Aragon’s Community Governance Model

Aragon

• 4 min read
Aragon’s Community Governance Model

How we plan to achieve transparency and inclusion for the community

Our community is everything for us. With Aragon, we want a thousand communities to flourish. Tokens align the incentives of communities and projects towards the same goals and values. But those communities are the center of where the magic happens.

Two weeks ago we posted our Community Governance Model for feedback from the community. We received some comments on it, and we now have the final version of the model ready. Before this, we had already worked on the model internally. I drafted the original version and Luis Cuende and Jorge Izquierdo provided their thoughts on it.

Further changes might be made as things develop. But we wanted to show the community what we'll be doing in terms of governance, transparency and inclusion.

The model was designed so that every community member will be treated equally. Everyone will have the same changes of participation, and our Meetings and decisions to be transparent.

We have already held our first Dev meeting that was livestreamed and open to community questions. This Friday, July 14th, we'll have our first public Community Meeting. The Community Meeting will also have our first regular AMA with it. Feel free to send your questions at our subreddit, on this thread.

Goals

We want a productive, happy and agile community that can welcome and bring forth new ideas.

We will rely on 5 key principles:

Independence

  • Decision-making structure
  • Independence from employment relations

Pluralism

  • Diversity of contributors
  • Management of conflict
  • Determination of leadership — processes and turnover

Representation

  • Membership structure and rights
  • Ways in which those in authority are accountable to contributing members
  • Degree to which members can exercise voice on community members

Decentralized decision-making

  • How contributors gain code commit and #frontline rights
  • How contributors gain access to the project's decision-making structure
  • The degree to which project communications and activities are publicly available

Autonomous participation

  • Newcomer joining rate
  • Newcomer socialization opportunities
  • Rate of idea generation

Description

Our Code of Conduct and Community Guidelines act as a basis for all our community activity, how to participate, how to grow our community, how to represent Aragon to others outside the community.

Meetings

Community meeting

  • Monthly, first Friday of the month. Time 17.00 CET.

Team members will produce a write-up of the most important things they have worked on since last Community Meeting, the problems they have found and what they plan to do in the next weeks (that can be a bit blurry, and that's fine). These write-ups will be published as a blog post for the community to review on Monday before Friday's meeting.

Meeting agenda will be created based on the topics the team members present in their write-ups and discussion entailed around these topics will take place in the meeting. Live chat audience of the meeting is encouraged to participate and comment on the discussion during the meeting.

Following all the other things in the meeting agenda, an AMA (Ask Me Anything) will take place where the team answers questions by the community. The AMA questions can be posted at a dedicated thread on/r/aragonproject.

  • Facilitator: Project Lead
  • Participants: All Aragon team members + possible relevant contributors
  • Viewers: Public on Youtube

Team hangout

  • Weekly, Friday. Time 15.00 CEST

Relaxed weekly meeting with the team where anyone can talk about things they feel are current

  • Facilitator: If needed, any of the participants
  • Participants: Project Lead + anyone from the Aragon team who wants to participate
  • Viewers: Non-public

Aragon HQ Meetings were held previously once a month, but have been merged into one Community Meeting as per AGP7: Merge Aragon HQ and Community meetings.

Structures

  • Project Lead or Tech Lead will have final call on all things pertaining to their area of expertise.
  • Decisions made after thorough conversation on Meetings, informal vote to be taken if necessary, possible conflicts discussed if necessary, final vote if needed and decision confirmed by Project/Tech Lead.
  • Facilitators are responsible for gathering the agenda for the Meetings where applicable, as well as either taking notes of the Meeting and decisions made or delegating this responsibility to another participant
  • Use (The Etherian's or our own) Colony to have community members participate and get rewarded for their non-code contributions
  • Implement a system similar to Maker's Actions and post a monthly transparency report about the use of funds to the blog
  • Institute Aragon Improvement Proposal, AIP, system for community members to create proposals about Aragon. Take a similar approach for governance with Aragon Governance Proposals. GitHub Issues will be used as a forum to discuss proposals by community and team members
  • Proposals and ideas from the team and community members will be go through the AIP/AGP process and will then be discussed in the relevant Meetings
  • Community Meetings will be AMA styled video meetings where team members will answer questions by the community members. Questions will be submitted through Reddit and answered live
  • We'll have templates that can/will be used for the basis of agendas in Meetings so the Facilitator can easily fill out each Meetings info, like who will be presenting what, who has slides etc.
  • Facilitator of the Meeting will make sure that the discussion stays on rails, everyone gets a chance to speak their mind, everything on the agenda is discussed, necessary decisions are made and that the Meeting length stays on a reasonable length

Contributions

Thanks to Kenny Rowe for his feedback on this!