Hey everyone!
It’s Ben- researcher in Mina Foundation’s protocol governance team 
We recently explained how we want to share our research on key governance concepts, principles and best practices.
One topic we have been exploring is how Mina Protocol’s governance should be organized to harness the intelligence of individual community members to make the best decisions that are aligned to the wishes of the Mina community?
In a series of research blog posts we are exploring the potential of collective intelligence where groups of people are organized at scale to solve public problems in ways that often outperform individual people alone.
The first blogpost introduced collective intelligence while the second blogpost explained how deliberation relates to it. We now want to publish a third blogpost that continues the discussion of deliberation by introducing sortition and citizens’ assemblies. Sortition is a civic lottery that randomly selects a subgroup of a community or society to participate in decision making- similar to the selection of jurors in the legal systems of various countries. Sortition is used in citizens’ assemblies to select people who are broadly representative of a community or society to learn about, deliberate on and make recommendations about an important public problem. zkIgnite implemented this kind of approach.
What is really exciting is that deliberation and sorition are unique features of Mina’s governance compared to other blockchains so Mina can set an exciting example to the rest of the industry, as well as the wider world!
Thanks for the feedback about making blogposts simple to read. This blogpost is quite long but we hope it is still readable, especially when it finishes by presenting some specific examples already being proposed in the wider community.
We welcome any initial feedback on this draft blogpost before we publish it shortly.
For example, some questions to consider:
- List item zkIgnite implemented this kind of approach. How could it be applied more broadly to other decision making, such as the Mina Improvement Process and Mina Ecosystem Funding?
- Are there any limitations to this approach, and how could they be overcome?
Please feel free to provide comments in the document linked above as you read or leave messages directly here in MinaResearch. We are thinking about publishing this blogpost next week and want to discuss it at the governance Q&A Town Hall on September 25th. Feedback before then would be great!
Best wishes
Ben