XXX The Voice of the Community on the Cardano Foundation Board XXX

English General Discussions
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Having the newly founded Board with some exceptional members with unquestionable integrity and professionalism the Cardano Foundation is finally in very good and caring hands.(https://cardanofoundation.org/en/news/cardano-foundation-statement-14th-december-2018).

It is also reassuring to see that some of the new leaders of the Foundation have already proven their true passion, loyalty and efficiency within the Ecosystem in other critical roles.

This interim Board will have the challenging task to build up a state of the art Board structure that sustains and efficiently serves the very best interest of the Cardano Ecosystem, while carefully managing it´s resources & assets.

A successful Board has strong diversity, quite a few members (7-11) and brings a lot of different perspectives, experience and culture along the strategy, vision and goals of the Foundaiton into the respective decision making processes on the Board Meetings.

One of the key perspectives to add would be the Voice of the Community. Having someone (or maybe more people) who filters, aggregates and presents the Community´s authentic feedback and is a mediator between the Board and the Community could work out pretty well. It could be a key responsibility for such a person to set up, support and supervise the infrastructure for the assessment and vetting of Community Projects, which apply for funding (Cardano Hub).

Being at Plutusfest I have heard the rumors spreading fast, that the Board might consider one Guardian to become a Board member. At this point I mentioned it to Eystein and we naturally got really excited and sent our applications way early without having any formal or official communication or process in place.

But then we were struggling a bit later that something is missing, being You, the Community!

For the Cardano Foundation to truly restore its trust it needs a board member(s) from the Community, that was voted in by the Community. There are so many passionate, intelligent and highly educated people in the broad Community to allow for some truly amazing candidates even if they were not at the right time, right place or in the right state to be part of the Guardians of Cardano group.

Such a candidate elected by the Community would have all the authenticity, legitimacy and empowerment from the Community.

We also hope the voting could eventually take place on the Cardano infrastructure if ready by then. To write a voting DAPPS on Plutus wouldn´t be a big issue, there would be other challenges around identity (multiple wallet addresses may belong to one) and the need for KYC.

Let the Community decide or influence the process, protocol, eligibility, rules & policies, terms, length of mandate and infrastructure for this very unique initiative. Let’s have a fully transparent application process and also selection process. Let the candidates freely campaign for a month or two (whatever the Community and Cardano Foundation thinks is an appropiate timeline) in the Community regarding their program and let the Community finally vote and decide.

Just imagine the amount of valuable assets, such as creative content, number of relationships, the excitement and strong media coverage such a Community Campaign for the Board Position would generate, this unique once in a lifetime opportunity would inspire and strengthen the Community as no other in the crypto space.

The candidates for this Board member position could be the 6097 people who signed the petition “Liberate the Cardano Foundation”, when the Foundation badly needed their support or even to let anyone from the Community to apply if one can show sufficient support from the Community.

As the Guardians have a significant advantage over other Community members and our group has also eventually disintegrated following a Governance conflict it feels appropriate if we would not run for such a position. Personally we will not participate in such a process and officially revoke our previous applications. We would even go that far inviting all the other Guardians to not run for Board member position and let the other members of the Community start off in an equal opportunity competition.

Nevertheless, where the xGuardians might add some real tangible value is to supervise & support this Board selection process and help with reviewing all the applications, carrying out interviews, etc. Basically to stand by the Cardano Foundation Board to orchestrate the Campaign and lift this burden from their shoulders.

This Cardano Roadmap Item would be such a nice learning experience and might provide some really valuable output for the future Governance and Treasury System of Cardano. We would also get to know our Community better, see the faces, see the personalities and see our diversity, which was already shown once when the Petition has been signed from all the hidden corners from around the World.

What do you Guys think?

Would this spice up our Community Life a bit? :slight_smile:

Bertalan Vecsei (@bercinho)
Eystein Magnus Hansen (@Eystein_Hansen)
Mihori Liu (@Mihori)
Tim Wulteputte (@Bullish)

ps: we have also officially informed the Cardano Foundation Board

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The biggest problem that I have identified with permissionless networks is the hairy issue of building proper governance.

While I appreciate what everyone does in this ecosystem, I have also witnessed the some hairy governance issues, which manifested themselves through internal infighting, competition of egos, etc.

Before we move on with “representing” a community, in my opinion, we have to agree on the “rules of engagement”. First and foremost I would hate to see fracturing of our community because one set of individuals have irreconcilable differences of opinion with the other.

