Please describe your proposed solution.
Over recent Funds, the parameters related to Catalyst governance have changed often; and although community members have individually commented and engaged, there has been little focused oversight, nor research into the effects of changes. There is also no clearly-defined, evidence-based process for managing and sharing changes: despite some discussion of questions such as “how much community opinion-gathering and engagement is enough?”, there is no commonly-agreed idea of how to consult the community on changes, and no clarity on how community input is incorporated; so those who have contributed to consultation are often left unclear how or whether their input has been used. Additionally, the process of sharing background information and research about the thinking behind changes has been patchy. Sometimes, key sections of the community who are affected by a change have not been reached or engaged, and often, little information has been shared about the research behind a proposed change, so that people can fully understand it.
You can read about these issues in the relevant section of CGO’s Fund 8 closing report .
We propose to address all this by reconvening CGO (Community Governance Oversight), a group that maintained successful oversight of Catalyst governance processes in funds 7 and 8 (see for example our Fund 8 closing report, which covered issues such as the proposed change from Challenges to Categories, the Circle election process, and the proposed introduction of dReps.)
In this proposal, CGO (with a new team including some core members from F8, and some new members) will meet monthly for 6 months, to investigate recent Catalyst governance parameter changes, explore how such changes can be managed in a way that is fully co-produced with the community, and develop an approach for a community-led change management process for the future. This will include recommendations on how changes should be introduced, how they should be shared and what kind of information should be given about them, how to identify who needs to be consulted, how best to reach particular stakeholder groups, how to establish baselines, what to track when trying to assess the effects of a change, and so on. We will include in our thinking both current changes, and the changes CGO identified during its Fund 8 proposal (see CGO community register of Catalyst parameter changes) which, since they happened some time ago, we will be able to examine the results of - this will ensure any process we devise is evidence-based. The change management process we develop will be intended to work as an adjunct to IOG’s funded processes, as an independent “check and balance” to the system.
To support this work, we hope to be able to test and use an open-source participatory interface which is the subject of another F11 proposal, "CGO Parameters Platform", to help us track parameter changes. This tool was first suggested as a result of CGO’s Fund 8 work - see <https://github.com/Catalyst-Auditing/Catalyst-Parameters-Dashboard> - and if it is funded, we will contribute to its testing by using it to track the parameter changes we are exploring. We also hope this tool will offer an ongoing way, after the end of this project, for the community itself to log and analyse parameter changes and determine whether they meet recommendations on change management, thus embedding long-term community oversight of parameter changes.
Our meetings will be documented on the CGO GitBook, and via recordings on YouTube, and via a GitHub project board. Progress will be shared with the community via a weekly slide at Catalyst Town Hall, and posts on key channels such as Discord, Telegram, Twitter and the Cardano Forum. The project will end with a detailed final whitepaper.
A note on the background to CGO’s approach to “governance parameters”
In CGO’s Fund 8 project, we concluded that “governance parameter changes” in Catalyst is a broader field than IOG’s definition of the functional parameters for each Fund - in fact, it comprises any change that substantially alters the way Catalyst operates, or the way a Fund is run. This is the definition of a “Catalyst governance parameter change” that we will be working to.