On Governance and Polkadot Fellowship

Gavin Wood recently announced that Polkadot Fellowship is about to launch.

It’s an another huge step to eliminate whole centralized actors from the governance of Polkadot.

It will be an adaptive, challenging and experimental process on on-chain governance mechanism.

Meanwhile, in recent months current Kusama and Polkadot governances have experienced big debates and long governance processes.

All these discussions eventually leaded to outcomes better than the initial proposals.

I, myself, feel very content with it. But what expects us on the new Era?

Probably, at first we will appreciate more, these people in Committees, when we move on to the next phase:

To the Promised Land,

to the Fellowship.

Before digging in, let’s also look at Governance as a concept on wider aspect, briefly.

Undoubtedly, Governance in itself, contains many issues already. The principles we favor for a good governance sum up around these:

- Rule of Law

- Transparency

- Agile & Responsive

- Participation

- Accountability

- Equity & Inclusiveness

- Centering on consensus

Governance mechanism can leverage blockchain to provide some of these principles.

But it requires more empirical research combining with research in CS and social sciences.

Web 3.0 space has already been testing it for a while but we are quite far from anything optimal.

Some argues, Web3.0 space should also adapt several components of traditional governance structures to provide stability, while some others strongly disagree that.

But don’t we see this traditional structures already in the space, executing under off-chain governance?

It s also a fact; that, in the end no-one should have to understand a technical proposal on governance.

But also there has to be made a decision and center around a consensus. So we look for an authority, a guide right?

Situation gets even messier when we try to apply this decision making on “on-chain” to provide more agile, responsive and progressive governance.

So, how we do that without sacrificing decentralization and at the same time protecting governance power from monetization and being a transferable.

These things won’t work or be adaptive by existing only as theories on papers. They’re required to be tested on an empirical scale.

So far, I can only see, two experimental & progressive approaches on crypto space.

One is from Optimism side,

the other is from Polkadot.

.

Optimism is applying non-token governance defined as Citizen House into their governance structure to manage retroactive public goods funding; to pursue long term interests of ecosystem.

Meanwhile, Polkadot goes with a game theory approach “Fellowship”, a powerless guidance.

As I indicated previously, Polkadot answers to the necessity of an authority/guide on decision making by introducing the Fellowship. Without any decision making power, defining a whitelisting power to them, getting their bless to make the governance more agile and progressive.

So only thing it can do, is to provide this oracle role which is needed to determine and declare a particular proposal is safe and time critical. For more details on that, I recommend anyone to check on from “Asynchronous Rob”. He explains them in the best form.

All in all, these are very high level experiments that we have to test, work on and maybe break it. Only by that, we can maybe reach to the some sort of optimal governance and also have something that traditional structures, institutions can adapt into.