F7 Meeting 4 - 21st April 2022
Community Governance Oversight Meeting #4 - 15:00 UTC, Thursday, 21th April 2022
F7 Meeting 4 -Agenda - 21st April 2022
Agenda
Attendees
| Name | Role |
|---|---|
Allison Fromm | Member |
Kenric Nelson | Member |
Matthias Sieber | Member |
Phil Khoo | Member |
Stephen Whitenstall | Member |
Tevo Saks | Member |
Vanessa Cardui | Member |
Andre Diamond | Treasury |
Miroslav Rajh | Treasury |
Minutes
| Name | Role |
|---|---|
Livia Corcino | Secretary |
Apologies
| Name | Role |
|---|---|
Jo Allum | Member |
Information
Community Governance Oversight (CGO)
F7 Ideascale Proposal - https://cardano.ideascale.com/c/idea/383517
F8 Ideascale Proposal - https://cardano.ideascale.com/c/idea/398225
GitBook - https://quality-assurance-dao.gitbook.io/community-governance-oversight/
Agenda
1 CGO TREASURY
01:24 Andre - We’ll start working out now who is owed what; then on the day IOG make the next payment, we’ll pay as much as possible to people.
01:53 Stephen - Payments for project deliverables to be discussed at a future meeting. Only payment to be made immediately will be to Livia (for minute-taking and documentation). Generally the project is aiming to make budgeting decisions in advance of fund release.
Action - Stephen and Andre to meet Fri 22nd to discuss details of payments.
2 Town Hall Slides
02:42 Allison - Feedback from the past meeting has been incorporated. Specifically, the question of how the group emerged was clarified.
03:22 Stephen - This is important to repeat (briefly) for a while.
3 Fund 8 - CGO Proposal
03:53 Stephen - The fund 8 proposal is now in the voting period. It is necessary for people to promote the proposal so that we are funded and have a larger budget.
05:05 Allison - Will tweet about it. Stephen will retweet.
06:31 Phil - Town Hall is a valid place to promote the proposal; other projects use the space in Town Hall to promote their future proposals, so we can do that too.
06:58 Allison - Could mention our proposal and open the space for contact if there are questions about it.
07:15 Tevo - And share propoal link in the Chat.
4 CGO Project Board Review
07:33 Stephen - Tasks to do - input to the IOG weekly newsletter, which will be done at the end of the meeting. Fund 7 report needs to be done on the 24th (Sunday). I will be responsible. Updates of what will be reported will be posted on discord. In progress: this meeting; and Fund 8 proposal; and our 4 deliverables. Been done: Town Hall slides.
08:40 Stephen - Detailed updates are kept so you can track who will get what at the end of the fund proposal 7.
5 F7 CGO Scope and Deliverables
5.1 Challenge setting process
09:28 Phil - has been talking to Ro from AdaGov about giving feedback and about implementations. Ro works full-time, and is in Australia, so unlikely to be able to make our meetings to discuss.
10:08 Tevo - Ro’s work is in scope of community governance; it’s trying to bring the community together and give access to data.
10:35 Phil - I’m in support of the data structures he is trying to implement, and I will be aiming to represent the ADAgov solution in the community. Have spoken to Joey Chessher (Toolmakers and Maintainers rep on Catalyst Circle) about it.
11:06 Stephen - how it relates to scope and deliverables of our project, is that it might inform what surveys and retrospectives we do in relation to the “review of challenge-setting” deliverable. Ro is doing some work on that, so we can learn form each other.
Action - Have more detailed discussion on this outside the meeting.
11:47 Allison - Haven’t yet spoken to George Lovegrove about his work on consolidating challenges into new categories.
12:05 Stephen - Could discuss with George on Discord.
12:26 Allison - The point of this action item is to understand what George is doing so we know how it relates to the governance oversight activities.
12:45 Stephen - Note that our scope is to oversee challenge settings, not specifically challenge teams - although the two are related. George is aiming to replace challenge-settings with his solution in the medium-to-long term.
Action - Allison to tag George in Discord and ask him for a brief update.
5.2 Catalyst Circle problem sensing
13:42 Stephen - Action from last meeting, joint working group with CCv3; Allison, Stephen and Tevo. There have been two meetings so far. The first sought to clarify the problem-sensing process; the second developed this further; created a problem-sensing rubric, and designed a workflow for how to review a problem at a Circle meeting.
14:34 Tevo - Today in CA/VCA hub, we did an intro to DeWork. CA/VCA hub is another use-case for a problem-sensing process using the same rubric.
15:27 Stephen - The rubric covers looking at how a problem relates to Cardano’s mission; a problem statement; and using a qualitative or quantitative metric. That’s the minimum for a problem to go on the Circle board.
