Beyond Minimum Viable Governance (MVG) Governance Experience Insights Workshops

Governance Governance Events & Workshops
6

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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