Hello Cardano community,
As part of the Civics committee at Intersect MBO, we’ve been deeply engaged in creating a Governance Education Framework to support Cardano’s evolving on-chain governance ecosystem. This initiative aims to empower community members with the knowledge and skills needed to actively participate in governance processes and help shape Cardano’s future.
Through this development journey, here are the key insights we’d like to share.
Effective governance requires more than just voting — it is a complex skillset involving proposal writing, critical evaluation, dialogue, consensus-building, and informed decision-making. Developing the framework emphasized for us how hands-on training around these skills is desirable to help community members confidently contribute. One challenge is simplifying these concepts without losing their depth, which can be addressed through case studies, interactive exercises, and governance scenarios.
Drawing from our research and experiences as educators, we will now focus on framing the problem and ideating solutions. Our primary concerns as the working group are the impact of the work and the inadvertent subversion of the purpose of the committee, using it as a volunteer-based working group rather than the decision-making body a committee is supposed to be. In particular, there is certain flexibility to the definition of “the heavy lifting” used by the Intersect Team. One same activity can be an easy volunteer task or heavy lifting, depending on who does it when the common sense dictates that the essence of the activity is what defines it’s value. This goes to a broader problem with Intersect such that the idea of community leadership starts to look as a lipstick for exploitation. Civics of a member of Intersect are formed through rights, and duties. The rights that the members have is distributed very unequally because many of the members have strong protection of their rights by their governments, while many others - do not. Decentralized nature of Cardano and its value proposition (as global money you can trust) demands diverse participation. Most of the attempts to invite diverse members of the community so far lacked trustworthiness, dependability and incurred high cost of opportunity. This in turn harmed Intersects’ reputation in the community. We believe this is due to poor understanding by the powers that be of how privileged their positions are, which leads to cultural barriers to adoption of ideas and practices.
As the Civics Committee, our civic duty is to reverse this situation and work actively towards restoring the balance of rights and duties of members of Intersect, reputation of Intersect in the community and trust in Cardano as decentralized money.
Therefore we advocate at this point that we need to concertize the Governance Education Workshops planned by the Civics Committee with their purpose!
We want to propose a criteria such that a Civics Committee Governance Education Workshop is successful when it makes a change to Intersect as the organisation.
To cut to the chase, we want to argue that of all the efforts we’ve seen from the OSC collaborating with Bitergia and CHAOSS, they have missed a very important health metric: job opportunities. If we want people to give a dime about Cardano governance, we have to give them opportunities for making a living on Cardano.
To move forward, we propose a governance workshop. Our goal is to create a certain number of job opportunities that are fair and inclusive. To do so we will need to influence Intersect to direct some of the funds it got to a funding program and to develop a proof of concept for a stipend that automates some of the processes handled by the Intersect team at the moment. The selection process that is fair, transparent and unbiased exists but it needs to be developed and validated for on-chain feasibility!
We are excited to continue refining the Governance Education Framework and would love to hear from the community about your experiences, insights, and needs around governance education. Together, we can build stronger foundations for Cardano’s participatory future.
Thank you for your time and support.
— Alex @ The Civics Committee, Intersect MBO