Governance Assessments

Blockchain conference

In July 2019, we hosted a meeting in San Francisco of international experts on governance, including representatives of major public and permissioned blockchain projects, economic and legal scholars, lawyers, and internet governance analysts. The goal was to begin the process of developing common frameworks and principles for effective blockchain governance.

One conclusion that emerged from was that there is no detailed information about the governance practices of blockchain networks, applications, and consortia. This makes it difficult to evaluate the governance of existing systems, forces developers of new systems to rely on incomplete information, and makes it almost impossible to compare governance across projects. An assessment tool in a standard format would provide valuable information for both practitioners and researchers.

About the Questionnaire

The Cryptogovernance Assessment questionnaire consists out of 20 questions. They are designed to apply broadly to systems build on public blockchains as well as permissioned distributed ledgers. The questionnaire covers:

  • Goals and scope
  • Stakeholder groups
  • Underlying incentive schemes
  • Governance powers
  • Governance procedures

We believe this is the first tool of its kind, which will provide valuable information to aid the development of blockchain governance schemes. We are in the process of soliciting responses from significant projects, but we also welcome outside contributions. The questionnaire is freely available under a Creative Commons licenses, as well be all responses collected on this website. In our GitHub repository you may also find an extended version of the questionnaire, with more detailed questions designed to explore every significant attribute of blockchain governance.

Thanks to all the workshop participants who contributed to the development of the questionnaire, including Thomas Cox (Strongblock), Gina Pieters (University of Chicago), Lane Rettig (Ether Core Developer), Akin Sawyerr (Feleman), and Nina Siedler (DWF).