The future of the Guardians

English General Discussions
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@bercinho and @Singularity
Considering decentralization, and equal distribution of power and control: which of the 21-22-23 points would you choose for your future activity?

Also: in my opinion it’s not about “put to rest” the guardians. The crucial point is to remain independent and unbiased. Crucial to understand and not misintepret this.

As you pointed out certain activities require funds, money and also some focus and persistence to achieve the goals of this single project. This is where certain people can put in all their skills and efforts, and - in the best case - getting paid for it. This is what I call soldiers. They follow goals and have to stay polite and sometimes also quiet. You ever wondered why none of the paid employees from all involved companies publicly raised their voice about Parsons performance and guidance? why it required a real independent group of (mad) guys to do this thing?

It’s this what I see as the real value build in the past months. It’s is not comparable (not better or worse) with the value of all other important existing and upcoming entities in the ecosystem. But it is different, not to say pretty uniquely. I consider it crucial to keep this value, based on the roots it is grown off. Other institutions and listed ideas have to earn the merits based on their own values and not morphed from the Guardians given activity.

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I think you underestimate the effort & cost of doing this single scope item properly & efficient. And there are many other important ones, which would bring tremendous value.

IMO this can’t happen without some sort of funding.

I don’t see would the Guardians of Cardano and other groups in the Guardianship movement for instance maintain a Stakig Pool and act as a non-profit organization financed by the pool rewards & transaction fees and maybe by applying for Treasury funds (to be voted for allocation by the Community), where would this damage the independence and integrity of the Groups who cover their operations transparently this way?

I disagree that you have to be a charity organization to be independent. There are many non-profit organizations, NGOs who are seen and proven to be independent.

Let’s not get lost in ideology, but be practical.

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ok, so in practice you want being funded by the own staking pool, who rates and issues certificates for other pools?
It’s exactly this what I believe is crucial to consider when it should make sense and become of a real value. ignoring this has very big probability to create a lot of noise, hate and disharmony. Please don’t let us ignore this risk, because we so hardly want to reach this other goal.

I don’t say it’s easy to get the funds for everything one may want to achieve and do. That’s live and not a specific Cardano-Ecosystem-issue. But it’s also not that easy at it might look like to put all under one “movement”. Just start to think about who decides what funds from the money-cows will be assigned to what project.

And then we even haven’t speak about the “who cares” question? What is the reason that a self proclaimed entitiy is going to be this “virtual one but someway decentralized, hard to explain, but believe me” movement, everyone has to underlie and accept his valutations?

We should keep in mind that R&D is hardly working on a protocol that should be resistant and adequate to support whatever entities want to use this blockchain. Each one has to build the own brand, strategies, marketing, government structure, funding and monetization ideas.

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When I said we have to be practical, I didn´t mean we have to be dumb.

Of course you have to watch out for conflicts of interests and the service a group provides should not clash with wherever it´s income comes from. This might have to be designed on each individual group level. They have a transparent agenda, a transparent source of income and transparent management of funds.

In respect to such source of income staking pool was just on example here, there are other ways like treasury, donations, sponsorship, sell of merch, crowdfunding, Foundation financing, etc.

This has to be very carefully worked out, which is what I am promoting here. Patience. Give time for working out the fundementals. Let´s not rush things please. There is no such urgency to make conclusions and decisions following a few Forum message exchanges. We need time for this. Period.

The only thing I personally don´t believe in is to have a set of groups take the responsibility of “call for accountability and transparency behind those with power” without begin funded, but being hobby guardians acting by charity. And really let´s not forget the other scope items proposed …

Don´t get me wrong you can achieve a lot with charity organizations, but for critical functions in the Ecosystem I do not see them fit.

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To those who left or who wanted to point fingers, why not form another independent group to fulfill your idealism? Or simply come back to do what you feel it’s right to do.

I mean it’s easier to say things than do things.

I really encourage the community to form its own groups to involve with more community works and to promote more greatness of Cardano, instead of expecting other people to achieve your things for you.

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This would be possibly the best solution now to let those who “left” and “left-but-stayed” to form their new group they truly believe in.

When there are key differences about the group´s future, then it´s better to split and go two ways. This is not like a damaging cryptocurrency fork, this is more like a heatlhy cell division in the lifecycle process an organism is growing and developping.

