Getting to a Minimum Viable Constitution and Beyond

Hi everyone, this is Charles Hoskinson broadcasting live from warm City, Colorado. Always warm, always sunny—sometimes Colorado. Today is July 29, 2023, and this is a follow-up video to some of the videos I’ve made in the past about SIP 1694. I want to go into a lot of detail about some current thinking regarding a minimum viable Constitution and how we can move beyond that to a final Constitution, a 1.0 product by and for the community.

In a prior video, I talked a lot about Cardano, the open-source project, and its governance layer, execution layer, management layer, and oversight audit control of how great software is made. However, Cardano is getting a government, and SIP 1694 is the closest thing we have to it at the moment. Many people get the D-rep side because D-reps essentially look like stake pool operators under a different name, with very similar mechanics. People register and delegate to them, but there’s also the idea of a constitutional committee. They are elected for a term and constrained by the Constitution of Cardano to act as a check and balance.

It’s a tripartite government with three branches, including the stake pool operators, who come into play when the system undergoes a major upgrade or if some oversight mechanisms need to be implemented. So, a very legitimate question is: what is the Constitution of Cardano? One of the closest things we have to a founding document is this right here. If you go to mycardano.com, I just realized I am not screen sharing, so I am going to do that for you guys.

There we go. What is the Constitution of Cardano? If you go to "Why Cardano," this document I wrote back in 2016 was published in 2017, shortly before the network went live. It talked about some things we care about: scalability, science, interoperability, regulation, and more. That was the original document.

There is a social contract of these types of things, but it has grown much bigger now. It’s not just an idea; it’s a launched network with millions of people. So, the question is: how do you get to a good Constitution for Cardano? If you look at SIP 1694, one of the things we’ve been exploring is how to constrain behavior across the D-rep side, the Constitution side, and the SPO side. This is done via liquid feedback, similar to the liquid democracy conversation.

If people don’t like their D-reps, they can change their delegation preferences. We have evidence through the SPO side of the pros and cons of that. These D-reps are elected but follow rules, and those rules are established in some form of a Constitution. On the Constitutional side, we have a small working group writing what we call a minimum viable Constitution (MVC). The initial ratification of that will be the ratification of SIP 1694.

This doesn’t contain flowery language about rights and duties but rather a collection of things required to convene an interim working group or interim constitutional committee to get started. You need to bootstrap a system. We also have this idea of an MBO intersect. What will happen is that the small working group at the intersect will move over to a working group, kind of a Civics committee, and they will start a more open discussion. The idea is to establish a baseline that can become an input to hosting somewhere between 100 to 200 workshops throughout the world, providing all the funding necessary for those workshops.

This is an innovation we learned from SIP 1694. Each workshop will elect a delegate, and that delegate will then travel to a constitutional convention where they will draft and ratify version one of the Constitution. That will then be voted on by the SIP 1694 government, and then we’re done. There are basic steps to bootstrap the system. You need some initial parameters.

What’s super cool is we’re adding something into the SIP where there’s actually some smart contract logic that can represent the Constitution and constrain the Constitutional committee members. There’s already this idea of an on-chain Constitution that’s machine-understandable and enforced in some parts. You start with a very minimum viable kernel, and a small working group instantiates that kernel. A larger working group comes together and starts creating those established parameters to get workshops done throughout the world. The idea is to have over a hundred countries represented, making it a super inclusive process.

It’s not enough just to be part of it; the most qualified person according to those workshops will be elected in each of them to create a delegate. Those delegates will all converge to one location for a period of time to have a constitutional convention. This Constitutional Convention will finalize and ratify a candidate Constitution, which will then be voted on. This process will likely take the entirety of 2024. There’s a lot to do and many moving pieces, but it’s going to be an incredibly inclusive process.

If you want to bring 100 countries together, it’s a lot of work. If you want to bring delegates, there needs to be a group that has the capacity to help them get there—paying for plane tickets, hotel accommodations, maybe a stipend, and helping with visas and other considerations. The other cool thing is that by having a working group, we’ve identified over 40 domain experts in writing constitutions. We can bring those experts in to serve as advisors on how to actually write one. They can serve on a working group with community members interested in participating in this open process, providing some of the preliminary training and knowledge necessary for the workshops to be effective.

