Hello all,
I have been using the Polkadot platform for 7 months now, and I couldn't help noticing that there is still a strong focus on technicalities or techies' inputs at the expenses of real (read: "decentralised") governance.
What do I mean by that?
Well, let us have a look at the governance tab: Who has the final say on the suitability of proposals for democracy? The Council. Who manages the treasury? The Council. Who oversees tipping? The Council. And who are the members of the Council? The majority are Techies/Founders, meanwhile most of the validators and grant recipients who have applied are still stuck in the runners-up waiting room.
I might be wrong, but it seems to me that there are not many representatives from the multiple meetup groups/communities that Polkadot has set up around the world sitting at the Council table. This is a missed opportunity because on-chain governors could be working much more closely with off-chain governance team members.
The biggest issues I see with the current governance setup are:
Inefficiency: nobody is good at everything. Someone might be qualified to review 10000 lines of code, but unqualified when it comes to judging a promotional campaign on Twitter or YouTube. So why set them up to do the second task, if there are high chances they won't know how to approach it in the first place?
The criteria for council membership could be reviewed to become more inclusive and representative of the various parts of the Polkadot ecosystem at large. This would help flag a wider range of problems in advance and allow more time for delivering solutions as the number of on-chain and off-chain participants increases.
Fatigue: Nobody can deliver optimal performance 100% of the time. After undertaking multiple governance-related tasks over a long period of time, there is bound to be some exhaustion at play. This is particularly true because not all members of the council are engaging with the governance process de facto, thus leaving their duties to the few that do make the commitment to be consistent.
Council members should have some incentives for participating in the governance process in deeds. This could be something as silly as a system of colourful badges (i.e via Substrate's Front-End), or as serious as funding Council members' on-chain identity registration (i.e the deposit of 20.258 DOT).
I understand that everyone is getting geared for the upcoming Parachains auctions, but at the end of the day, Governance sits at the core of blockchain projects and is as essential as the code on which it is built. If users and early adopters do not think/believe/feel that their input is being acknowledged or valued, they will not engage beyond "to-the-moon" narratives nor hang around the platform long enough to discover its hidden treasures.
My question is therefore: is there a concrete roadmap for fully implementing governance on Polkadot?
I hope to hear from some of you PolkAssembly folks.
Cheers,
Anaelle.