11. The CIP process is decentralised

Why doesn’t the Cardano Foundation (the repo owner) govern & fund the whole CIP process directly?

From an estimate of all of currently active editors' workload, the total amount of work in the CIP process could likely be done in an employee work week (as of mid-2024, maybe with some overtime): i.e. by a single employee doing nothing else.

What would the Cardano community lose if the CIP Editing effort had been constituted (or were reconstituted) that way?  We would lose the competitive factor that makes blockchain possible in the first place: consensus.

A solitary bureaucrat would be the direct opposite of a team with finely distributed skills and dispositions: such a diverse team makes broad community outreach possible as defined in the expanding scope of editors' responsibilities.

Likewise, having a mix of independent and professionally affiliated editors provides a broad range of skills & social channels to cover more ground in community, communication, and documentation, while retaining some established company affiliations which can be vital to secure high-quality CIP reviews and to validate implementation paths for the CIPs that are accepted.

Most importantly, CIP editors from multiple organisations provide consensus about CIP decisions and processes from multiple points of view and a mixture of technical, social, and academic dispositions. Since we cannot make everyone in the Cardano community a CIP editor, we can achieve the next best thing by diversifying the CIP Editor group to cover large segments of that community through practical understanding as well as empathy.