It´s even good for the Ecosystem to have two very committed, dedicated groups who can and should of course collaborate together instead of one, which is trying to run towards two different directions.

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4-6 people spending an hour or two a week, with a publicised point of contact so others can also raise concerns, would be plenty to keep an eye on major player activities IMO.

Regarding your forking suggestion, that is also of course a possibility.

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I honestly don´t see relying such a critical function to a group to operate in a “hobby mode” feels safe & stable enough.

Also I see the effort to be significantly higher. The devil is always in the details, so you would have to go deeper as if you are superficial you will miss the point.

The Ecosystem will just grow, and there will be so many parallel things on-going, just by context-switching between them you will loose those 1-2 hours a week.

You have 3 key big entities with lot of diverse & complex initiatives and many startups, partners, projects will follow, then who knows how many key personel, key influencers; the amount of information these all will generate may be tremendous effort to process.

There will be more and more information, content to review & process, key people to contact with questions & enquiry and also keeping in touch with the growing Community, making sure you filter, collect and aggregate information, hear clearly their voice.

I really don´t see this as an avarage 10-15 minutes effort per day as you write it. Just the overhead of communication, coordination & collaboration of a team which is located in different timezones eats up more time.

To make proper estimation the scope has to be defined in more depth, the skills required has to be assessed and then it´s possible to see what competences & capacities are required.

Again 10-15 minutes per day of charity effort is a beautiful & honorable gift to the Ecosystem, but I doubt it´s enough to manage a critical function.

I would really suggest that the member of the Guardians who ideologically oppose a non-profit operations or don´t want to, are not able to or not interested in contributing much more then the avarage 10-15 minutes effort per day for the cause of the Guardianship should found a new Group and let the others move on. I would also see these two groups working closely together and collaborating under the Guardianship movement.

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10 - 15 per day of charity effort is enough if we can get 100k of people into Guardianship of Cardano or whatever name or movement we want to call it.

The scope of work required for GoC are pretty much covered and each of it has a huge workload if we want to do it in a proper way. Right now we do not have enough people to come onboard to help us out. We need more passionate members to come onboard in contributing the voluntary work to Cardano ecosystem.

There was a popular chinese saying that goes - the more people we have, the easier we can get things done. Don’t get misled by the Agile methodology into believing the fewer the people we have the better it would be. This belief is only applicable for decision making but not for executors. Anyway i never believe in Agile methodology.

The next immediate priority we should really give a a thought in the recruitment strategy - how we should get more contributors and place them under the key contributor in each region. Put up a document in google drive and invite people to share their background - expertise, industry, the number of hours they can contribute within a week, etc…

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It doesn´t scale like this unfortunately.

10-15 minutes per day of 100k people is not as much as 2-3 hours per day of 100 people for most of the tasks. And for some complex tasks even 10 people can do much more in 2-3 hours per day.

At the moment we had 6097 signers of the petition, there may be 50-100 active regular members in the Forum, maybe 500 daily active all together in the Reddit and Twitter and other channels. Please correct me if these numbers are wrong, it´s just my quick assessment.

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My point here is not about the quality of effort coming either from 100k or 100 people to carry the 24 duties outlined above.

My point here is that, until we make a move and gather all the participants and understand their background, we are just making a lot of assumptions and exchanging thoughts here endlessly.

We need to start somewhere, that is start gathering and assessing the candidate expertise, background, their preference contribution hours, etc…only then we have data points to work on the next step.

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Sorry everyone…A lot to think about and my head is kind of spinning. Maybe we should lobby to have a certain number of Guardians to be on the board of directors of the foundation? I keep thinking that the responsibilities we are talking about should be handled by the foundation if it was working properly. Also if we had a vote on who was on the board I assume they would be more responsive and responsible. The Guardians arose because of a lack of accountability shouldn’t we use our voice to ensure that there is accountability baked into the system? With that said I do see the wisdom of having a group of people who are activists as a further check and balance on existing power structures. Nothing stopping those people from forming a stake pool to fund their activities. I am contemplating starting a pool as well but I would also support a Guardian pool to ensure a healthy ecosystem.

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This is very well said.