15:56 Vanessa - Documentation of past Circle meetings reveals useful things e.g. how far the Prioritised Problems board was used in the meetings has influenced the effectiveness of the problem-sensing process. Might be useful for our final report.
17:14 Stephen - How different sub-circles or communities are feeding back to their representatives. We should be seeing problems coming from the community more?
17:49 Vanessa - The different communities and seats on Circle; it makes a difference how organised they are. The CAs sub-circle are able to get problems raised through this process because they are more organised and have a sense of themselves as a community; Funded Proposers less so, so their issues may not be coming through in a structured way yet.
18:49 Tevo - Last Coordinator meeting, Mercy (Funded Proposers representative on Circle) shared a presentation. It takes time to find people to gte involved; and not all roles will be as organised as CAs are. Did Allison (when she was general ADA holders rep on CCv2) get any results from holding community calls to engage people?
19:29 Stephen - It's interesting to report information in a final report such as how different communities are operating. This matters from a governance perspective.
19:51 Kenric - The process set up by Nadia (identify an issue, create a temporary sub-circle around it, select a champion who will lead it, do a close-out report on what has been done) is a good one and can be used as a model in Circle and by different parts of the Catalyst leadership.
21:16 Stephen - From an Oversight perspective,we could look at whether that way of working is transferable to other sub-circles, and whether it’s appropriate for different communities who may have different ways of operating?
21:40 Phil - I’ve discussed issue of how to reach “voters” for a fund 7 proposal.
22:36 Allison - Open Office Hours; using places outside of Catalyst where voters engage, e.g, Reddit.
23:16 Stephen: in Wednesday’s Town Hall, Danny’s presentation on voter surveys mentioned engaement levels on different social media platforms, and Reddit and weekly newsletter were both v successful.
24:06 Stephen - How each Circle representative represents their community is answerable now to how they report their funding; interesting for us as Oversight.
5.3 D-reps
24:46 Kenric - Invited c 10 people to be part of Zotero literature database.
Action - a meeting next week to discuss the tool and plans on how to use it. How to open this more to the community, and make the whitepaper a community document? To be discussed.
28:25 Stephen - interested in interfacing Zotero with Obsidian.
29:00 Stephen - main action item from last meeting on d-Reps is discussing IOG’s letter
29:49 Allison - I appreciate that IOG took time to reflect on the community’s letter, and send a response; but it is fairly non-specific, other than that the concerns would be taken seriously. So we are still in a “wait and see” pattern.
30:44 Phil - Not by chace that they call Catalyst an “experiment” - IOG understand they do not have all the answers, and want community participation, but not everything is ready - this was clear in Town Hall presentation from Kevin and Jerod this week; it would be open to attack to release things that are not ready.
32:04 Vanessa - Key thing I get from the letter is parag. 3, where it says the goal of D-reps is to “increase the validity of Project Catalyst by increasing voter participation and decreasing voter apathy.” How will they monitor this as IOG; and, if CGO is funded again by the time dReps are implemented, how will we measure it and maintain oversight of whether it’s happening?
33:11 Kenric - How much does a passive voter who selects a delegated representative improve governance? If numbers increase, but people are only participating as passive voters? How do we measure?
34:03 Phil - It reduces choice - instead of choosing between 1,000 proposals you’re choosing from 50 dReps
34:14 Kenric - Maybe that’s a good way to measure it - in information theory, you measure information by how many choices you havevs. what the outcome is.Moving from many choices to one outcome is a measure of how much information was processed.
34:43 Stephen - In the Blockchain Governance paper from February; there’s a choice not to be informed. If you are doing some metrics from D reps' oversights, you’d want to see what difference are dReps making to the - quality? - of decision-making, as opposed to people who “choose” not to be informed, and whether there’s any quantitative or qualitative difference between those two approaches.
35:39 Matthias - At my company (some people involved in Catalyst, the majority not), I asked if people would find it helpful to get a voting list - answer was yes. With dReps it’s even more hands off - people delegate trust, they don’t need to be informed at all. I still think it’s a good idea, but - does it improve governance?
37:06 Stephen - We need to be clear about what we mean by terms like legitimacy, and whether dReps are for domain knowledge, or some kind of representation, etc.
37:25 Tevo - The community’s letter to IOG asked a lot of questions about dReps, and these were not answered. Now again we’re in the situation where IOG has information but don’t give it to us because we are not ready for it?
38:12 Stephen - Kevin Hammond’s Town Hall update about Treasury partially answers some of the questions the letter asked - but a lot of the specific questions were not answered. The statement “The solutions presented in your letter align well with IOG’s plans” - which suggestions? The vagueness feels like, rather than not being ready, they are holding something back.
