Off-chain proposal submission and discussion

Off-chain proposal submission and discussion is a governance process that should happen off-chain, before a governance action gets submitted on-chain for voting.

During this step proposers should socialise context about their proposal (what later on might get submitted as an On-Chain Governance Action), to explain the rationale behind their proposal, provide supporting evidence of its validity and usefulness, generally provide extra context and more.

Once socialize the Cardano Community is expected to review this content to provide comment and feedback that will allow the proposer to improve and adjust the proposal itself and also get a feeling about community sentiment around it, before it gets submitted as an On-Chain Governance Action.

Why it is important?

Off-Chain proposal submission is a critical step of the overall Governance process. It does allow proposers to provide clear and complete context, as well as supportive material, about their future Governance Actions, and so it allows the overall community to participate in the refinement of the proposal, making use of its shared brain, one of the great strength of a distributed community to handle a decentralised governance process.

Off-Chain proposals also generate the valuable context that will then been submitted On-Chain with the Governance Action in the form of metadata. This will then be available On-Chain (and displayed in Governance Tools) for voters to make an inform decision when submitting their vote.

Furthermore, as described also in CIP-1694, a structured Off-Chain process can reduce and filter the amount of Governance Actions that get submitted On-Chain, reducing the stress to the blockchain itself.

It's important so to consider that without a structured and complete Off-Chain proposal submission and discussion process the Governance Process itself could fail because there would be no clear avenue for discussing and refining ideas, Governance Actions submitted On-Chain would simply be a basic view of a single or small group people, without any structured context for voters to make a decision on.

Suggested Off-chain Process for Proposal Submission

The suggested key steps for this Off-Chain process are:

1. Proposal submission in a dedicated platform owned and maintained by the community

2. Community discussion on the submitted proposal (potentially with a defined minimum length)

3. One or more ways for proposers to gauge the sentiment of the community around their proposal before On-Chain Submission as a Governance Action (for example using submitted community comments, reactions or via an Off-Chain poll)

4. Proposal editing, meaning the ability for proposers to adjust their proposal based on the feedback received by the community

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Proposal Discussion Forum

To support this critical step of the Governance Process Intersect has issued a grant to build a Proposal Discussion Forum. More information about this grant can be found here.