[GWG] - A charter for the Cosmos Governance Working Group

Hey all!

Here’s an initial draft for the Cosmos Governance Working Group (GWG). Please discuss here and/or make suggestions in the Google Doc (link at the bottom). My goal is to refer to this in order to keep us focused on what’s important and to cite it when governance discussions veer off track.

Cosmos Governance Working Group Charter

Mission

Make Cosmos governance easy and desirable for those acting to improve the network as a common good, while making Cosmos governance difficult and undesirable for those prioritizing anything else.

Vision

A diverse Cosmos working group group that develops and communicates decentralized community governance efforts alongside the Hub’s governance development, and a Cosmos community that’s capable of identifying and assessing the key components of a proposal.

Values

We value our reputation, competence, objectivity & rationality, communication skills, and diversity. We devalue self-promotion and efforts to further self-interests at the cost of Cosmos stakeholders.

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Hey everyone, this is Connor with Consensus Networks. We run a validator on Cosmos and have been validating since early in Cosmos Hub 2. We have been wanting to get more involved in the community and felt that this is an area we can really add some value to the community. We support quite a few different networks with different governance structures and approaches and hope to bring the lessons learned and best practices we have found across all of our experiences to the Cosmos. Governance is closely intertwined with the decentralization of any network and bringing in a diverse range of stakeholders is critical to creating any effective governing body. We have been conducting a lot of research on decentralization and governance across multiple networks and believe a working group like this is necessary, especially as a network becomes more decentralized. If economic incentives are coupled too closely with governance, then you run the risk of a handful of network participants essentially dictating the network. We believe decoupling the two is the only way to ensure that checks and balances are kept between the different participants in a decentralized network, community interests…

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Thanks Connor! Happy to see Consensus Networks participating on the Cosmos Hub.

For anyone interested, please me know if there’s anything that you think should be added to, changed about, or removed from the initial GWG charter posted above.

I would like to propose that the GWG charter is a major deliverable of your work, along with the group, such that we lay the foundation of the GWG for the long term. It would be great if the outcome of these 3 months is a charter that is voted on by the community, giving the GWG a form of legitimacy by the Cosmos ecosystem.

Overall, the charter should include the following sections, which can be discussed in the group:

• Mission
• Objectives and goals
• In / out of scope
• Stakeholders
• Deliverables with plan
• Risks (if any)
• Budget

Each of these sections relates to questions that have been discussed recently following the submission of the proposal for voting and specifying them for the long term would help bring the community together and help keep the GWG focused, as you rightly point out. Once the community has voted on this we can easily stick to the details of the charter. I will comment separately on my ideas of the details of each section.

Hey Gavin, Sergey from cyber~Congress here. I took part in the call and here are some points I build upon, that might be of interest to the mission and the actual delivery of that mission: (In no particular order of importance) • I believe it’s uber important to be aware of the dangers that any working group in a decentralized project can have. Hence, it is vital, IMO, to get across the message that the mission of the group is by no mean “to govern”, but “to listen” • I think that 2 of the most important parts are, of course, education and participation of the whole community in governance • It is vital IMO to think of the working group, not just in terms of the cosmos hub, but to be able to listen across the whole ecosystem, especially with the coming of the IBC (for example, right now in cyber, we are trying to solve the puzzle of having our community to take part in having a vote with our cosmos validator, even though theoretically that would mean off-chain voting ((although this process can later be formalized through the local chain governance or IBC)) • Someone mentioned manuals. I think manuals do exist. They are called democracy, communism, marxism, capitalism,…

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