Civics Meeting Minutes November 16, 2023

Governance guardrails working group update

• Governance guardrails are non-protocol parameter limits we may want for the safety of the system.

• Topics to explore guardrails for included:

  • Treasury withdrawals, the need for a budget, governance principles like immutability that may be useful guides, reviewing security risks, corruption/populism capture, future interactions from sidechains/ISPOs

• The working group spent time in this committee meeting continuing discussions about governance guardrail categories.

Cardano Treasury budget process

• The need for a budget process was discussed

• There was recognition that a separate committee would need to define with budget input across existing committees. This included the notion of defining if outside investment may be needed as part of the process and also for this committee to also consider alternative funding sources.

• This will require agreement on the philosophy of the use of the treasury - as a sovereign fund that only uses income, vs as a fund to be depleted.

All Other business

• A proposal was made for the committee to map the Cardano ecosystem and enable “seeing” the thing that’s being governed. There was general agreement that this could fit in the Civics committee, and it was added to the backlog of topics to consider for 2024.

• The Civics committee wants to get in front of the community more as a committee

• The committee discussed the general disagreement with holding a CIP-1694 temperature check that excludes hardware wallets