Week 41
Mon 6th Oct - Sun 12th Oct 2025
Thursday 9th October 2025
Governance Workgroup
Type of meeting: Weekly
Present: LadyTempestt [facilitator], CallyFromAuron [documenter], LadyTempestt, CallyFromAuron, Alfred Itodele, PeterE, omolola lawson, Sucre n Spice, UKnowZork, Kateri, esewilliams, Évéline Trinité
Purpose: Regular weekly Open Governance meeting. This session was the quarterly retrospective of the budget consent process.
Working Docs:
Narrative:
Not many people gave their opinions during the meeting.
At Guillermo's request, we added an extra section to the Miro board, to collect feedback about the Governance Dashboard specifically.
Key points raised:
Participation and quorum
Participation was good eventually, at 31% of core contributors (only just below all-time high of 33% from last Quarter), but we noted that people had to be chased, and participation initially was so low that the closing date had to be extended because only 6 WGs had met the quorum.
Some felt that the quorum was problematic ("quorum felt useless, pushing people just to get the numbers aligned with our own %")
Others felt it was still useful ("We have always had to chase people to participate anyway - at least the quorum ensures we do keep chasing till a reasonable number take part. Many people I DM'ed said they had otheriwse been unaware the consent round was happening"
and there was a suggestion: "leave the "chasing people to take part" to the Workgroups?"
80/20% rule Everyone who commented raised concerns about the 80/20% rule (the idea that a WG's budget should not be blocked by one or two objections, so will pass if no more than 20% of those who take part are objecting to it.) Points raised included
"80/20 rule might need revisiting, some objections felt reassonable but didnt impact bc it passed anyway"
"Either bring back the 2nd round, or reconsider 80/20 rule - is 20% threshold too high?"
"the 80/20 was not effective"
"80/20% rule feels like people used it to get away with a lot of irregularities in their budgets and reports"
"lots of proposals were passed only because of 80/20% rule."
Accountability and responses to objections Although some felt that actual reporting per se had improved compared to last quarter, concerns were raised about how accountable WGs are in the event that an objection is raised (some connected this with the 80/20% rule):
"people were not accountable enough and didn't respond to objections enough - because of 80/20 rule?"
"responses to objections couldve been more complete and more timely"
"back and forth with WGs - most WGs were not fully accountable" However, another opinion said
"Objections discussion (in Gov Calls) was a good one"
Some felt that the follow-up process will be important - how will we track whether WGs have implemented suggestions?
"Off the actual followup of the lessons learned is where the magic happens, looking forward to that" but some felt that this accountability should come before budgets are awarded:
"make people more accountable before they get their budget, and address objections"
The consent process overall Several people were unhappy with the current process:
"I feel like over exhausted from reporting and promoposing (but working on that) the quarterly iterations are too quick for small amount of funds, almost all the funds go to write a report about writing a report xD"
"It still takes a lot of time to read reports and budgets properly."
"I think we have explored this consent process method enough and we need to look another way to approve budget proposals."
"The process has now completely morphed into a vote, and "consent decisionmaking" has been entirely abandoned, but without any discussion or agreement. This isn't great process imo."
"the problem is not the ideas, the rules, the tools, etc whatever methodologies we come up with but instead our behaviour and attitudes towards is so we need to sit down and actually question ourselves."
Suggested solutions included:
Consider a whole different decison process
Appoint (and pay) a small group of "objectors" to read everything thoroughly and identify objections, and everyone else can agree or not, and/or can raise additional objections if they want
Either officially discuss and decide to move to a majority vote process, or make the Dashboard into a Consent tool
"need better metrics for how/why a proposal would pass"
The Dashboard Most people liked the Dashboard overall, and felt that for a first iteration, it had worked well. People found it easier to use than the old process, and particularly liked the idea of discussion and WGs responding to what was being said/asked, although it was recognised that this didn't happen enough in this round and could be promoted more.
Suggestions for changes were mostly minor:
"disclose names of those who consent or abstain, not just objections"
"more attention should be placed on User experience"
"fiddly to get to proposals, if you press Back button it takes you to top of page rather than where you were"
"we need a search box (ctrl-F doesn't work on a phone)"
A more major objection - the design of the tool had moved us from consent decisionmaking to majority voting without any discussion or agreement ("In short, we've let the design of our tooling shape/dictate our governance process. It should be the other way round.") and said that "this is not just about calling it a "vote" - it's also about the whole structure and layout of the dashbaord's "consent/object" section, which completely reinforces the idea that it's a vote." The suggestion here was either to redesign the dashboard as a consent tool, or discuss and agree to move to majority voting as our decision method.
Ethics of the AI assistant One ethical issue was raised about the use of the AI Assistant in the Dashboard: "Using an untrained and un- contextualised chatbot, and encouraging people to base their decisions on it, is ethically questionable imo -and also not very effective :-)"
Discussion Points:
Participation and quorum
80/20% rule
Accountability and responses to objections
The consent process
The Governance dashboard
Ethics of the AI assistant
Action Items:
[action] Vani will add the issues raised to the GovWG rolling agenda for proper discussion, in time for the next GovWG session, which will be agenda planning [assignee] CallyFromAuron [due] 14 October 2025 [status] todo
Keywords/tags:
topics covered: accountability, Governance Dashboard, AI Assistant, ethics of chatbots, Participation in governance, quorum, 80/20% rule, Issue tracking, WG responses to objections, Small group of "objectors, exhaustion, improved reporting, quarterly process is too fast, consent decisionmaking, decision-making methodologies, majority vote decisionmaking
emotions: slow, quiet, Only a few of those present spoke, incisive, thoughtful
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