Proposal to Join Forces on Governance Issues (GaiaFest)

From David Bovill on the Stewards channel on Mattermost, Off-topic: for GaiaFest I need to start a governance conversation et seq.

Discussed during OGM Stewards Jam Sesh, 2021-04-27.

For GaiaFest I need to start a governance conversation leading to a constitution for the project that is able to decide about budget and resource allocation in the light of rich and meaningful deliberations about environmental values.

The requirements for these discussions I believe are identical to the OGM stewardship deliberations in the Stewards channel. But I will take a very different approach.

The difference of approach is mainly a difference in structure. That is, I believe in having structure lead openness, rather than look for structure simply to emerge from openness (at least in the time scale needed for GaiaFest).

This timescale requires a rich detailed human-centred governance, with some degree of legal participation across global jurisdictions and a legal DAO (LAO) like component presented on the world stage in November (at COP26). It also needs to be functional enough in order to organise next years festival - so by November it needs to be up and working.

To that end I hope to start some structural work around rich governance from a legal and technical perspective starting this week, with the aim of presenting a work program in 6 weeks time on World Environment Day.

This will be:

1. A technical work group open to people who are motivated to work on the legal-tech aspects that will need to be in place prior to the involvement of a demos (public).
2. GaiaFest requires an ambitious involvement of diverse stakeholders. Those who will actually make the decisions. This means building micro-publics and supporting their deliberations with the infrastructure we have built in 1) above.

My proposal (discussed with Jerry and Pete) is that we combine forces on these Governance issues, and adopt a similar timescale.

That is, I propose that whatever stewardship proposal OGM adopts is both sped up and slowed down.

First, OGM should adopt a pragmatic and simple stewardship model that fits any fiscal needs it may have until November.

Second, it should take the time between now and November to deliberate its stewardship needs in detail.

Lastly, OGM should propose a structure to its members and formally adopt a stewardship model after the November public presentation.

The adoption of a timescale like this would allow such possibilities as:

1. We pool legal-tech expertise and build a common legal-tech platform to support both organisations.
2. We run common governance workshops around GaiaFest, and learn from this thought experiment together and seek to apply lessons learned to OGM.

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