🏛️Governance
Watchtower's long-term goal is self-governance via a polycentric form factor as a way to balance chaotic decentralisation and chaotic centralisation [1]. We're big fans of evolutionary governance which works well for distributed computing ecosystems. What is meant by evolutionary governance is that the system's (Watchtower) governance lives within a spectrum and at the extremes, can be moulded from being either a time-constrained centralised dictatorship or a more time-constrained decentralized democratic structure and anything in between. Time constraints are important here as no form of governance can (as history suggests) not be forever.
Using Metropolis Pod Configurations as a guide, Watchtower will initially have a Dictatorship configuration. Being a small team with just an idea to execute, this is the perfect configuration at an early stage with progressive decentralisation of components and subsystems.
The Dictator model is one where a person serves as manager and has control (but does not necessarily sit on as a member) of the pods in your organization. This individual could be an Ops/Governance/Community lead or a trusted individual tasked with supporting the managerial duties of the pods. In the example above we have one manager supporting the project-dev and project-mktg pods.
As parts of it mature, they will be relinquished to the community. A high council pod configuration would be ideal as it accounts for subject matter experts (elected with term limits) for those subsystems/parts that need expertise and to be decentralized. As an example shown below is a potential high council pod config for governance, using Metropolis's pods library as a reference for one of Watchtower's prediction markets [2].
References:
2021. 🔭 Exploring Polycentric Governance in Web3 Ecosystems Workshop. Common Stack
Pod Configurations. Metropolis
Last updated