Metadata Standard for Governance Feedback

(Note: If you haven’t seen, I’m largely off Twitter, except to occasionally stay informed and mirror blog posts like this one to my audience.)

I’m publishing this blog to present a new proposed standard for governance metadata pertaining to draft proposals, feedback, and clarifications.

CIP-100 is designed to “accrete” new features via extension, rather than by revision. That is, there is no “version 1” or “version 2” of CIP-100. Instead, it defines a way in which real world users can simply… define what they need in order to express what they want to express. It encourages an organic adoption of these new features, first from those who need that new capability, then by tooling authors who want to improve the discovery experience for their users.

Unfortunately, CIP-100 has not yet been heavily utilized that way. Most people see it has a heavy-weight process whereby a new CIP needs to be proposed, and all tooling authors are brought along for the ride before we consider it adopted. Or, equally missing the point, tools impose restrictions like content length limits and ignore valuable governance metadata published on chain if it’s not connected to a specific governance-related transaction.

So, I’m hoping to lead by example.

While reviewing several recent governance proposals, I became frustrated. An on-chain vote is supposed to be the final step of the process, after much review, iteration, feedback, etc. However, there are no convenient venues for this feedback to happen; Twitter discussions are un-discoverable, and the fragmented tooling landscape for proposals and comments creates walled gardens that further fragment that ecosystem and prevent it reaching a critical mass of useful discourse that makes soliciting feedback worthwhile.

So, in an attempt to solve this, I have defined a new JSON-LD context describing how I would like to provide feedback to proposals, and how I think they should post drafts and responses to feedback. At the same time, I am also posting feedback for several governance proposals using this standard to demonstrate how genuinely flexible this is. I am not waiting for the CIP standardization process to do so, though I am submitting it as a CIP in case it does gain traction.

Notably, CIP-100 enables this to mesh well with all other governance metadata, and enables organic and lightweight adoption by tooling authors. It’s not a whole different standard, it’s a few new fields that, if present, tooling authors can add custom renderers for, and if not, should appear in the raw metadata.

One shift that I think would be beneficial from tooling authors is to treat 1694 labeled metadata seriously, index it, and make it discoverable. This can be as simple, to start, as just making a “governance metadata” tab that enables browsing the raw JSON of 1694 labeled transaction metadata. Richer integrations include grouping by subject, author, on-chain submitter, and custom widgets for different field types.

Feel free to provide feedback on my proposed standard. I don’t claim it’s perfect, just that it represents how I want to voice my opinions in governance at this time. If you think it would be useful, please use it, and ask your favorite explorers, wallets, and governance tools to support it. :) For those non-technical, if there’s interest, I will build a small user interface for submitting such feedback and responses to help it gain momentum.

You can find the CIP here. You can find my published feedback on the following governance actions in these transactions:

My hope is that this standard will enable and encourage:

• Proposal authors to publish early drafts for feedback
• More constructive dialog about governance proposals (it’s less easy to be a snarky shit when it requires a tx fee; failing that, if all Cardano drama generated tx fees and chain activity we’d have flipped Bitcoin by now ;))
• An avenue for authors to provide official, socially-binding clarification and responses during an ongoing vote

And that it will have the following secondary effects:

• Less overall toxicity
• More experimentation with CIP-100 style governance metadata
• Richer and more interconnected data within our governance tooling
• Higher quality governance proposals overall
• Indexing and display of all governance metadata, even if it’s not a known standard, as CIP-100 encourages