The road to the Cardano Constitutional Convention in Buenos Aires, Argentina, is starting to reach its destination.
Planned for the end of the year, the gathering will mark a milestone for the Cardano blockchain as a community-drafted version of the Cardano Constitution will be presented and voted upon for ratification to officially implement a distributed governance framework.
The wheels to community-run governance have already been in motion for the Cardano network, starting with CIP-1694, which outlines proposals for Cardano’s on-chain governance functions and features. Intersect, a member-based organization open to all, has also been launched and is working to support governance by organizing community workshops, forming various groups and committees, and assigning important governance-related tasks to interested parties.
During this transitional period leading up to the Constitutional Convention, the Cardano network requires temporary governance functions and features to bridge the gap between the present and the official ratification of the Constitution. An interim Constitutional Committee and a provisional interim Cardano Constitution have been formed to address this need.
This blog will cover more about Cardano’s interim Constitutional Committee and Constitution.
The formation of a temporary or interim Constitutional Committee (ICC) has been approved to bootstrap Cardano’s governance era. This body will have all of the duties of the full Constitutional Committee after the second upgrade of the Cardano blockchain’s Chang Hard Fork. The ICC has been elected for a minimum of 73 epochs in the Cardano network.
Originally, the Cardano blockchain had managed its technical updates via a group of genesis keys. A majority of the keys were needed to push a new hard fork to the network and begin the process of adoption by the stake pools.
However, after the Chang Hard Fork, there will be seven votes belonging to the members of the ICC, including those from the community, Intersect, EMURGO, IO (Input Output), and Cardano Foundation.
The members of this temporary body won’t receive any remuneration for being part of the ICC, but they will assist in guiding the Cardano network towards ratification of the Constitution, among other things.
Recently, a few members of the ICC took part as individual participants in the first Cardano Constitutional Workshop held in Berlin, Germany on July 28, 2024, to explore community input about selected key topics related to the drafting of the Constitution.
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Of course, if there isn’t a Constitution, there would be nothing for a Constitutional Committee to uphold. As with the ICC, there is also an interim Cardano Constitution to bridge the gap until its official ratification.
The text of this document has been drafted by the Civics Committee of Intersect.
The interim Constitution will also be added on-chain during the first upgrade of the Chang Hard Fork. The entire text will be hashed and added to every updated node in the Cardano network to ensure the integrity of the interim Constitution.
Once the official Constitution is drafted and ratified, it’ll also be hashed and added on-chain to the Cardano network. The text of the interim Constitution can be found here.
During the first Constitutional workshop held last month, the community discussed specific topics related to the drafting of the document including financial sustainability, voting rights, principles and tenets, and budget allocations.
More workshops are scheduled globally throughout August and September in the lead-up to the Cardano Constitutional Convention. Interested members can learn more about the scheduled dates and locations here.
Interested in learning more about how Cardano’s distributed, community-run governance works?
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