Beyond Minimum Viable Governance (MVG) Governance Experience Insights Workshops

Governance Governance Events & Workshops
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We’re inviting ADA holders, DReps, SPOs and anyone involved in Cardano to share their experiences.
Your stories will help us explain the numbers we’ve collected in our State of Governance report and improve our governance measures.
The Governance Measurement Framework (GMF) measures the engagement and accountability of our Cardano Governance stakeholders.

Why join?

  • Share how governance really works for you: successes, challenges and lessons learned.
  • See how your insights shape the GMF metrics and the upcoming State of Governance report.
  • Help create evidence‑based recommendations for improving Cardano’s governance.

Choose a session that fits your time zone:

  • 27 January 2026, 15:00 UTC
  • 29 January 2026, 03:00 AM UTC
  • 31 January 2026, 17:00 UTC

Register here: @BeyondMVG | Linktree
At the link, you’ll find background on MVG and the GMF.

Researchers from IOG and community members will guide the discussions and prepare the report.
After workshops, our team will synthesise what you share into patterns and signals, map these insights to governance metrics, and feed them into recommended governance changes and potentially future Cardano Problem Statements / Cardano Improvement Proposals (CPS / CIP)

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Digest February 2, 2026: • Circle and Pentad Integrate USDCx on Cardano • Spotlight Linda & Josh • Call for Action: Intersect MBO State of Developer Survey 2026 • NuLuna Roundtable, Barcelona: Your Art, Your Rules • Upcoming SPO Table Talk Feb 2nd
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Thanks for sharing - maybe also worth sharing it here Cardano Events · Events Calendar

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Beyond MVG 27.01.2026 Workshop Summary
People Present: Tevo Kask, Wepngong Maureen, Danielle Stanko, Kelvin Peter, Ken-Erik Ølmheim, Lloyd Duhon, Mark Hall, Ian Hartwell, Gintama, Input Endorsers, Nana Safo, Pedro Lucas, Ryan (Cerkoryn), Hassan, Tanny, Daniela
Purpose: Beyond MVG workshop session to capture lived experiences and desired outcomes for the Cardano Governance Measurement Framework (GMF)
Meeting notes: Miro Board Link
Workshop Video: Youtube Video link
History: Cardano Essentials Project Status: Sundae Treasury Dashboard

Workshop Onboarding
The Beyond Minimum Viable Governance (MVG) project is a community-focused initiative that uses a structured, data-driven approach to guide the continuous improvement of Cardano’s governance system.
Beyond MVG recognizes that effective governance is not achieved by structures alone, but through ongoing refinement informed by community experience, objective measurement, and practical process improvements. This workshop operationalizes that approach by creating a structured space where governance participants contribute insights that directly inform how governance performance is understood, measured, and improved.

  • Shared workshop material, if people would be interested in replicating data collection and run their own workshops
  • Shared overview of Governance Measurement Framework by reading Google Slides Notes
  • Introduced to Miro Board activities and interaction strategies
  • Quick round-table check-in where attendees identified their stakeholder roles: 15 ADA holders; 6 DReps; 3 SPOs; 1 CC Member; 3 Committee Members

Below is the list of insights we derived from our Miro Board notes, which will be submitted to the Workshop Survey for further analysis along with the other surveys and interviews.

What factors affect how quickly the Constitutional Committee can review and vote on governance actions?

  • How well written are Published Governance actions?
  • The number of interactions done on the Governance Action
  • The time it takes for Governance Action proposers to communicate with CC members
  • The amount of CC Seat positions
  • Geographical differences
  • Timezone differences
  • Each Member has their own Operational requirements
  • The Number of active proposals at that time
  • The amount of supporting materials that come with proposals
  • Proposal complexity and readability
  • Voting Fatigue
  • Lack of proposal templates
  • The amount of pressure CC members get for not voting
  • CC Member other responsibilities not related to the Constitution (for example, also a Drep)
  • Volume of discussion in social media platforms (both privately and publicly)
  • Lack of explicit requirements for CC members
  • Uncertainty on how is the efficient decision making defined (quickness?, resolution?)
  • The time it takes to learn set up and vote with CC keys
  • Constitutional Amendment changes can affect how proposals should be reviewed
  • The size of CC Member team/community
  • The perceived priority by CC member
  • No standard tooling to collecting feedback
  • The readability of the Constitution
  • Voting early may affect how others behave, depending on status (may intentionally withhold decision)
  • hard to show the work of sense making
  • No clear communication channels for all CC members to communicate with rest of the community

