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

Change log • 2022-10-16T05:00:00Z Created initial post • 2022-10-16T05:00:00Z + cosmos/gaia/discussions link to summary Summary This proposal is to move the Proposal process to GitHub. GitHub is better structured to handle Proposals made to the alter the form and function of the hub, and proposals that effect code change can be directly cited in the code improvements made via the proposal process - no matter if the repositories are hosted separately. Details Cosmos Hub already has the discussions repo available and there are several categories that would enhance the engagement around proposals. “The Start Participating in the Forum” post makes these suggestions: Some collected wisdom on soft governance strategies for making and passing proposals. To make proposal-writing easier, topics in each Hub Proposal subcategory come with a template for formatting your content. • Socialize the idea (e.g. On the Hub Discord, Twitter, arranging calls with stakeholders) before going on-chain. Because proposals can’t be changed once they move on-chain it’s important to solicit as much feedback and editorial comments from stakeholders as possible before setting it in stone.…

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To comment on my own proposal - something I just realized, is that tagging other teams in proposals like this where there could be common interests would have network effects that garner higher quality discussion around collaboration to achieve desired outcomes.

The Fetch.ai team, for example, are not directly alerted to the significance of the underling motive and the practicality of this proposal - whereas comments they might have would have desired qualities for it’s purpose.

On another note, there is not a “proposal category,” but a proposal category can be created and all the templates be added.

Personally I’d rather try to improve the forum itself, or if a move to another platform is on the cards make the switch to Commonwealth where other Cosmos chains have their governance discussion periods. Commonwealth has the option to register/sign in using a wallet and is purpose built for community governance.

The forum currently lacks widespread engagement from the broader community (something I have been thinking about more recently and realize is a problem with governance) and GitHub doesn’t seem like a platform that will help to change that. Outside of developers many Cosmonauts don’t use GitHub and it can be initimidating to new users. I wouldn’t expect them to be required to use professional software engineering tooling to participate in governance.

We have also paid Hypha to steward the forum and they have done some fantastic work here laying the foundations for community governance to improve.

I would vote NO to moving governance to GitHub but appreciate the discussion on the matter.

One of the main reasons for the proposal is to achieve some flavor of automated governance. Commonwealth has a closed api, but I’m sure that could be investigated further.

The other aspects are the additional features github provides around participation which, at a glance - Commonwealth currently does not. Maybe those feature should be suggested to their development team.

JD-Lorax:

Outside of developers many Cosmonauts don’t use GitHub and it can be initimidating to new users

Was aware of this, and the way I framed it in the proposal was - reading and writing was also intimidating to people for most of human history. Utilizing github could increase peoples acclimation to powerful tooling.

jasonsprouse:

Utilizing github could increase peoples acclimation to powerful tooling.

It could also detract people from engaging. Forcing people to use engineering tooling isn’t likely to encourage engagement. I don’t use GitHub myself. That’s not to say I don’t know how to read and write. We need simple to use and accessible tools.

I want to thank you @jasonsprouse for starting this discussion. I’m sure it will bring up some important dialogue about how we, as a community, engage in governance. Additionally, it’s clear that a fair amount of thought went into this draft, and there is a larger context at play (largely governance automation), which is definitely a worthwhile topic to explore. I will begin by stating my stance on the matter, and then I will elaborate on that stance. Stance a. I believe that Discourse is an appropriate solution for the Hub’s current governance needs. b. I believe we need better tooling for (or more parties involved in) feedback consolidation. c. I am opposed to ratifying official tooling for doc collaboration at this stage in the Hub’s governance development. Rationale a. I believe that Discourse is an appropriate solution for the Hub’s current governance needs. (some) Hub Governance Challenges: • It is difficult for newcomers to get involved in Hub governance • We want to foster a diverse and inclusive governance culture • Governance conversation is scattered across multiple platforms • Centralized infrastructure is prone to capture • Governance…

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First off - although I knew the name of this forum product many eons ago I didn’t try to find the name of it before posting this proposal. Github had been what I envisioned to achieve the technical feasibility for the time I’ve been contemplating it. I’m not opposed to exploring other options and internalizing feedback - ever. The Discourse api could very well be used to achieve the objective of automating governance. Considerations: • Github discussions is a relatively new feature. • Discourse or other server products that could be maintained by xyz organization are still isolated from the ability to include tags to others beyond xyz organization server participants. • What ever is normalized across the ecosystem people will use. Github tooling would be comparable to Discourse + twitter, but I do agree that this Discourse product is mature and has quality features and is probably why it earned itself a reputation as the go to forum tooling. • IPLD Links content addressable content - git is content addressable - there are yet unknown and unexplored ways these technologies could be used in the context of governance, and automated governance. • The simplicity of the end…

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jasonsprouse: The simplicity of the end goal is for the end user to be able customize their protocol governace participation as light or heavy handed as they wish. This is a very admirable end-goal and I hope we will be able to further explore it. jasonsprouse: IPLD Links content addressable content - git is content addressable - there are yet unknown and unexplored ways these technologies could be used in the context of governance, and automated governance. That’s an interesting use-case I hadn’t thought of. It’s clear to me that there’s room for a lot more use of content-addressable tooling within the space. Could you expand a bit about how content addressability could be used in the context of the proposal feedback period? Additionally, and unrelatedly, I think there is probably a strong opportunity to set up an IPFS working group on the hub anyway particularly focused on archiving and preserving documents used in governance. I worked closely with Love Life from Good Team in Sifchain on such an initiative and he produced this documentation . jasonsprouse: As it relates to your suggestions and concerns in that twitter thread, LaTeX is…

