What would you put into a Cardano Constitution?

Governance Constitution
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Although I’m sure this has nothing to do with the Cardano constitution, I’m happy to clarify what happened here. So let’s recap:

1… @Dettox screenshot-quote me (people usually do this when they expect the author will delete the tweet) stating, “CF does not vote on Catalyst projects. At all.” (which is a fact btw), but he was claiming, “I do not even have my facts straight”. His Tweet: https://twitter.com/Dettox/status/1602367014030409730

2… So I tried to shed light on this, assuming he was mixing up “vote on challenges” vs “vote on projects”, (I’m still convinced this is true) and also linking a primary source on why CF does that and how: Cardano Foundation: Encouraging active participation on Catalyst My Tweet: https://twitter.com/adatainment/status/1602374528633655296

3… After realizing with his answer here: https://twitter.com/Dettox/status/1602374957631246336 that he wants to refer to something completely different than he was screenshot quoting me, I felt it made no sense to go down into this discussion any further and ended it with this lovely “OKAY”-gif. https://twitter.com/adatainment/status/1602375895226155008

From there on @Dettox is trying to bring this reaction to all kinds of discussion. Even after weeks now, I don’t have anything to add. If you quote me claiming my facts are not right, then please expect me to react exactly to that quote and to nothing else what you think up afterwards.

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@adatainment I see.
Thanks for taking the time to clarify something this petty.

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@adatainment You come at me with a BS response.
I clearly said “stop voting in catalyst with genesis ada” and your reply is
“CF Does not vote on Catalyst projects. At all.”
What kind of answer is that ? Why are you trying to deflect ? It’s even worse when CF votes on challenges, it’s way more impactful than simple projects as it dictates the agenda for the following round.
Why are you being dishonest and trying to deflect the underlying issue ?
image

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I’m glad you did this. I was going to make a comment about changing the constitution because I had not yet seen it discussed. Amendments will be very important. The constitution should probably be able to change as the protocol, itself, gains new abilities and functionality over time.

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Phew - just “one”? :grin:

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Hi EGMSSE,

I agree there should be a process by which one can change or amend the constitution. Once in place the constitution should not be easily changed so some though needs to go into this. There can be a second document with a method of temporary changing or interpreting parts as needed. For example, a change in the economy may warrant a change in allocations for one year and then that change expires, and the constitution goes back to the original status. Just some thoughts around this topic.

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What will we put into a Constitution is an additional way to frame the question which may provide the space to be more inclusive in the thought around the idea.

There are great answers above and it will be an interesting journey in 2023 and hopefully the Constitution can be community sourced and discussed.

On April 21st, 2022, a group formed in the Gimbalabs discord and created a Cardano Constitution Working Group and produced this research and output.

I see comments from many participants of this conversation such as @Colm_Byrne, @HeptaSean @Neo_Spank @adatainment and others discussing “Principles” and “Values” and the technical implementation. If a Constitution is to “live” on-chain, does it need to be “born/created” on-chain as well?

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I think it’s important to also recognize that while CF does not vote on proposals, other than challenges, in catalyst, it is very likely that employees, staff, friends and family of CF vote in Catalyst, not on behalf of Cf but as individuals, and I believe this is expected and acceptable.

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Just found out through this Tweet:

… that there is a working document already:

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Rick just dropped his version of a constitution on Twitter:

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Hi Colm,

I believe the work produced by this effort may be of interest.

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It’s not possible for me to agree with this more, and I wish I had a way to upvote this (and @gjlite’s simple and enthusiastic response to it) harder and with moar gusto than just ‘hearting’ it…

I’ve been a web developer for nearly 20 years now, and here’s my illustration for why the WHY is so much more important than anything else…

When I’m attempting to fix a bug, or to implement a new feature (etc) I often run into existing code that I need to modify (or possible remove/replace, etc)… And I can see the history in source control as to WHO wrote that code and WHEN, and WHO has since modified it and WHEN… I can read the code and see WHAT it’s doing, and HOW it’s doing it… But none of that tells me WHY the dev wrote it, and/or WHY others modified it, and/or simply WHY it’s doing what it’s doing as it is today… You need in-code comments and documentation for that, and nothing irks me more than to see code comments that tell me WHAT the code is doing, and/or HOW it’s doing it, but not WHY… It’s like, I can read the code, and run it and debug it too, to see the WHAT & HOW… I needed you, other dev(s) in the past, to explain to me WHY it’s doing what it’s doing, and WHY you chose to implement it the way you did, etc…

