Recapping Filecoin Foundation’s 2021 Governance Summit

Last month, Filecoin Foundation came together to host its first-ever Governance Summit, a three-day series of meetings, brainstorming sessions, and design sprints. The Summit was designed to give the Foundation team an opportunity to deeply understand, analyze, and propose improvements to the mechanisms and processes of community governance.

Participants focused on understanding ‘governance’ as the networked interactions between the various stakeholders and tools that currently- or one day will- contribute to making Filecoin a primary building block of the decentralized web. Importantly, the Filecoin Improvement Proposals (FIPs) process was analyzed as one component of the broader governance ecosystem. Although FIPs are the primary mechanisms through which protocol changes are crafted, presented, deliberated, and approved, the team was interested in crafting a process strategy for FIPs that was inclusive of the “before and after” of FIPs changes as well.

For example, the team wanted to better understand:

• Who currently participates in governance, and why?
• What barriers exist to ‘opening up’ Filecoin governance to new, diverse, and/or less technical stakeholders?
• How can we create better linkages between people and programs in the Filecoin ecosystem, so as to better connect the right person, with the right expertise, and the right opportunities, at the right time?
• What strategic goals is the entire network working towards, and how does governance facilitate these changes?

From this, several conclusions were drawn that will help the team coordinate continuous governance improvement in the coming months. These include both short- and long-term activities in several key areas.

For the FIPs process, this includes a series of process improvements implemented before the end of the year. The first of these is a proposed change to the FIPs process and workflow. The goal of this proposal is to enable the FIPs process to scale — accommodating both complex technical proposals and an increase in the number of community members participating in governance — while also improving the overall transparency and robustness of the system.

The community also identified other improvement opportunities during the Summit, many of which will be introduced and/or implemented in the coming weeks. These include governance office hours hosted by the Foundation, public roadmaps for both the network and all core implementation teams, and the creation of better documentation via a FIPs resource library.

To further support these improvements, the Foundation also focused on community engagement as a core (and increasingly important) element of protocol governance. In the coming weeks and months, community management efforts will center around resource-building, increased responsiveness to community questions and ideas, and creating new forums and channels for community discussion. The team will also work to build connections across the Filecoin ecosystem in order to help community members identify new opportunities for participation and engagement.

Although these changes were identified and will be implemented by Filecoin Foundation team members, it is important to note that needs, issues, and ideas can be raised with the Filecoin community by anyone, at any time.

To engage with the community, or for more information about the Foundation’s ongoing work, be sure to join the Filecoin Project Slack and/or check out the Community or FIPs repo on the Filecoin Github project.