Interests in Cartesi governance calls

Hi everyone,

I’m starting this thread to open a discussion on active forum members and builders participating in open calls to discuss everything around cartesi grants program and governance.

Goal:

  • Create governance discussions around the grants program & other topics.
  • Highlight builders.
  • A space for builders to connect and showcase their work.
    I have seen ENS DAO, Optimism and others host such calls and they provide a valuable space for such discussions.
    If you would be interested in this please engage on this thread and share your thoughts.
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Hey Elle – cool idea!

The current CGP is nearing the end of its pilot phase, and I think everyone who’s been involved to date would love to hear fresh ideas on what the program could look like in its next iteration.

Curious to know if you’ve had any interactions with the current CGP process and if you have any thoughts on how it could be improved!

Hi! @Brandon
Thank you for your response.

I have been exploring current CGP and have some thoughts around my observations. I think defining what governance means to Cartesi and increasing accessibility and documentation around the governance process and participation would be helpful.
Some key observations I made while checking out the current CGP raised several questions around:

  1. How do I get involved?
    GitcoinDAO has Workstreams, ENSDAO uses Working Groups and Optimism has a bicameral governance system with two houses.
    Creating such foundational groups e.g Ecosystem, Public goods etc would help in defining core areas around the mission of CGP and have such groups carry out missions on specific areas that are aligned with CGP.
    I believe this would also help define what governance means to Cartesi and explain the scope of governance.

  2. Proposals
    I noticed there are proposals that have been voted on snapshot but couldn’t find information around:

  • What types of proposals get voted on snapshot?
  • Can anyone put a proposal on snapshot, and if so, what does the process look like?
  • How can one create an RFP proposal? e.g I think creating a temperature check to get community feedback and use that to decide whether to continue with the proposal or not is helpful to builders.
  1. Voting process
  • Is there a possibility to delegate my $CTSI to someone I trust and align my vision with, or should I self-delegate?
  • Where can I find profiles for current active voters and learn more about them.
    If there is no delegation process for voting, curious why it’s not currently in place.
    I feel like delegation encourages broader community members to participate in governance and have a say on things.
  1. Tooling
    Governance interfaces to help members understand various activities and help streamline the process of decision making would be helpful.
    Tools like Agora built by Nouns DAO and Tally forexample are most popular tools used by various DAOs to help capture governance data for the above concerns.

In general so far it’s not clear what is the scope of governance for CGP and lacks documentations and frameworks around the governance process.

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Thanks for your inputs. From your questions, it seems there is a bit of confusion around the CGP’s approach to decentralization. The CGP is not a DAO, so it doesn’t make sense to form a roadmap that uses other DAOs as reference points for its own evolution.

The purpose of the Cartesi Community Grants Program is to give clarity around the selection process for issuing grants to developers, and to provide the means for the community to influence funding decisions. So although certain tools are common to both the CGP and some DAOs, it shouldn’t lead to the expectation of mirrored governance structures or operations. Moreover, our own ecosystem of developers is still relatively small compared to those of Gitcoin, ENS, and Optimism. As such, the scope of these groups’ needs differ, and don’t always warrant the full gamut of tools, processes, policies, and operations that are implemented elsewhere.

Three resources that you should take a look at are Program Instantiation Memo, the Processes and Guidelines, and the New Proposal Template (click “new topic” in the Submit a Proposal section, and it will auto-fill in the text field).

Now, with these points in mind, here’s some feedback to your points-

How can you get involved?

  • The highest impact that a contributor can make at this point in our program’s lifetime is to take part in the feedback when a proposal is made on the forum. Awareness is important, but participation in proposal feedback is essential.

Proposals

  • In the resources I linked, it will be clear that developers submit proposals for funding either proofs of concept for broader applications of Cartesi tech, or else more mature projects in the case that the POC was completed and successful.
  • It will also be clear what the CGP deems as acceptable. For example, it will not fund portions of a project which seek to monetize some aspect of it, or closed source modules, etc.
  • These resources also explain the proposal lifecycle, and how a proposal actually makes its way to Snapshot.

Voting

  • Delegation is a good point! However, due to how the voting policy is implemented within Snapshot (tallying votes from staked CTSI, without double counting pool managers’ tokens), there is not a compatible voting policy for delegation which plays nice with the staked CTSI policy. The aim of our staked CTSI policy is twofold. First, we want to give control over funding to those who participate in maintaining the security of our network (by means of staking). Second, the policy mitigates certain attack vectors- for example, where someone may acquire large sums of CTSI just before a vote opens, vote with it, and then sell it.
  • Perhaps an RFP could be for someone to implement a voting policy that is compatible with staked CTSI?
  • There are no profiles of those who vote, but it is known (by ENS domain names for instance) that certain pool managers are active in our voting process.

I hope this can help you understand more about how the program functions, what the intentions are, and the tasks at hand (increasing participation in the feedback loop and proposal volume). Although our program is still quite young, you bring up great points and tools which can add value down the line when it matures into the growth stage.

In the coming weeks, as we nail down fine tunings to the next iteration of the CGP, I can share more details as they pertain to your original point about community calls, as I am a big proponent of giving the developer community a platform to showcase to each other what they’ve all been working on.

Let me know if you have any questions about the resources I linked.

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