The aim of this repository is to collect information about the governance of blockchain/cryptocurrency projects - first and foremost, to serve as a repository of information about where one can observe this governance in motion and learn more about it.

There are three components:

  1. Collecting descriptions of how cryptocurrency projects are governed and funded, by answering a set of questions.
  2. Collecting descriptions of significant events from the history of cryptocurrency projects.
  3. Collecting data about proposal voting outcomes. Data-sets following a standard format can be found in this folder, also see these notes about how the data for each project was collected and what it means.

This work is funded by the Decred Open Source Research program, Governance Models Research track.

How are blockchain projects governed?

There are a set of questions in the questions.md file which are intended to guide and structure research.

This project is currently in an early pilot stage, so the questions are subject to change, perhaps drastically. Feedback from people who apply these questions is sought and much appreciated at this stage. The questions document will undoubtedly require many iterations to reach a stage where it can be usefully applied by a variety of different researchers.

To participate in this project, choose a subject and create a file called [project.md] in the answers folder. Work through the questions for that project, answering them in a way which makes sense for that project, works as a standalone document, and includes links to sources for as much of the information as possible.

I find it useful to start with the questions.md file and use it as a template to fill in the answers.

If a question doesn't make sense for the project you're looking at, skip it. If the question is relevant but you can't find any answer, say so in the document.

The Decred and Dash markdown documents have been prepared as examples of a reasonable effort to answer the questions well - it is worth looking at at least one of these before attempting to research and write up a project according to this methodology.

There is no requirement to achieve any specific degree of polish before opening a pull request - pull requests will be accepted where they add statements which are backed by credible sources.

"Where does the governance happen?" can be regarded as the primary question, and it is fine (even encouraged!) to create a file for a project even if it only contains a list of sources where one can observe that project's governance processes in action or read about its workings in detail.

This repository should be about gathering information which is not readily available - if there are sources where the answers to any of these questions are available and reliable, please open an issue about that. In the medium term the plan is to pair the writeups in this repository up with more quantitative data from other sources.

Proposal voting outcomes

The repository has up to date information (as of 2019-04-06) about completed governance proposals for the following projects:

  • Aragon
  • Dash
  • Decred

This data-set has a link to read more about each proposal, a start and end date for voting, and details of the voting outcome. More info and analysis here.

Voter participation by project (histogram)