33. Assessment of community satisfaction

How should CIP Editors look for difficulties & potential improvements?

Beyond the particular threads that emerge in developer discussion online over particular CIP-related issues, there will always be an overall, subjective sentiment of the Cardano community about whether the CIP process is “working”.

Therefore, in addition to the goals that we have met cleanly and predictably, it can be equally instructive to look at the perceived difficulties, criticisms, and failures that might interfere with community satisfaction with the CIP process as a whole:

“Does the CIP process work?” Some challenges & responses:

About straightforward standards issues we can always clearly demonstrate that user and editor feedback has been used to build a complete proposal. For these CIPs, the objective will simply be to progress all proposals within the time available to us as editors. Therefore the main measurement for developer satisfaction for the bulk of proposals will be a lack of visible complaints online: the simple metric of “no news is good news” (though there will often be “thank you” messages posted which can be seen in many GitHub PR threads).

But ultimately the feasibility of the CIP process will be whether the Cardano community is also satisfied by handling of CIP issues which border on external issues beyond our control, especially “political” factors. Even after all the routine work is done, communities will often remember only the most dramatic issues: so the ultimate test of performance will be whether we have handled these pathological cases with enough objectivity and sensitivity.

Two examples (resolved in early 2023) are helpful to illustrate these subjective criteria:

Handling of RSS (Reward Sharing Scheme) proposals

From 2020 through 2022, members of the Cardano community submitted CIPs to argue for commonly requested updates to blockchain proof-of-stake rewards: particularly to change the minimum pool fees, the K factor (number of ideal stake pools), and/or the effects of pool pledge. These CIP authors understood that CIP editors had no control over whether these policies were implemented by IOG core developers, but still became disappointed with the CIP process as a whole because this lack of institutional support led to older RSS proposals being apparently ignored and newer ones accepted with an “Inactive” status.

Eventually a combination of internal communications and editor & community advocacy led to a resolution of this problem by defining these proposals as under the purview of the Ledger team at IOG (see key factor in resolution). Once this opportunity became available, although the long exclusion was “not our fault” we were still responsible for maintaining faith in the CIP process by promoting the acceptance of these proposals (see Tweet & its link). The positive response from the community suggests that our attention to community satisfaction has been successful after a long period of unavoidable difficulty on this sensitive issue.

Governance and CIP-1694

During nearly 8 months of posted updates to the Ledger based governance mechanism of CIP-1694, the sensitive "political" nature of this proposal invited unprecedented amounts of feedback about issues of constitution, representation and ethics which were literally outside the scope of the proposal. This presented a difficult moderation problem (over 700 comments) and some routine commenters complained bitterly when we were ultimately obligated to merge this proposal (see announcement) so that further edits and focus-group (“governance workshop”) refinement could then be applied regularly.

For such "political" proposals — and perhaps any CIP, once core implementation changes as of the Governance era are confirmed by on-chain voting — CIP editors will face criticism that we have somehow appointed ourselves “gatekeepers” who only represent the interests of the Cardano established companies and/or maintain bias toward certain proposals.

We will therefore have to accommodate this negative feedback (seen, for example, in response to the announcement above) which may be inevitable from the community. Although we may not respond when this presents criticisms that are beyond the scope of a particular CIP or the CIP process, the community will have to observe that we remain impartial and keep taking this criticism into account. As in the case of the successful RSS proposal issue above, there is often a resolution that can come from somewhere, even if we ourselves cannot provide it… so we need to remain attentive to the most intractable issues in the meantime.