Constitutions

[faddat]

Feel free to assign me.

Right now chains do not have a stated purpose. I think that this has led to contention in a number of situations, and it would be easier if we handled:

• questions about the intent of the founders
• the purpose of the chain
• governance scope restriction

As "wet code" in the genesis block. My proposed solution is to make a genesis entry for the governance module that contains a constitution. This is based on my research here:

https://www.notion.so/Governance-in-Cosmos-e692ccfe678d49cea3951e6e406b6f7d

I think that I can have prototype code today, since it shouldn't actually be very complicated. I figure that for upgrades, constitution can also be nil.

[alexanderbez]

Why does a "constitution" have to exist on chain?

[smsunarto]

I think this can be generalized into a "MOTD" (Message of the Day) module. As we approach an increasingly modular blockchain explorer architecture, it might be useful to be able to surface messages there imo.

[alexanderbez]

Is there documentation on such a module?

[rexsaurus]

I am starting to feel like constitutions in blockchain space are getting to the point where we need an almost default template language like yaml or helm or a manifest file which explicitly define the governance structure, powers etc.

E.g.

{
"Validator Rights"
.
.
.
.
}

Constitution as code

We really also need to treat constitutions the way open source licenses are treated. Like you include the standard MIT constitution in your blockchain genesis at root to specify the base parameters.

Then you can have a list of templates constitutions that people can fork or pull in.

There needs to be standardization in constitutions in same way as like terraform.

[tac0turtle]

Personally I don't think this needs to be on chain, but if it were to be on chain then a simple testProposal and voting by the "people" would suffice. Validators can vote out founders, take allocations, change governance scope and define the purpose of the chain via unchain & social consensus.

migrating this to a discussion as its unclear if there is an actionable at this time