It worked really well with SIP 1694, where some initial work came together, and then over 50 workshops were done. Now, we ask more of the workshop participants because they actually have to go to a constitutional committee convention and create and ratify something. What’s so inclusive about this is that the voting for ratification in the committee convention will be one delegate, one vote. For example, if I were a delegate in this Constitutional Convention, I’d have the same vote as a delegate from Ghana, Sierra Leone, Australia, or New Zealand. There’s a great degree of equality in all of this, allowing for a lot of diversity of thought and opinion.

This is kind of a candidate process, and I’d really love to hold the Constitutional Convention in Argentina. In 1852, General Urquiza had a constitutional convention in Santa Fe, a little town northwest of Buenos Aires. Buenos Aires refused to participate in the constitution of Argentina, so it was ratified without that city’s participation in 1853. I think it would be super cool to host the Constitutional Convention in Argentina sometime in 2024, bringing everyone together. It’s a pretty easy visa situation for most people in the world, certainly easier than the United States.

It’s a wonderful city, and the Latin American community has been very vigilant about building a great Constitution. If we plan this for a while and have a great working group, core members can put a lot of money into making it an effective event. Many people will experience this amazing place for the first time, and a lot of heavy, meaningful work can be done. The structure and form of that work will be modeled and scoped here. You have two levels of consent: a one delegate, one vote open process because the people took the time to volunteer to come from around the world, and then you have ratification by the community as a whole through the D-rep process.

Once that’s in place, we’ve built this into SIP 1694. There’s a model to replace Constitution version 0 with a new version, so they just follow that. That new version comes into place. One of the things designed is to encode parts of that Constitution into smart contracts to constrain the behaviors of the Constitutional committee members. When that new version comes in, it will also be affiliated with some machine-understandable logic that constrains their behavior, creating a nice check and balance.

What’s really cool is this process is reusable. You could create a living Constitution, and every so often, maybe every five or ten years, you can go through the whole process, have another Constitutional Convention, and update the Constitution to a new form. This allows the community to decide whether they want to stay with the old government or adopt the new one. These conventions can grow to hundreds or even thousands of people, and you just have to use different systems to sort all of that out. This is an awesome opportunity.

If we did 50 workshops and there were a thousand participants, scaling up to 200 would mean 4,000 people participating in the workshops. Of those, 200 would be sampled and participate actively, rolling up their sleeves to make decisions. It’s very egalitarian; it’s not connected to a person’s ownership of ADA but rather to their skills and their ability to convince their local community that they’re the most qualified person. Then, obviously, the community has an on-chain update system to go from the minimum viable Constitution, which is the bootstrap, to version one. The question then becomes: what ratifies the bootstrap?

That’s the ratification of SIP 1694 altogether. There will be a special voting event this year, and anybody who holds ADA can vote to ratify. They’ll be ratifying the SIP and the initial version zero of the minimum viable Constitution, which puts the government in place. That government can then be used recursively to get to the next government, and this process is reusable for revisiting some of the foundational logic. One of the work streams will be transitioning more and more of the Constitution into code so that code literally becomes law.

This is also an opportunity for people to learn a lot. There are people who have dedicated their entire lives to studying the legal construct of a constitution. By having a Civics committee at the intersect, those people can serve as advisors to help bootstrap this process and attend the Constitutional Convention as either voting or non-voting members, depending on the community's decisions. A lot will be asked of delegates; they will have to travel, think, argue, and represent what they believe the Constitution should look like. Our hope is that it can converge.

This is an idea of how we should go about it. I think it’s a sensible structure that includes a continent that has been unfortunately a little under-loved and left out of the Cardano ecosystem, despite having such a huge community. It also solves an old problem—an old injustice that Buenos Aires was left out of writing a constitution. It’s about time they get to write the Constitution of a much larger digital nation, and they get to do it with the entire world. I just wanted to make a video to discuss a little bit about where we get started and how we go to bootstrap the MVC.

The MVC is just a very simple document because our hope is to encode a lot of it as a smart contract to create some baseline rules for the interim constitutional committee. It’s not really meant to be a full Constitution but rather a launching pad that will enable a full Constitution to be ratified. As you can clearly see, this particular process is set up in a way that would allow the willing across the entire world—my hope is for more than a hundred countries—to participate, travel somewhere, get to know each other, and create the most diverse gathering of people by culture, language, and ideology to reach a version one. That version one then goes to be ratified by every single ADA holder through that bootstrap government, and then it moves over to become the law of the land for the digital nation that is Cardano. I hope this answers some questions about that.

The MVC will have more specifics to release, but obviously, you’ll be able to read it and see it because it’s part of the special voting event for SIP 1694. Make a decision if you think that’s good. Pretty cool stuff, huh?