Similarly, a Cardano constitution must be a document that explains to future Cardanians WHY things are they way they are… In 20 years – or 50, or 100, etc – people will be able to see WHAT Cardano can do, and HOW it’s doing it, etc… What the constitution must do, first and foremost, is give the needed context as to what the driving values and principals were that led all those WHOs to do WHAT they did HOW they did it, etc…

Anyway, I know I’m diving-in a bit late here, but I would add a few choice things from the https://why.cardano.org essay here, because it’s already the founding document that explains, literally, WHY Cardano :smiley:

Proposed cryptocurrencies such as [Tezos] (https://www.tezos.com/) provide an interesting model to examine where a cryptocurrency protocol is treated like a constitution containing three sections (Transaction, Consensus and Network) with a set of formal rules and process to update the constitution. Yet there remains much work to be done with incentives and over how exactly to model and change a cryptocurrency with a formal language.

The use of formal methods, [machine understandable specifications] (http://www.kframework.org/index.php/Main_Page) and merging a treasury with this process for financial incentives are being explored as possible avenues for inspiration. Ultimately, just the ability to propose a protocol change in a transparent, censorship free way with blockchain based voting should improve the process, even if more elegant solutions cannot be designed.

– https://why.cardano.org/en/introduction/social-elements-of-money/

Like all financial systems, the Cardano protocol must have an opinion in its design over what is fair and reasonable. We have chosen to divide between individual rights and the rights of a marketplace.

Individuals should always have sole access to their funds without coercion or civil asset forfeiture. This right has to be enforced because not all governments can be trusted not to abuse their sovereign power for the personal gain of corrupt politicians, as seen in Venezuela and Zimbabwe. Cryptocurrencies have to be engineered to the lowest common denominator.

Second, history should never be tampered with. Blockchains provide a promise of immutability. Introducing the power to roll back history or alter the official record introduces too much temptation to change the past in order to benefit a particular actor or actors.

Third, the flow of value should be unrestricted. Capital controls and other artificial walls diminish human rights. Outside of the futility of attempting to enforce them16, in a global economy with many citizens in the least developed nations traveling outside of their jurisdiction to find a living wage, restricting capital flows usually ends up harming the poorest in the world.

These principles stated, markets are distinctly different from individuals. While the designers of Cardano believe in individual rights, we also believe that markets have the right to openly state their terms and conditions, and if an individual agrees to do business within this market, then they must be held to those standards for the sake of integrity of the entire system.

– https://why.cardano.org/en/introduction/regulation-intro/

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Since the Sancho Ponza testnet started yesterday I started a draft on a constitution myself just to see what I could come up with. I think ofcourse this is a project for many people to do together but interesting to see if there are some similarities or differences.

Version 0.0.0.1 - Authors : Eystein Magnus Hansen

Preamble
We the users of Cardano have within this document strived for computational constitutionalism.
The purpose of this type of constitution is to ensure the security, inclusiveness, decentralization and opennes of the Cardano protocol to the public.
Where possible this social contract will be encoded into the node software and we will strive to further the computational constitutionalism as technology advances.

Article I - Highest order law.
The constitution is the highest order of law in the Cardano ecosystem and has priority over any smart contract, and any bi-laws created from the constitution or otherwise.

Article II - Openness
The Cardano protocol itself will remain open to any user who wants to participate in the protocol by purchasing Lovelaces. Any changes to the protocol against this article will be consider unconstitutional.
Note that this does not limit any sidechains or otherwise from deviating from this openness requirement.

Article III - Duty of remaining a decentralized protocol.
The Cardano protocol will remain sufficent decentralized as per the state of the art knowledge of what decentralization entails, per the writing of this article the Edinburgh Decentralization Index. It will be the duty of the
Constititon comitte to interprit what is suffient decentralization based upon the values of security, inclusiveness, openness and decentralization. Note that this does not limit any sidechains or otherwise from deviating from the decentralizastion requirement.

Article IV - Inclusiveness
The Cardano protocol will remain inclusive to users who wish to adopt its usage. This includes making the Cardano Protocol a public good that remains open source and that anyone can modify or build upon without any form of commercial terms enforced upon them.