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ala.tusz.am: Could you expand a bit about how content addressability could be used in the context of the proposal feedback period? It has nothing to due with the proposal feedback period. Hypothetically you could send a twilo message when a new proposal is made, but I wouldn’t want to get notifications for that. EDIT: Content addressing is a hash of the text digest - every alteration produces a new hash and links to the previous history of that hash. Some of the concepts in the linked TED talk are advanced features - Ai autonomous agents making proposals or suggesting edits to proposals, it would require artificial general intelligence to perform those kinds of tasks. Ai that has parity or greater than human intelligence. Tech that is publicly available is near that level. This is intended to position the ecosystem for the maturation of that technology, and perhaps be a proving ground for it. As stated the end goal is to be able to parameterize the degree at which personal involvement in that process is a choice. ala.tusz.am: StackEdit seems interesting, does it have the ability to measure consensus about potential changes? No it does not. It…

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I agree with you, I think if the governance discussion is to be moved, it should be to Commonwealth,

CW is straight forward whereas github can be daunting at first, after you move around for a bit, you understand how to use it, however, got to admit most people won’t put the effort in learning how to use github

I think these discussions can happen on Cosmos Discord as well, having one channel for CW threads and another channel to discuss those helps

gov was on github here and we depreciated the repo because very few used it and the people who did ended up not participating in the forum. I’d like to keep gov on the forum as we just managed to get the community engaged in one place finally.

That’s a shame, as the discussion feature is relatively new. I’ve seen it being used quite actively on other projects.

I wouldnt agree with governance discussions being moved to github. I would support migration to commonwealth instead since almost all other cosmos chains are in commonwealth and this would help drive up more participation.

I’m in agreement with @hxrts - moving this community that the forum has built recently to github won’t result in anything more than most likely starting from scratch again.

With regards to migrating to CW as @Instafinanzas suggested (since most other projects use that system), that might be a decent shout however it should be brought up in the future and not quite right now so that we can collectively build up the community here on the forum first.

I’ve seen a lot of effort being put into this place from some parties and i think they’ve done quite a great job as is. We just need more engagement.

Thank you @jasonsprouse for taking the time to write out this thoughtful proposal.

I agree with many of the commenters that we have just started to establish an engaged community of governance participants here on this forum, and changing to another venue may end up with us losing the momentum we’ve gained here. I am not opposed to moving to Commonwealth. But we tested out a sandbox version of Commonwealth recently and I personally feel that the UX and moderation capabilities (spam filtering, flagging and hiding posts, trust levels) of Discourse are more developed.

I support the idea of more automation to streamline stewardship work. Discourse has an API to do that too. In fact, we recently set up an automation to allow pre voting discussions that are tagged with the “last-call” tag to trigger a notification on a popular governance Telegram bot. It would be very useful to identify other high value automations that will ease the burden on governance participants.

Im strongly against putting governance into any form and shape of must. Governance isnt about governing people. Its about listening to those who elect you to do a job. It is the task of governance to know how to learn to listen to all of the opinions, no matter if they are on the forum, GH, TG channels, etc.

I think we need to go back to basics =)

uditvira:

I agree with many of the commenters that we have just started to establish an engaged community of governance participants here on this forum, and changing to another venue may end up with us losing the momentum we’ve gained here.

Understandable. For me, and the outlook of a multi-chain ecosystem - setting a precedent to normalize participation uniformly for all chains with a common interface is important. I’m not opposed to this platform at all. Part of the intent in proposing this is that the cosmos hub might be considered the standard bearer in acclimating people to which tools people get customed to using, and again there is a broader end goal.

In my opinion, moving to GitHub would not be much beneficial because there are still a lot of people trying to onboard with Blockchain and the ecosystem who don’t know how to use GitHub.

It’s not any more complicated than formatting on here. You don’t have to know more about github to propose and format ideas there, but if more people used github they might be inspired to try a hand at other things other than open-source project governance participation.

Agreed to that. In essence it is about allowing people to voice their opinion, being heard in a discussion about the future of their favourite project. I am a fan of people having an opinion and voting for themselves. As a validator I know I am responsible for the votes of many people, but my ideal world would be that everyone overrides my vote.

The magic of governance is that you can decide for yourself what you want to see happening. It will not always happen, but at least you showed intent.

The platform where this happens comes second. It must be really user-friendly, which great UI/UX and a very low barrier for entry. And Github is just not that. Commonwealth is already better, the forum is better. But both still also have their cons imo, so a better alternative would be welcome

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

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

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

• independent service, can be hosted by ICF
• don’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

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

Thanks for the feedback and lively discussion. To reiterate some of the reasons I still feel this suggestion is a reasonable approach. • Discussions on github is quite new, it is being used heavily by some opensource projects. • I would love to see governance be more driven by automation, and this would be an excellent “training” ground for this technology. See • Github would be a free common interface to utilize for Cosmos blockchains to implement this “hypothetical” autonomous governance. • Fetch.ai is a cosmos chain that is focused on Ai and blockchain intergration. • 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, don’t get me wrong, but I’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. I’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 silo’d sever such as this. Perhaps Discourse would be interested in implementing…

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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.

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.

Hey folks, realizing I’m coming into this conversation late, but I’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 platforms—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 I’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 won’t have to choose, the proposals will just translate across the services. PS There’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!…

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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?