39:14 Vanessa - More openness on recruitment criteria is needed at this stage, for equal opps and representation.
40:50 Kenric - It is hoped that the literature review and a possible white paper will clarify what liquid democracy means, how each concept would be measured, why these words would be being used, aspects of the design that meet that aspiration, and so on.
41:59 Stephen - We're looking at the theoretical basis; and we’re looking at how IOG are releasing and communicating things.
42:51 Phil - There's a research point for us to ask the community how they feel about IO’s decision-making process and their ability to communicate their plans to the community.
43:21 Stephen - There are opportunities to get feedback from people at different stages of the implementation of dReps, or even the communication about dReps.
5.4 Governance parameters
43:50 Stephen - Last meeting - we decided that even though the Parameters Pilot form IOG is on hold, we can still look at governance parameters.
Action - Stephen and Tevo to meet next week, to discuss what counts as a parameter change and a parameter.
44:56 Vanessa - Is documenting community comments in social media (esp Telegram) about governance issues. Will collate and then ask contributors’ consent to make the collated version public. (NB summariser’s note: even though such comments are “public”, recontextualising something in this way can raise consent issues - not necessarily legally, but in terms of ethics and best practice - so best to ask people.)
6 FUND 7 CGO Proposal Reporting
46:15 Stephen - We’ll work on fund 7 reporting in Discord in time for deadline of Sun 24th
7 Any Other Business
46:26 Stephen - All to digest what happened in this meeting and post a sentence or two in Discord, suggestions to help summarise it for Daniel's weekly newsletter.
46:57 Matthias - Google form on principles of governance which came out of the GimbaLabs working group on creating a Cardano constitution. It’s a first step, collecting insights; all please complete it and distribute it. Matthias is part of this Gimbalabs working group and can be a liaison between it and CGO.
48:30 Kenric - On how we measure the effectiveness of governance: Decentralisation doesn't accomplish everything that needs to be done in a governance environment. Need to look at good ways to measure the effectiveness of decision-making in governance. A constitution may be an opportunity to define what good outcomes would be.
50:04 Allison - Town Hall and ATH discussion on treasury on Weds could be included and documented. Is it in scope - and if so, to what extent do we want to include that material in what we are documenting?
50:35 Kenric - Probably as part of “parameters”? 50:49 Stephen:Disagree there should be a constitution or “universal principles”. There is an American and French tradition of constitutionalism, but from an English perspective I disagree.
51:48 Vanessa - Seconded. Has it been decided already that there will be a constitution, or is it still up for debate?
51:57 Matthias - It is up for debate. We acknowledge that the word “constitution” might be triggering. Jo Allum did a presentation at Catalyst Women about the idea of a constitution, mentioning the example of New Zealand which also does not have a constitution. I agree the terms we use are important. But we want to establish e.g. how we communicate with each other, treat each other, etc. About principles and values. Could use the word “mainfesto” but that may be triggering for many Americans. But the main thing is we would rather develop something as a community than have something imposed by IOG.
53:26 Vanessa - For clarity, it’s not the word that people are resisting; it’s the idea of a single document. From an English perspective, we do have a constitution, but it is distributed through several oral and written sources, same is true of New Zealand. So it’s the decentralised-ness, rather than the word you call it. 53:43 Stephen: It undermines the priniple of decentralisation to have a single definition of governance by a body. If IOG decides to define it, they are working against decentralisation. Jo’s perspective also includes Eleanor Ostrom’s idea of the Commons - process of discovery of what people’s democratic or representational needs are, rather than defining what they are. Universalist approach versus a discovery approach.
54:41 Matthias - To clarify, we also did talk about that, and made the asumption that there probably would not be a single source of truth.The meeting yesterday - Token-Based Learning Project - was recorded, see GimbaLabs, and the chat is now public (link)
55:17 Stephen - While we might disagree this is helps us think about how we should deal with an d document these issues.
55:39 Tevo - Innovation Fund Architecture Miro board (link) developed in Swarm sessions in relation to the process that’s being used in the CA SubCircle - in next Swarm session we’ll have a breakout room on this; Also created a survey to report how people feel about meetings, whether they feel heard, whether they are OK with the progress we’re making. Also on Thursdays there is another meetup group in the VCA Discord - weekly retrospective on what we have learnt and how we are going to proceed with decisions; and improving our problems board. All ties in to governance of Catalyst.
57:50 Stephen - It's good to highlight that there's other work going on in the ecosystem on governance: Tevo’s work on innovation fund architecture, and Gimbalabs work on the constitution.
Next meeting: 15:00 UTC on Thurs 5th May
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