What is Social Governance?
Social governance is the process by which a community debates various ideas in order to formulate what they want so decision-makers can be better informed when coming to a social consensus. Currently, much of Ethereum’s social governance informally takes place on Gitter, Twitter, and other Web 2.0 platforms.
In reality, we don’t need Web 2.0 platforms anymore.
Why have we constrained ourselves to past power structures when we are trying to create a new future?
Currently, we have no single platform to debate the future improvements of Ethereum and no single platform that effectively gauges the sentiment of the Ethereum community to ensure their voices are being represented.
We the Ethereum Community raise our voices on social media platforms and circulate petitions when we are strongly against decisions that are being made on the protocol layer of the Ethereum chain. Yet there isn’t a single platform where the debate about protocol layer decisions is transparently reflected for the entire Ethereum Community.
Nowadays, the debate is fragmented across a number of social platforms that do not have the features nor desire to support such an important process as Ethereum’s Social Governance. While each of these platforms give some insight into what people support through the tracking of post “likes”, “favorites”, and ”retweets,” the data taken from these platforms is not meant to inform the wider community about the governance process happening on the Ethereum chain.
In fact, the data from these platforms are really meant to fatten the pockets of established institutions. They reduce us to checkmarks and non-checkmarks, optimizing for outrage culture because that is what drives the most clicks, which is exactly what Ethereum is against. Silicon Valley tech companies do not care about their users and are not about financial empowerment; they are about financial extraction.
Most importantly, these current platforms are rarely used by the Core Devs to inform themselves on what the community thinks about upcoming protocol changes, as these platforms are far too chaotic and hostile to navigate.
This lack of interaction between the decision-makers and the Ethereum community at large is the weakest point of our shared vision. We need proper Social Governance in order to have a strong network.
What Ethereum needs is a single place devoted to hosting the crucial debates that affect Ethereum; a place where the Ethereum Community regardless of their status as a Core Dev, dapp developer, DeFi wizard, or just a regular old community member can congregate in order to discuss the future of Ethereum development and growth.
This social governance platform should not come from these scallywag Web, 2.0 folks. This social governance platform needs to be of the Ethereum Community.
We joined the Ethereum Community to be a part of a movement that will permanently change the structure of economic potential. We are here to have a positive social impact on humanity. We believe that we can change the way we as humans operate on a fundamental level and thus build a brighter future for all.
Why are we settling to have our Social Governance process on platforms that perpetuate the exact culture we want to change?
If you want to be a part of the team building the new Social Governance platform for Ethereum, join us at The Ether (theether.io).