Article V - Duty of security of the Cardano protocol
The users of Cardano has a obligation to ensure the Cardano protocol is secure to use in the sense that it has sufficent encryption as well as sufficient protection against known attacks of the protocol such as the double spend attack or long range attack.
As technology progresses what is considered a secure protocol will change and it will be up to the constitutional committee in collabration with domain experts to fill this article with the current state of the art knowledge.

Article VI - Rights to create proposals
Any user of the Cardano protocol will have the ability and rights at the protocol level to be able to create a proposal, currently known as creating a governance action. The whole protocol relies upon this for its other values of openness and inclusiveness.

Article VII - Right to participate
Any owner of the Cardano protocol shall at the protocol level be able to participate in the protocol as a staking pool operator, a direct representative, or as a member of a membership based organization of the Cardano protocol.
All users shall at the protocol level be able to participate freely in transactions on the Cardano protocol.

Article IX - Right to exit
Any owners of the Cardano protocol shall have the right to voluntarily exit the Cardano protocol by ceasing actions and selling their share of the protocol in Lovelace. This includes situations such as a state of no-confidence in the constitution committee.

Article X - Right to vote
All owners of the Cardano protocol shall have the rights to delegate voting power in the protocol to a direct representative.

Article XI - Duty to participate in voting
Direct representatives and owners have a duty to participate in voting and this is encoded into the protocol by the fact that no user can withdraw rewards from staking without also being delegated to a direct representative. Note that the duty to participate
in Cardano protocol governance includes delegating to a protocol level direct representative such as abstain vote and no-confidence vote thus upholding the values of openness and inclusiveness in the constitution.

Article XII - Rights to Lovelaces
No owners of the protocol shall be taken away his rights to any owned Lovelaces exempt when the user(s) agree to do such. Burning of tokens as a volunterly act is considered users agreement to give away his rights to Lovelaces.

Article XIII - Users and owners of the Cardano protocol
All entities either human or otherwise owning a single Lovelace or more are considered owners of the Cardano protocol. All entities utilizing the protocol in any way such as transaction or reading information from the protocol are considered users of the protocol.

Article XIV - Priority of updating the constitution
Updates to the constitution shall have the highest order of priority of actions on the Cardano protocol when submitted and having reached the established tresholds for doing so. Enactment by the constitution committee on any new constitution rules will happen immediately in the
epoch the updates / new constitution was enacted. The constitution committee shall be given sufficient time to read and understand any new proposal but shall not vote or act on behalf of an old constitution when a new or updated constitution is in effect.

Article XV - Process of new constitutions
Any updates of the constitution has to be voted in by the Constitution Committee as well as the Direct Representatives. In a state of no confidence a new constitution committee has to be formed and state of no-confidence has to be ended before any updates to the constitution.
In the case where there is no bad faith in the constitution comitteee but the users express a vote of no confidence in the constitution itself the constitution shall draft a new proposal for a constitution together with a prosal for the constitution committee that can remain unchanged if the voters accept this.

Article XVI - Freedom of lovelace movement
At the protocol level there will be no built in cencorship of transactions and lovelaces shall have the freedom of movement. This does not stop users or owners of the Cardano protocol to build solutions on top of this if they agree to have other rules for theire usage of the protocol.

Article XVII - Sustainability
Treasury mangement of the protocol shall be sustainable, meaning that over time it shall replenish any Lovelaces held due to fees and/or inflation. The owners of the protocol are free to vote on usage as they see fit but with regards to the value of sustainability over time.

Article XVIII - Transparency
At the protocol level all Cardano transactions shall be transparent, indexable, searchable and freely available to any users of the protocol.

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Think there should be a clouple of influences outlines

Think we can learn alot about other web 3 and internet constitutions out there.

And also constitutions created for international basic human rights.

And of course the constitution of governments.

Have clear voting threasholds outlined

Reference the steps that can be had durring a period of no confidence.

Voting timelines and procedures

max time for drep or cc members to be in their position, what happens to dreps that never check in or show as active.

The various options for moving votes between epochs to delegate to different dreps or go to no confidence. To protect against flip-flop(untrustworthy) dreps

CC procedures and genisus key best practices and requirments,
Transparency metrics to keep keys and memebers in check.

Protections for Governance tooling and accessibility. Wallet accessiblity.

Protecting the backwards compatability if the projects and spos to some type of standard or ability to have the time to catch up in upgrades and updates before being left behind.