Cardano Foundation's Role in the Interim Constitutional Committee & Voting Decision

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With the Chang hard fork ahead, Cardano stands on the eve of decentralized governance. The proposed governance model will ensure inclusivity and diversity while providing checks and balances through delegate representatives (DReps), stake pool operators (SPOs), and a constitutional committee.

During a bootstrapping phase, between the Chang #1 and Chang #2 upgrades, only three governance action types will be available: parameter changes, hard fork initiations, and info action. As a pioneering entity of the Cardano ecosystem, the Cardano Foundation will contribute to this bootstrapping phase in two ways, first by being an Interim Constitutional Committee (ICC) member and second by participating in the ICC election.

An Interim Constitutional Committee will be appointed during the bootstrapping phase and will have the power to approve protocol parameter changes independently and, together with SPOs, initiate hard forks. The appointed ICC) will interpret the Cardano Constitution, review governance actions, ensure transparency and fairness, support initial governance structures, and guide the transition to a fully established Constitutional Committee. Each member has one vote, with approval thresholds set by the “threshold” protocol parameter.

Cardano Foundation’s Voting Decisions for the ICC

The Cardano Foundation participated in the ICC election, ranking candidates based on their adherence to constitutional principles, engagement with the Cardano community, transparency, technical expertise in blockchain technology, and commitment to regular communication.

The rankings were as follows:

  1. The Cardano Atlantic Council
  2. Eastern Cardano Council
  3. Lloyd Duhon
  4. Johnny Kelly
  5. Cardano Japan
  6. Joshua Stone

The Foundation, voting with 20 million ada, strongly emphasized transparency throughout the process, and of course you can keep track on our stake through pool.pm This active involvement underscores the Foundation’s unwavering commitment to fostering a robust and transparent governance framework, ensuring the long-term success and integrity of the Cardano ecosystem.

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Who at CF voted?

What were the deliberations?

And why were these candidates picked?

We literally had a space with ICC candidates talking about how important it is to be transparent on our votes, the deliberations, and justification for the vote.

Can CF do the same with their ICC vote?

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I think it is wrong that Cardano Foundation should put their thumb on the scales. Cardano Foundation holds that Ada on behalf of the Cardano Community and they should follow the will of the community.

CF should have ruled themselves out from the voting process entirely. CFs vote should be removed from the tally.

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CF is a public entity that represents the entire Cardano community.

This was supposed to be a community vote for community positions. And, we are supposed to be building a transparent and fair governance system which apparently will be the envy of the world.

This isn’t supposed to be a kindergarten experiment. Actually, if a kindergarten wanted a student representative the teachers would know to abstain from voting.

According to Charles’s welcome speech, there was another candidate that narrowly missed out on being elected by some 2M votes. That candidate would have been elected if not for CFs inappropriate influence.

Congratulations CF. You have turned the ICC vote into something that can always be criticised as unfair now. Why even have a community vote if it is not going to be decided by the community?

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I am also very much against the founding entities voting and dwarfing ordinary users’ votes, but that is not true:

Due to the voting method used (instant-runoff and then stop when six candidates – 3 elected, 3 alternate – are left on the list), your vote, but also the votes of CF and IOG only count for the first candidate that makes it into these six places.

CF and IOG only counted for the Atlantic Council and, since they came in top, were not evaluated further. And because of the massive number of votes the Atlantic Council had, they were largely irrelevant in the end. Doesn’t change the tone-deafness of them voting at all, but is at least a little relief.

That, of course, also happened to everyone else’s votes. If you had one of these six on your ballot, everything below that on it was not evaluated at all.

Strange choice for a voting method. But partly intentional. When I criticised that on X, the reply was a) a little offended and b) that they wanted this to partly neutralise whale power (also neutralising other voters voting for popular candidates on the way, but hey …).

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Thanks @HeptaSean for that explanation of how the instant-runoff voting system worked. So what you are saying is that in the end CF’s vote didn’t alter the outcome because of how the runoff system worked and that CF rather fortunately happened to vote for the same candidate that the community overwhelmingly supported anyway. I am trusting your analysis on that and so all I can say is that they are bloody lucky the community vote turned out the way it did because they didn’t know this when they cast their vote.

The only voting action CF should have taken is to agree with the community decision after the community votes were tallied.

Here we are seeking to build a transparent and fair governance system for the world to envy and our founding entity tasked with representing the community… Seriously, I am at a loss for words.

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@HeptaSean : I am finding it difficult to obtain a breakdown of the voting tallies for each runoff round.

As you say it seems a strange choice for a voting method.

Do you think it might have been possible for voters to strategically preference if they were able to know partial totals prior to the close of voting? I am not suggesting that anyone did this but how were votes protected from watching eyes during voting? Was there any ZK tech used?

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Haven’t found anything, either. Would be good to have that.

Sure. If you knew beforehand, that your vote is not needed for your first choice at all, you could for example just leave it out and boost your second choice instead. Just for the simplest possibility.

I don’t think that the Summon platform has anything like that up to now. In previous votings, for example the CIP-1694 temperature check, they even continuously published intermediate results during the voting. At least that was not the case this time.

I don’t think that the results looks like anything strategic/nefarious was going on at all. Their stated reason for the strange method was that it could counteract “whale power”, that the votes of whales would be “sucked up” by only counting for their first successful choice. And that worked quite well. More than 50% of the vote was just “sucked up” by the “Cardano Atlantic Council”.

Slight problem I have with that (except for the sheer ugliness of (mis)using a single winner voting system in this way) is that not only whale votes, but also votes of people with small bags were “sucked up” by this, didn’t have any relevance for the result in the end.

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