**What factors encourage or discourage SPOs from participating in governance voting? **

  • Some proposals are ratified quickly before SPOs get around to voting
  • Lack of tools for: batch voting, cold key management, update feed coordination, information assessment and its validation tools
  • Quantity of proposals
  • Lack of Proposal awareness
  • Lack of incentives (somebody or something to value the choice and rational)
  • Unclarity what behaviours are currently incentivised and how it affects our ecosystem
  • There are a variety of reasons why someone becomes SPO, from scale to not being interested in engaging in governance at all to being part of every decision.
  • Complexity of the proposals
  • Quality of the constitution to help assess parameters
  • Having prior experience with related activities and technology
  • Change in the delegation amount
  • What information is shown on SPO explorers
  • How information is shown on SPO explorers (including lack of guidelines)
  • Amount of time spent on governance action in the given time period (both operational and technical)
  • The amount of delegation SPO currently has
  • The amount of impact voting has
  • Lack of incentives
  • Lack of standards across tools

Voting power has become more concentrated among DReps since the role was established. What do you think most contributes to this change?

  • Promoting self-voting
  • Promoting individual dreps or yourself
  • Lack of spaces for promoting dreps
  • Prior connections with large stakeholders
  • Attending spaces
  • Wallets and drep platforms user experience
  • Protocol Requirement to select a dRep to withdraw staking rewards leads to choosing the wallet default
  • Current Incentives and Control Mechanisms
  • The complexity of the governance system
  • How do larger stakeholders act on the chain?
  • Complexity of the proposals (how to read them and access the appendix)
  • sticky delegate, delegate and forget about it until something breaks
  • Lack of drep evaluations
  • Lack of proposal outcomes
  • Some Governance Actions are already completed and acted on before had the time to analyse effects
  • Information gap between what Drep knows and what the general Drep delegator knows

Elegant Next Steps

MVG team: Decide and communicate recording publications
Anyone: Participate in the next workshops found in the Beyond MVG Linktree
MVG team: Cluster and organize stickies into themes

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One thing I love about cardano is that we always give for the community fair hearing, while I will not be able to meet up with the dates , can I request for ano

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Definitely, do you want the team to connect for the interview?
There options to provide async feedback through various Surveys you will find under the Linktree.

And ofc you can simply share additions in here in forum itself, I will figure a way to recognise your input

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Beyond MVG 31.01.2026 Workshop Summary

People Present: Tevo Kask, Wepngong Maureen, Danielle Stanko, Kelvin Peter, Ken-Erik Ølmheim, Fanny Wijayaa, Pedro Lucas, James Meidinger, Cathy Hermstad, Sebastian Pabon, Shaggyrax, Marina, Nana Safo

Purpose: Beyond MVG workshop session to capture lived experiences and desired outcomes for the Cardano Governance Measurement Framework (GMF)

Meeting notes: Miro Board Link
Workshop Video: Youtube Video link
History: Cardano Essentials
Project Status: Sundae Treasury Dashboard

Workshop Onboarding

  • The Beyond Minimum Viable Governance (MVG) project is a community-focused initiative that uses a structured, data-driven approach to guide the continuous improvement of Cardano’s governance system.

Beyond MVG recognizes that effective governance is not achieved by structures alone, but through ongoing refinement informed by community experience, objective measurement, and practical process improvements. This workshop operationalizes that approach by creating a structured space where governance participants contribute insights that directly inform how governance performance is understood, measured, and improved.

  • Shared overview of Governance Measurement Framework
  • Introduced to Miro Board activities and interaction strategies
  • Quick round-table check-in where attendees identified their stakeholder roles: 11 ADA holders; 5 DReps; 2 SPOs; 2 CC Members; 5 Committee Members

Below is the list of insights I derived from our workshop notes, which will be submitted to the Workshop Survey for further analysis along with the other surveys and interviews

Across all three questions, many governance barriers stem not from lack of willingness but from missing coordination, feedback, and legitimacy infrastructure that would allow participants to act with confidence.

What barriers, if any, have you encountered when trying to participate in Cardano governance?