To address that, any type of contention should be put up for a vote. Results of the vote should be respected by everyone. That means even if you lose, you should respect the will of the community (and not create another group). Then and only then we will have a constructive environment to actually build something meaningful.

I really like the idea of voting for projects. With my finance background I could help formulate and rank projects according to their return on investment. BUT before we do that, we have to decide the general strategic direction of the platform, because it would help us allocate funds in a more structured/directed way.

Africa and the unbanked seems like the natural step from the point of view of creating most value for potential customers, but this strategy has its drawbacks as countries in emerging markets tend to be authoritarian, corrupt and unwilling to change.

Blockchain introduces transparency and they don’t want it. So we will have some headwinds trying to push this thing bottom-up. BUT we could also engage from different directions (i.e. with the World Bank) to push for adoption. I see enormous opportunities for Cardano to create synergies with the World Bank . For example, they spend millions to verify how their funds were spent on multi-million dollar projects. Something that could be tracked with a click of a button and peanut size expenses on the blockchain.

Anyway, really good initiative, but we have to first decide on:

  1. Governance rules of conduct
  2. General strategic direction
  3. Value metrics (ROI, adoption, etc) for Cardano ecosystem before voting on projects
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Great inputs!!! There are simply just too many things to be considered with, and the voice of community can hardly be listend and executed unless there’s some sort of representation of the community.

Guess how many good ideas and proposals were buried this year already? How many good people left the community already due to the ignorance?

We know there are many many talented and skilled members out there, and this will be agood chance to let them get involved beyond voluntary community work.

Also, this is also a good practice for Cardano community to find its way to its governace system. We might make mistakes, maybe there will be more conflicts, there will be more fights, but those are simply the nature of the process. Eventually things will find their own balance points, and we will all achieve our specific type of blockchain governance!!

We are really looking forward to community’s participation and IOHK/Emurgo/CF’s collaboration on this one!!

:smiley::smiley::smiley:

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Wow! I think this is a great idea! What better way to get the community involved in Cardano than having set community formally choose a peer to represent them on the Foundations Board! Brilliant!

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I get some PMs regarding what a Member of the Board is responsible of.

This is a good overview, however be aware that the Cardano Foundation is a non-profit organization.

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Hello @bercinho,

In principle, I very much welcome the fact that the Cardano Foundation seems to be giving concrete consideration to giving Community representatives a place on the Council. But I believe that there should be very clear guidelines for the election, which should also be confirmed by the Cardano Foundation. The people who apply for this position become a public figure and must expect to be screened in every respect by the community before being elected. In order to avoid a possibly dirty competition, I would suggest the following points:

Standardized Application Portfolio

  • Personal data (name, age, place of residence)
  • Professional activity, verifiable expertise in relevant specialist areas (e.g. in the fields of law, network technology, software development or economics)
  • Objective what is to be achieved in the term of office for the community. This is how they will be measured in the event of a possible re-election.
  • Previous activities around Cardano
  • Best in video format with all written references as attachments

Advertising for one’s own person only on the approved portal

Allow only one portal for the application to this position and portals like Youtube and Twitter may only be used to refer to this portal. In order to avoid that particularly well-known persons from the forum have a competitive advantage through their followers outside of this forum compared to persons who are “quietly” only active in the forum.

Involvement of all stakeholders

The idea of a liquid democracy goes up in smoke when certain groups are separated.
Perhaps it would be possible to generate an encrypted proof that confirms that the stakeholder has a profile in the forum without establishing a public connection between profile and ADA-Wallet and to set this as a condition for participation in the election process.

Do not exclude members of the Guardians

Very committed members of this forum have joined together to publicly protest against grievances within the Foundation’s management and have rendered an important service to everyone in this forum. This should not be seen as a reason for exclusion from future engagement.

This topic seems to me to be very speculative, as nothing concrete is known from the side of the foundation yet. Let’s use this discussion to find out:

1) What do we expect from a representative?
2) What might the election process look like?

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Does that mean you have not yet heard anything about it directly from the Foundation? I think that this should be the very first step: The Foundation should express their willing in having a member of the community in the board.

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If this does happen, which I doubt btw, I would like it to be a requirement that the “candidates” disclose their coin holding and when they bought… I smell dreamers and chancers milling about. Incentive alignment is a thing, I need to know you have skin in the game.

Also the entire thing needs to be translated into Japanese and circulated to forum / telegram / reddit.

Also the “term” should be established at the outset; 6 months, 1 year, etc.

Also, I don’t see why a “guardian” shouldn’t stand, but neither that it should be a “shoe in”.

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I don’t really see why this should not happen, while it’s in the very best interest of the entire Community and the Cardano Ecosystem.

