[Proposal ##][DRAFT] Signalling Proposal - Move Governance to Github

Hub Proposals Signaling/Text
21

Governance is the discussion of growth, efficiency and management. It should happen where it should happen. Not pushed onto people to be used where it is comfortable for an X entity

1 Like
22

Indeed. If the only disadvantage from using the forum/Commonwealth/whatever is that someone has to create the proposal manually; but we get high user participation for that in return then count me in. I would then do the creation work of the proposals with love myself

23

The advantages of keeping proposals in forum.cosmos.network or Common Wealth are:

  • independent service, can be hosted by ICF
  • donā€™t rely 100% on GitHub
  • could be more friendly for non engineers.

Notes:

  • Github commits can still easily reference any post / comment of the forum
1 Like
24

There is no issue with using the forum, there is an issue with obligating to use the forum and / or github. It doesnt matte what to use. It matters if governance is done freely or its enforced

1 Like
25

Thanks for the feedback and lively discussion. To reiterate some of the reasons I still feel this suggestion is a reasonable approach.

  1. Discussions on github is quite new, it is being used heavily by some opensource projects.
  2. I would love to see governance be more driven by automation, and this would be an excellent ā€œtrainingā€ ground for this technology. See
  3. Github would be a free common interface to utilize for Cosmos blockchains to implement this ā€œhypotheticalā€ autonomous governance.
  4. Fetch.ai is a cosmos chain that is focused on Ai and blockchain intergration.
  5. Could inspire folks to code or read it well enough to write documentation or contribute in ways other than governance participation.

I like this platform, donā€™t get me wrong, but Iā€™m cross-breed as it relates to blockchain. My interests are the fusion of IoT, Ai and persistent state. Github is a perfectly reasonable solution with enough features to satisfy the stated goals above.

Iā€™d like to tag some of the Fetch.ai team to get their opinions about the stated goal. Something I could do on github, but not in a siloā€™d sever such as this.

Perhaps Discourse would be interested in implementing ActivityPub (w3.org) into their offering. The ActivityPub protocol is a decentralized social networking protocol based upon the ActivityStreams 2.0 data format. It provides a client to server API for creating, updating and deleting content, as well as a federated server to server API for delivering notifications and content.

26

The main issue is the user-unfriendliness for Github for new users. The learning curve is quite steep imo

However, if there would be some kind of symbiosis between for example this forum and Github you would still be able to get the best of both worlds.

1 Like
27

Githubs level of complexity would pose a barrier to participation for many common non-technical users who do not have exposure to Git. I believe it would be counter-productive to gaining more participation from the community.

2 Likes
28

Hey folks, realizing Iā€™m coming into this conversation late, but Iā€™m at Metagov / Validator Commons and have been working for a while on interop + standards between social platforms. This discussion on tradeoffs between GitHub / Commonwealth / Discourse is super interesting.

My basic sense is that different parts of a community can and should live on different platformsā€”just as a typical office building will have conference rooms, auditoriums, phone booths, etc. But it takes time and effort and research to build a cohesive community that spans across multiple platforms. One of the things Iā€™ve been trying to do is to get Microsoft / GitHub to publish APIs that interoperate with or bridge across Web3/DAO tooling services like Commonwealth or even Discourse (e.g. this is the idea behind EIP-4824 for DAOs). If that works out, then you wonā€™t have to choose, the proposals will just translate across the services.

PS Thereā€™s also some NSF-funded research that Metagov is conducting with UC Davis, CU Boulder, and UWash on governance transitions, specifically in GitHub communities. If there does end up being a transition to GitHub governance I would love to keep tabs + take notes on it!

Cheers,
Josh

3 Likes
29

I am not able to join the Validator Commons call, but very much interested in this multi-platform approach on governance. Shall we link up? Can you send me a Telegram/Discord DM?

1 Like