We have to look at the individuals according to their skill set, background, geographical location, their level of contribution they may make & commit to and see our possibilities.

Generally you would organize the voulnateers into smaller groups (max up to 11 members, 7 is ideal) so they can efficiently work together.

From this bottom-up approach, we would be able to assess the resources at hand who may support the cause.

Then we have a top-down approach to investigate what this cause should exactly be, to have a very clear and detailed scope definition and agenda.

When these two processes are completed then you have to bridge the gap in a creative way between the scope and the possibilities. One might limit the other of course.

Is this something we can start with?

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Some background information from the very beginning of the Guardians days: I wrote pretty exactly what you mentioned as a proposal to better involve and claim community requirements in the Trinity operations (except it was not clear at that time if and how the CF will proceed) It’s all documented with dates and content progress in a (protected) github repo.

Now guess who strongly opted for getting rid of Parsons first, and don’t transmit this ideas, as well as the request to form fundamental goals and rules on start, instead of discussing them now.

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So here is another suggestion from top of my head, which might be considered.

If the current group of Guardians of Cardano agree we could “donate” the “Guardians of Cardano” brand to the movement of Guardianship of the Cardano Ecosystem, basically in the hands of the Community.

Literally this means that no Community group is ever allowed to wear and claim this name anymore and everyone who joins the movement (to join the movement requires a clear policy & protocol) under which ever group or as an individual is entitled to say he is a Guardian of Cardano. Also the owl concept from @Bullish would make a lot of sense in this constellation.

As this brand has established some reputation, recognition and acceptance by the Community as part of the “Liberate the Cardano Foundation” operation strongly belonging to the Guardianship ideology it would make lot of sense to donate it for this particular movement with such a good & related cause.

Current members of the “Guardians of Cardano” group with new members from the Community would have to reorganize themselves into new groups under new names. So you could say we have “The Jedis of Cardano” who are a “Guardians of Cardano” group.

The Guardianship movement would use & manage the “Guardians of Cardano” brand for it´s neverending cause and define its policies of brand usage (such as non commerical use, etc.).

The Guardianship movement would need some very light-weight decentralized governance structure of course (requires careful work out and consensus), but generally have the Community to be accountable to and make changes to it´s consitutions only following Community consultation & consensus.

All suggestions here that would expect the “Guardians of Cardano” brand to be passivated, inactivated, to put to sleep would easily mean it would degrade, become forgotten and insignificant over time for absolutely no reason, so this should be avoided IMO by all means.

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One of the main differences between @bercinho and myself has just become clear to me: artificial top-down vs natural bottom-up.

I believe community initiatives should start small and simple then grow organically as needs and opportunities become evident. Bert seems to think it’s best first to design a large framework that could accommodate any and all functions that might eventually be wanted.

To me Bert’s thinking is inherently old-fashioned and centralist, even if all of the parts of his organisation are independent and self-organising. I do not see the reason for having that large framework unless there is some top-down control. He has spoken of the advantage of shared goals and values, but I’m still waiting for examples, beyond those we’d expect all Cardano community members to share anyway.

I say we should evolve beyond the old corporate-style structures and, like much of the best modern tech, take our models from the environment: start small and grow naturally according to the resources and opportunities that we find.

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I’m a bit surprised by some reactions by current GoC members to the opinions of the two initial GoC members that left, for instance:

Why is having the opinion that it may be best for the GoC initiative to stay focused on to keeping the Cardano Foundation, IOHK and Emurgo accountable and thus lay low for now when things are actually moving necessarily a bad thing? And if opposing opinions aren’t welcome, what’s this thread about in the first place? :man_shrugging:t2:

From what I read now, there’s apparently a clear difference between the GoC group and the ‘guardianship’ movement the GoC initiated. For instance when @rickymac mentioned ‘we can all be guardians’ in one of his YouTube video’s I assumed that meant the GoC was a movement that was meant to be open for all members, but from what I understand now that was incorrect, as apparently the GoC is and will likely remain a closed group.

Like I mentioned before, if the GoC choose to remain a closed group that just offers a service to the community and asks to be funded for it, they have every right to do so.

