Stellar Community Fund

By Governance Modules Library

Governance Modules Library

SCF #26

$74.0K

Legacy v5.0 Community Award

Awarded

Expansion of GML, a curation of new/classic development modules for governance in dApps/DAOs, managing/R&D of old and new modules.

Products & Services

The Governance Modules Library (GML) is a curation of new and classic modules for governance in decentralized applications (dApps) and decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs). The specifications are platform agnostic, although the implementation guidelines and examples are focused on Soroban, a Rust-based smart contract platform. The goal for GML is to provide a comprehensive toolkit and instructions set for enhancing DAOs and dApps governance, to demonstrate and spread software development best practices to accelerate innovation in - and adoption of - Soroban as an ecosystem by providing a “batteries-included experience”. This needs active maintenance and development of new modules, especially when done as a public good. This library is intended for community governance and development. While in the bootstrapping phase of this project, we see the need to facilitate active community management to help onboard new maintainers, manage existing community members, and facilitate the active collaboration. This active community management is included in this grant, but is planned to be taken over by the community whenever feasible. Our aim is to transfer ownership and control of all project work to the open-source community. The GML contains documentation for each module as well as a Proof of Concept (PoC) through simulations. Documentation can be found in this GitBook site and demos can be found in this GitHub repo. Initially, the GML included three modules: Neural Governance (NG), Quorum Delegation (QD), and the Tier-based Role Certifier (TRC), and our goal is that the size will grow through the Community input both directly (by submitting new modules) and indirectly (by expressing demand and ideas for library maintainers to help integrate). The initial infrastructure, processes, and workflows for the GML are complete, along with initial governance modules. The aim of this post-award resubmission is to build on the initial, completed development efforts to deepen the library with more governance modules, to make it easier for developers to compose a broader range of governance processes. This could include conviction voting (time weighted preference signaling, as used in 1Hive DAO), retroactive funding (as used in Optimism DAO RPGF), osmotic governance, and multi-track governance. The GML lives in the SCF Handbook GitBook page and each Module in it consists of a series of documents and examples-by-simulation that describe at least the following: 1) Summary, 2) Use Cases, 3) User Journey, 4) Module-specific Adjustments, 5) Specification, 6) Implementation Instructions, 7) Tuning Guidelines, and 8) Simulations. Each one of them are templates that can be readily implemented and tuned to specific applications that depend on or require governance solutions. Because Governance is a wide topic, the library is categorized by templates across typical Web3 use cases. The GML is not intended to be static but rather a living library, to be embraced by the Stellar ecosystem, including other grantees, builders, and developers from other ecosystems that want to contribute to OS, as a source and destination for Governance Modules. Innovators have the opportunity to contribute and receive recognition for publishing and refining Governance Modules.