The Cosmos Hub and its ecosystem is at a crucial moment in time. Following the discussion launched by the Atom 2.0 paper and the related on-chain propositions (78,80,81,82,83,86) the community has entered a very lively debate on its future. The rejection of prop82 has created a divide and at the same time given birth to a series of initiatives like the Accelerator or progress on shared security for example. But the community has a huge difficulty to find ways to discuss constructively and the “drama per minute” meme has captured the attention. This is not good for the health of the community and the attractivity of the Hub in terms of talents and capital in a very competitive environment.
Despite this, Cosmos Hub is not alone in this challenge. DAOs and generally L1 and L2 ecosystems are grappling with the challenges of decentralized governance and there’s a push for recentralisation in the form of delegates and committees. If we’re to make decentralization work, we need to continue the work testing and refining new forms of governance.We propose to pilot a novel approach for the Governance of the Hub: deliberative governance based on the approach of the Citizens’ Assembly. Our thesis is that this approach will allow to solve complex issues at stake and enable the community to find alignment across topics that were previously divisive and risked festering.
Applying citizens’ assemblies to a blockchain ecosystem will further be a world first and would represent a revolutionary precedent for the whole Cosmos. Concretely, we propose to: Deploy a pilot ‘Cosmoszens’ Assembly’ on a key topic of interest for the hub. The exact topic will need to be decided upon in the first phase of the project. It will have to be a topic which is both consensual (the problem needs to be solved) and entails trade-offs (the community still doesn’t agree on how to solve it). Some ideas could be: How to solve the spam proposals problem on the Hub? How to improve participation in governance? What should be the parameters for Consumer Chain onboarding? This pilot will showcase the approach and permit to test it in the wild. Explore the economic and business model of such an approach: What would it mean to deploy such processes at scale for the governance of the Hub and beyond. What would be a model that would be at the same time economically viable, politically legitimate, and cognitively strong? We will propose a concrete path forward. Pilot technical bricks to scale the approach: Scalable and reliable random selection (in collaboration with https://nois.network/ for example), Software or processes to connect the deliberative group with the larger community, etc