  • Unclear who are responsible for the tools we use (used ekklesia)

  • Lack of Onboarding and Guiding material, which makes it difficult to start participating

  • Perceived lack of expertise, where we choose not to engage

  • Difficult to get poll information out to a wider audience.

  • There is a lot of cognitive overload that takes hours to understand before even coming to a conclusion on what to vote on

  • perceived Incentive and impact mismatch, reading proposals does not make economic sense both in terms of time spent and proposal outcomes

  • The proposal outcomes and decision impact is unmeasureable

  • Lack of administrative coordination creates duplicated effort and fatigue (Intersect does not support enough, Calendars often conflict or get outdated, committees don’t communicate with eachother)

  • Difficult user experience to engage and debate

  • Uncertainty about prioritisation

  • Unclear about the target audience

  • Overconcentration of the decision power on a few dreps makes devs and builders’ lives overdependent on their opinion and decisions

  • Cost of engaging with governance (Drep registration deposit; Gov action submissions)

  • Lack of perceived effort in ADA deployment for governance from abstation

  • Inconsistency between governance infrastructure (databases, wallets, explorers)

  • Lack of funding for community tooling that makes engagement easier

  • Important governance discussions happen in places not designed for decision-making

  • Participation requires sustained time investment, not episodic engagement

What factors do you think cause ADA owners to change their DRep delegation?

  • Are people aware of how to change DRep delegation?

  • Governance is too complex to assess outcomes

  • Governance tools are not standardised and measure different things

  • Lack of incentives to pay attention

  • Lack of Governance Tools to poll, communicate with your delegate or split delegation amounts

  • Lack of frameworks that help to label, score and compare dreps

  • Voting on proposals that are perceived to be self or close relationship funding

  • Too much information scattered everywhere (small impact)

  • What values does Drep expect to represent and how they follow them?

  • DRep makes an unpopular vote or votes a way the delegator doesn’t agree with.

  • Someone else shows up who aligns with their views

  • Drep doesn’t vote at all or seems inactive

  • lack of onboarding sites for Cardano Governance

  • How many dreps choose to Auto Abstain?

  • How do the most popular dreps vote?

  • Expectations for Dreps to use various communication platforms (Forum, X, Discord, Tempo, etc)

  • The existing amount of ADA, DRep that has accrued may affect how new people perceive them

  • When DReps propose new and Fresh ideas

  • When current DReps people get too popular and there are other less delegated dreps available

  • New governance design and frameworks that the majority start to use

  • Dreps over time may start to spend more time debating with other Dreps instead of communicating with their delegators or contributing to governance spaces.

  • Delegation shifts driven by social visibility rather than governance performance

What challenges do DReps and CC members face when publishing rationales for their votes?

  • Over explaining

  • How to provide messages that do not seem too long?

  • How to provide messages that align with decisions while there is a conflict of interest?

  • No shared norms for what a “good rationale” looks like

  • How to make interesting and readable rationales?

  • Difficult User Experience to help publish rationale

  • Expectations for Dreps to pay attention to governance action discussions

  • Expectations for Dreps to understand the impact of governance action

  • Difficult to understanding impact)

  • Feeling that I will underperform with my rationale

  • Feeling that I lose delegation if I provide a rationale

  • Unclear if the rationale has been valuable

  • How to communicate with delegators?

  • Lack of affordable tools to help label and communicate with delegators

  • Single CC members may

  • Managing Multisig DReps and maintaining smart contracts

  • Unclear where to find general governance measurements

  • lack of safe spaces to discuss governance actions

Elegant Next Steps

  • MVG team: Clean up workshop notes

  • MVG team: Prepare a workshop summary similar to previous sessions

  • MVG team: Analyse results for the report

  • MVG team: Targeting Report publication at the end of February, Final Report in June

  • MVG team: Potentially produce visualisations

  • MVG team: Continue monthly updates via Essential Cardano

  • Anyone: Promote and Contribute to Governance Surveys

  • MVG Team: Plan at least one more Twitter/X workshop

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Another workshop Session on X is planned for February 18
10:00 AM - 11:00 AM CST (aka 16:00 UTC)

The surveys are additional Governance signal strengthening points. Please feel free to affect our understanding of Cardano On-Chain Governance
Governance Surveys