While this could certainly be useful within the Cardano ecosystem, if their actions are to be funded, it also means they’re not fully independent, as there may be financial incentives to (not) do certain things. In such a scenario different groups would actually need to be formed, as it is possible the GoC group need to be held accountable for their actions as well.

Just to be sure; by no means I want to imply that the current GoC members don’t have the right intentions, I just want to make a point that the (not) for profit direction that is being discussed is not necessarily the perfect solution either from a philosophical standpoint. IMO it’s up to the current GoC members to decide what they want to do next, hopefully this thread helps them in their decision making process. Thanks again for all your time and efforts! :v:t2:

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O well, theoretically it makes sense, but realistically, how to get fund from the community before the treasury system completed ? Ask for public donation whenever we need compensation?

Sure… but how much negative feedback will you get and how much donation can the community give, especially when ppl lost heavily in their ADA investment.

Of cuz I know everyone would love to have a 100% independent, work for free, high efficiency group to work for the community.

If we treat it as casual hobby, and just do it 1-2 hours per week like Rob suggested, I guess it’s fine.

But at first people do appreciate, but slowly people just expect you to do more then you gotto do more, from community monitorings to community activities, and it looks bad if you make or take any money from anywhere.

I meant, it’s just hard, me and @bercinho tr just try to find a sustainable way for its longer future. But guess many people don’t like profit as it sounds so bad. I believe it’s not whose money we take, but it’s what position we stand. So hopefully the community can form something or simply take GoC jobs over and share workloads to achieve this ultimate concept.

@Undersearcher I didnt mean you in mu last post as i love :heart: you always :kissing_heart::kissing_heart::kissing_heart::kissing_heart:

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No worries; even if it was directed at me also I wouldn’t take it personal. :blush:

I appreciate your long-term outlook for Cardano and think if Parsons hadn’t resigned this discussion would turn out quite different, as there would actually be a pressing need to find an alternative to the Cardano Foundation.

However in the current situation, for the GoC to pursue funding and broaden their activities is arguably unnecessary, as it is well possible the Cardano Foundation itself can reform on a short-term basis and perform as originally envisioned. The whole point of the CF is to facilitate the transition from the current federated governance to the envisioned on-chain liquid democracy that is expected to be enrolled in 2020. After that, there’s a lot less need for the CF, IOHK and Emurgo to be held accountable, as they’re no longer ‘in charge’.

That is why I personally feel it might be best for the GoC to just lay low for now and for the next 2 years occasionally step up to remind these entities of their responsibilities if needed. At this point I don’t necessarily see a need for more of the incredibly intense research activities that the GoC performed so far.

That, combined with the actual movement within the CF and the fact that the GoC was actually the group that pressured Parsons out of his position (which had a lot to do with the foundation’s funds as well), arguably makes pursuing funding for the GoC to continue a broadened set of activities a bit questionable. If the GoC do choose to go that route I’ll still follow the initiative with interest and hope it indeed contributes to the overall ecosystem. Looking forward to seeing how this turns out. :v:t2:

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As an outsider to the GoC I just want to pitch in a 3rd-party perspective from someone who hasn’t kept up with the intimate details of it all and I’m sure there’s a least a few others who are in a similar boat as I.

The general narrative as I understand it is the the GoC came in and put pressure on the Foundation due to it’s corrupt nature. This was a great success, and I and others are glad that this happened. Now from skimming this thread it seems there’s a desire to build an organisation that directly works to build/speaks for the community, and whatever other intentions/goals you guys may have.

That’s awesome, but frankly most of us have no clue who any of you are, we don’t have really that much reason to trust that you will act in according to the best of intentions, and if it’s a giant top-down organisation (why not try to make a DAO that offers some sort of voting mechanism to holders of ada or some other idea that works to get the community’s opinion directly and has proper checks/balances), and what’s to stop corruption from happening in your group that didn’t happen to CF once you raise any money either from the treasury or from donations?

From this thread, to me at the very least, it seems that there is the expectation that the community will support the GoC in their future ventures, however I think for the a large swath of the community we still need to have our trust won over in a multitude of levels, just as with any good foundation or business that starts out.

I’m not really interested in the politics of all of this but I think this can be a helpful perspective to add to this conversation. I hope it grows into something beneficial for the community that lasts over the years, so good luck with it all :+1:

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