Questions about CIP 1694

Governance
1

I was reading the proposal for CIP 1694 and had a few questions about some things. I have copied the sections relevant to my questions and pasted them into this document to give reference. The questions follow the section in question. Thanks!

Size of the Constitutional Committee
Unlike the Shelley governance design, the size of the Constitutional Committee is not fixed. It may be changed any time that a new committee is installed. Likewise, the quorum (the number of votes that are required to enact governance actions) is not fixed and can be varied whenever a new committee is installed. This gives a great deal of flexibility.

How does a fluid number of Constitutional Committee Members actually benefit Cardano’s Governance Model?

What are the risks for allowing this fluid model?

Is there a risk Actors both good and bad could utilize this as a tool to pass an agenda by expanding or shrinking the amount of committee members?

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Once ratified, actions will be staged for enactment. Actions that have been staged will be enacted on the following epoch boundary, unless they are dropped. All submitted governance actions will therefore either:

  1. be ratified;
  2. be dropped as a result of some higher priority action; or else
  3. will expire after a number of epochs.

What would cause a ratified action to be dropped?

If a community member submits a governance proposal, it is then ratified through proper channels, and is subsequently dropped for a higher priority action it could be seen as circumventing the democratic process Voltaire seems to be aiming for. Understanding that there are technological issues to consider how do we handle this without disenfranchising voters?

What would a higher priority action be?

How do we properly drop ratified actions for a higher priority action without making it seem as if the system doesn’t care about the peoples concerns who pushed the action to ratification prior to its being dropped?

Thanks for reading.

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2

This might be incorrect, but I think the prioritization they are referring to has to do with a hierarchy of the types of Governance actions. So if a funding request and Motion of no confidence are ratified in the same epoch, the committee state ratification takes priority over the funding request (since funding requests can’t be ratified if the committee is in a state of no-confidence…implicit logic in the CIP) causing the finding request to be dropped. Other available"drop" mechanisms should be framed explicitly at the end of the day, but I would expect for this iteration of the CIP there will only be drop mechanisms based on the prioritization order of governance action types, corresponding to the order they appear in the table in the CIP.

Would appreciate a correction on that point if there are other drop mechanisms under consideration.