance we decided to put this initiative on hold. It’s been a month of 16+ hours a day to try bringing new ideas on the table. Just to face that our approach is not taken seriously. Therefore we don’t want to spend more time trying to convince people that just don’t want to.
Our standpoint is now clearer than ever, the current governance structure is definitely not sustainable, nor scalable, but we can’t force our way in. So we will just share what we’ve done, and let that sink in just in case someone could make use of it.
Let that day be the one we warned cosmos that the current political architecture of the SDK has a massive flaw. If votes are not separated from security then foundations will push for more and more centralized political agendas. We bet on the fact that political forces will do absolutely stupid stuff with the community money and this is where your system will break. Investors & delegators inevitably lose confidence and the entire castle will fall apart. At that moment you may remember than a tiny group of people warned you long before that this will inevitably happen if the political & economics forces are not clearly separated and constantly kept in check. Because there’s not even a chance to see politics & economics run correctly without proper balancing mechanisms. You didn’t want to listen in 2022, maybe you will in a not so distant future !
That being said ! Happy holidays to everyone in the Cosmos, we love that ecosystem, but we will remain out of the politics for now. Hoping that we were wrong about this. Otherwise see you guyz later when you’ll wake up to this call.
Sad to hear, but it is a simple but right conclusion that governance is rated less important than the tech development. I have been mentioning it a long time already, but the Cosmoverse is tech-horny. The next tool, the next dashboard is something where we all drewl and dream about, but people caring to market the product or do their share in making sure governance is prepared properly are in most of the cases struggling for scraps.
And unless people start to understand that a high APR does not mean you earn more money we will not break that stigma…
Most of our research pointed to the fact that this system may be OK today even though it showed some flaws emerging already. But the Truth is that it’s easy to see that this won’t be able to scale through the next maturity stages of this network. That’s why we need to start thinking how to evolve governance today, not rushing it, but starting to find a consensual approach in order to adapt as things go, proactive instead of purely reactive. That is the mission we wanted to kickstart with the initiative.
Most of our research pointed to the fact that this system may be OK today even though it showed some flaws emerging already. But the Truth is that it’s easy to see that this won’t be able to scale through the next maturity stages of this network.
Maybe I missed it, but did you share the reason behind this statement somewhere already?
Indeed, we could have been more specific on that point. I was refering to the recent share or rejected proposals along with the controversial ones. To us it’s a sign that Something is no working as seemlessly as it did before. On the scaling matter, it’s based on the fact that growth in the whole cosmos is expected to go nuts during the next market cycle. If we see some tiny cracks already that’s likely to grow as well on the governance side.
hello cosmos, we are govmos and we want to make governance in cosmos better !
