By @ThomasLindseth & @Eystein_Hansen
The Edinburgh workshop was the culmination of 50 workshops and discussions across the globe in the community about the Cardano Improvement Proposal 1694 (the birth year of Voltaire). In short the goal was to seek consensus across 6 important topics. One of the main themes leading up to the final workshop was that of treasury management, something that was discussed with enthusiasm in the Norwegian physical workshop as well.
Day 1
During the first day workshops hosts invited to Edinburgh went on stage to present major themes and ideas they carried with them from the workshops they held. For the Norwegians we were proud to have held the event in Horten and with our own Viking mascot that was presented to the wider community. Our main theme of Treasury management ideas was heavily discussed during the first day and we found connections with many of the other workshop attendees across the globe on this topic.
Pi Lanningham had many great points as always and had an interesting idea from his workshops on having return on investment of proposals.
@xeeban highlighted the human element and how we need to present so that humans can efficiently consume the information and called for transparency and clarity of data.
@NeoCornelius discussed the potential for large scale treasury withdrawals for program specific purposes and called for a body to look at standards and provide information to people.
John Kelly discussed deposits and themes for information.
LLoyd highlighted consensus from his workshop on D-Reps being able to come in no matter where they are in the world and the need to make governance work so well it is considered boring.
Lawrence reported his workshop had many from different backgrounds and there were many different perspectives. They also believed the constitution text was needed to better understand the judgment of thresholds that also had the constitution committee voting.
The Latin American community represented strongly at the Edinburgh event and in their first presentation they highlighted the need for a Minimum Viable Constitution and the need to reorder the priority of governance action to have the constitution updated as the first action.
James from Gimbalabs highlighted how identity is of importance as well as making people aware of Cardano governance.
Mercy and Megan from Wada had interesting points such as the fact many did not fully understand democracy as exemplified in the US and that these workshops where important to build information and there was a hunger to get the conversation going.
Juana and Amir from the Mena region said they had a bit low turnout to the workshop but highlighted the need for education in the Mena region as well.
@Kenric_Nelson critiqued on how the current system could be a threat to decentralization and he highlighted the community wants democracy.
Rick McCraken then gave a rundown of the security workshops that was quite extensive and showed how important the security concerns are going to be as well.
Then another Latin American workshop presented and discussed among other thing how delegation should have an expiration date and Dreps should have public identity.
@Nicolas Cerny presented on the workshop in Zug, and also they were concerned with powerful bodies within the ecosystem taking over the governance process and highlighted the idea that deposits from governance action could be potentially lost if the governance action was rejected.
We then had an amazing presentation on the Edinburgh Decentralization Index (EDI) where Cardano came out quite favorably on most metrics measured. EDI is an attempt to measure the decentralization of a blockchain using several measurement methods. We will surely hear more from the EDI team in the future.
Read more about EDI here
Then it was time for the London workshops with Chris and Mark who had 33 attendees but many wanted to be involved but did not know how. They wanted more information on how to make it easy for people to get involved and also discussed defining dReps such as validating identity.
The disastrously catastrophically great Adam Dean then presented on his workshop that took place on a boat 
They found that some of the CIP was up to interpretation and that two people reading the same text got different meanings out of it and called for more clarification.
@manonthemat presented from the Tokyo workshop that had high attendance. They wanted to find a way to be both inclusive but also protect network from spam and a balance between these two in the workshop’s proposals. They also called for dRep experimentation.
@Oscar_West , who came all the way from Korea had a lot of information to share in a short time and did a great job, despite not being a native english speaker. He called among other things for looking outside the ecosystem for examples, how koreans are used to decision making based on majority, but called for more realism in some decisions needs to be done faster and perhaps can’t always be a majority vote. He also called for more education on Cardano governance.
Lawrence Ley called for reaching the technical MVP and that software can be changed, and how we could put the CIP -1694 into the hands of more people and make the information more generally available.
Day 2
Day 2 started with information from Kevin Hammond on the CIP-1694 as a reminder and summarized the 50 workshops with 6 key issues:
- On-chain deposits
- Treasury withdrawal
- Community tooling
- Action expiration
- Action threshold
- DRep incentives.
Phillip Lazo and Vangelis Markakis from IOG research presented work on DRep Incentives and said they expected to have a paper published this fall on the topic.
Treasury withdrawals were heavily discussed and in particular because some definitions were not clear. The discussion ended with a plan to set up a treasury working group.
On Community tooling there was a clear majority vote for what tooling where needed and consensus was formed.
Action expiration also had a clear majority vote for 6 epochs expiration but some interesting discussions were made if this needed to be differentiated, and that a majority also said this meant that this was the strict voting period and the information should be available before the vote.
The Incentive structure for DReps had a lot of ideas and a consensus was not formed at this workshop. Action thresholds a majority agreed should have different thresholds for the different actions while On-chain deposits we did not get a consensus during the workshop.
We also had a session on community tooling and I would highlight as lot of tooling was about either Education or DRep information.
We also got to see a live demo of a constitution getting voted in on the 8.2.0 Cardan node (soon to be released) on the Sancho Panza testnet (named after the Don Quixote squire) and I personally had goosebumps seeing this happening in real time during the event because of all this will mean for future testing of governance actions such as constitution updates.
Charles also had a great observation at the end of the day during one of his speeches where he highlighted the debate on treasury management and if we wanted a treasury management more akin to the national wealth managements with potential for inflation / deflation or if we wanted a treasury management more akin to sovereign wealth management where the goal is to make a sustainable treasury over time supporting the Cardano ecosystem.
To end this summary we (Eystein Hansen and Thomas Lindseth) would like to express our gratitude for having been able to attend the workshop in Edinburgh and represent the Norwegian community. We truly felt part of a global Cardano community during the event and made great connections across the globe - some of these connections we hope to turn into even more cool Cardano projects for the Nordic Cardano community in the future.
