On Saturday, October 12, 2024, members of the Cardano community gathered in Vienna, Austria, for a Constitutional Workshop. The workshop aimed to provide input for the Cardano Constitution on selected questions and elect one delegate and a traveling alternate to represent the Vienna workshop at the Cardano Constitutional Convention in Buenos Aires, Argentina, beginning December 2024.
The workshop was well attended, with 17 participants throughout the day. In addition to members of the Austrian community, we welcomed guests from Taiwan, Norway, Slovenia, and the United Kingdom. To reflect the governance theme, the workshop was held at the Austrian Parliament, the most fitting venue.
The workshop followed a structured format: first, we received additional context from the host (me), followed by the presentation of each question. Attendees then had a few minutes to reflect individually before engaging in group discussions at their tables. Finally, there was a debrief session where members from each table were encouraged to share their thoughts. Input was collected using Mentimeter, an online tool designed to capture insights from a crowd with a focus on usability.
Attendees discussed five key questions during the workshop, and input was collected. Below are the questions, along with snippets of feedback from the attendees:
Should the Constitution require [these] dispute resolution provisions?
- No, safeguards are important, but the Constitution should not mention contractual obligations.
- The Constitution should include language requiring contracts for treasury withdrawals and the need for a counterparty.
- Escrow of funds could be implemented with smart contracts.
- This question is an example of the Constitution being too specific.
- The importance of dispute resolution was acknowledged.
- There were mixed opinions in the room.
Should the Constitution include a mechanism that causes ada holders to re-select their DReps over time?
- Sticky stake is a real issue, observable with stake pools that have retired but still have ada delegated to them.
- Governance shouldn’t be something that is set and forgotten.
- If ada holders do not want to participate in governance, they can delegate to the predefined voting option “Abstain.”
- Forcing ada holders to reconfirm their choice of DRep, even if they are satisfied with their performance, could be problematic.
- Requiring ada holders to reconfirm their DReps over time risks low participation in governance.
- Having ada holders reconfirm their DReps simultaneously poses a security risk. Potential solutions include randomizing the process or making it dependent on when the individual delegation certificate was issued.
- There were mixed opinions in the room.
Discuss your thoughts on if the Constitution should mandate that budgets include, for example, a contingency fund, an indemnity fund and funds to cover administrative costs of the Constitutional Committee.
- Contingency funds should be part of the budget itself; a good budget considers contingencies.
- Mandating specific budget categories in the Constitution is problematic and could lead to infighting.
- Mandating budget categories could result in a budget flush.
- There was general agreement on the importance of covering setup costs for the Constitutional Committee and compensating their work.
- Indemnity funds should not be mentioned in the Constitution.
Given that the Constitutional Guardrails establish minimum and maximum sizes and term lengths for the Constitutional Committee (CC) but do not specify other details about its composition, which additional provisions should the Constitution include regarding the composition of the CC?
- There needs to be clarity around term lengths and term limits. Term limits per CC credential are currently not defined and not enforceable on-chain. The same credential could be voted in as a CC member multiple times with the maximum term length specified in the guardrails.
- Some attendees believe the Constitution should never specify the exact number of CC members and their term lengths.
- Including a minimum number of CC members in the Constitution could be important to prevent capture by a few entities.
- The term length of an individual CC member should be at most three years.
- DReps and SPOs are the decision-makers regarding the CC’s composition and term lengths. They need to vote on the Update Committee governance action.
Should there be an additional tenet addressing financial sustainability of the Cardano Blockchain ecosystem? If you answered yes, consider if this new tenet should include an absolute cap on the circulating supply of ada
- Financial sustainability is a very ambiguous term. If included, the Constitution needs to define this term; otherwise, people will interpret it individually.
- Instead of an “absolute cap on the circulating supply of ada,” it should refer to the total supply of ada.
- Including the total supply in the Constitution would formalize the existing social contract regarding the 45 billion ada.
- Even if the total supply needs to change in the future, it should require amending the Constitution, which has the highest DRep approval thresholds for all governance actions.
- Specifying the total supply is unnecessary since it is not an updatable protocol parameter. Changing the total supply would require a new node version that includes this change.
Additional Feedback about the Draft Constitution
- Inconsistency with terminology, e.g., “Cardano Blockchain” vs. “Cardano Blockchain ecosystem.”
- The “Appointed Designee” section sounds like it was written by someone thinking about shareholders and publicly listed companies.
- Varying levels of detail regarding governance processes.
- The voting mechanism itself needs to be explained in the Constitution.
- Use terms consistently throughout the document. For example, if “owners of ADA” are the primary participants in governance, always refer to them as such.
- The preamble is lengthy and repetitive, which reduces its impact.
- It overuses specific phrases and includes long sentences that could be more concise.
- Use more precise and more directive language.
- The Constitution should not include specific operational or procedural details; these should be included in separate documents.
Intersect funded the workshop and is part of their constitutional workshop series, which is nearing its end with only four more workshops remaining. The next workshop is scheduled right before the Cardano Summit in Dubai on October 18.