It was explicitly said to at least one or two of the Guardians at Plutusfest who spread the news to us.

The important thing is to expand the scope of the candidates from the group of 11 disintegrated Guardians (out of this 4 of us have reigned from the positon for the reasons above), to the entire broad Community.

We have sent on Sunday morning an email to the Chairman of the Foundation, Mr Nathan Kaiser and Mr. Pascal Schmid about this request.

However as we have not received a response for our email since 4 days we decided to act and bring it publicly to make sure it gets the priority and visibility it deserves.

But let’s give them a bit of time, I am pretty sure they will come back. They were only elected last Friday and it’s Christmas season now :slight_smile:

We fully trust the good judgement of the new Board and they will definitely make the right decision, whatever it is.

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I want to add that while the post is in English with “the community” of course we are talking the full international Cardano community. In a board there needs to be considerations on communication as well but I definitively do not hope we are only looking at German as a working language on such an international board even if located in Switzerland. Let me add I also have full trust in Cardano Foundation with the new interim board and they should be the ones who have a say in any such decision and we are only discussing this as a community because I believe in the community having a say in governance issues and then as a community and for finding representatives of the community.

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While I like the overall idea very much, I think it’s unnecessary and not really polite not to wait for them. It’s the boards duty to look for more board members and they will do in time. Now they probably feel pushed by you, at least I would do so. Maybe your ideas are theirs, maybe not. Please give them some time to plan the next steps.

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Absolutely!

There is no pressure to pick Members tomorrow :slight_smile:

I guess it can take 3-6 months to get a good Board setup and do a proper handover, transition.

We just wanted to propose on the very early beginning to expand the section base to the Community beyond the xGuardians.

We found it also important to do as early as possible because such a process we are speaking about here may take 1-3 months of preparation and 2-3 months of execution.

In case the Board is reading this, please don’t take our action as a form of exercising pressure rather to bring an idea and valuable Community feedback early on as if you like the concept proposed you have time enough for execution in your agreed interim period of sitting in the Board.

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Totally agreed!

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As a bad analogy yet this illustrates my thoughts
In my opinion, there is a deeper interest ( personal interest) but it’s more marketable under the people voice in the broad, it’s human nature, for me just say it straight

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While I like the idea of the community having some sort of influence on the Cardano Foundation council in the long run, a popularity contest to vote for one of the Guardians to become a board member makes absolutely no sense to me.

First, while I appreciate the Guardians’ efforts in their petition and research activities regarding Parsons, I don’t think a member of a group that has just pressured out the former CF chairman should be put in a position to actually join that board. Whether intentionally or not, it would discredit the entire Guardians’ movement as it would proof the movement itself had conflicting interests.

Second, voting for a ‘community member’ to be on the council seems meaningless to me. There’s no single person that can represent the entire community, but also whenever a community member enters the council, it’s basically no longer a community member.

I feel more for a (long-term) solution where the council members themselves might (partially? fully?) be voted on utilizing the envisioned on-chain governance model for Cardano in some way. Though that definitely needs a lot of research before anything can be implemented IMO.

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Oh there can be many criticisms of my actions here and I am sure we will read some later as this thread evolves and people have gathered toughs for a while and figure out train of thoughts I have not even considered myself. I do however ask if you think it is good the community is aware of this and if it is good that any representative of the community is selected by the community. If that is what is wanted that is what should be discussed by the community.

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Of course there is personal interest behind anything most people do :slight_smile:

Being heavily invested in Cardano, at the same time caring about the unimaginable positive & disruptive impact it may have on our World and willing sympathetic Charles who gives his full heart to the venture to win the crypto war is my personal interest to make sure we have the very best Board possible, with the best candidate from the wide global Community, while having such a campaign generating tremendous added value and strengthening the Community like nothing else.

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As there is no single person who can represent anyone in anything? This goes right into the debate on governance. And I wonder why it has to be a 1 or 0 answer or right or wrong. I want someone that as good as we can represents the community. I also do not think you need to stop being part of the community if you are a board member. But you need transparency. In fact some of the criticism on Parsons was that his twitter profile was more focused on Bitcoin than being part of the Cardano community while a board member of Cardano Foundation.

Your long term vision sounds interesting on the other hand. But we are not yet there as you discuss yourself.

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Thanks for the honesty … go for it
Anyways thanks for your input in all this situation, I respect the fact that you stand for what you think

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Morning. Here is a video on choosing board members in
nonprofit organizations. Maybe it could inspire some discussion. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=3Z6CyxdOsnw

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