OpenGov Components
Governance Paries
Here are several groups of organizations with some specific authorities in the governance.
Fellowship
A mostly self-governing expert body with a primary goal of representing humans who embody and contain the technical knowledge base of the Bifrost, Kusama and/or Polkadot networks
This is accomplished by associating a rank with members to categorize the degree to which the system expects their opinion to be well-informed, of a sound technical basis, and in line with the interests of Bifrost.
The concept of Fellowship came from: https://wiki.polkadot.network/docs/learn-opengov#fellowship
Fellows level and corresponding permission settings
| Rank | Authority |
|---|---|
1-2 | Only officially supported fellowshipReferenda of the corresponding level can be issued. |
≥3 | Can initiate some authority & business with low risk level fellowshipReferenda. |
≥6 | Can initiate all supported fellowshipReferenda. |
Ranking System
To prevent a small group of participants from gaining effective control over the network, this system will adhere to three main principles:
The Fellowship must never have hard power over the network: it cannot change the parameters, conduct rescues or move assets. Their only power in governance is reducing the effective timeline on which a referendum takes place through whitelisting.
The Fellowship weights those with a higher rank more in the aggregate opinion. However, the weight should not be so high as to make a small number of higher members’ opinions be insurmountable compared to a coherent opinion from lower-ranked membership.
The Fellowship should be designed to grow and develop its membership, aggregate levels of expertise and ensure that its overall decision-making capacity strengthens over time.
To support these conditions, the Fellowship will have a constitution that outlines the requirements and expectations for individuals to attain and retain any given rank. Higher ranks can vote and promote lower ranks based on this constitution.
Demotion occurs automatically after a given period has elapsed, and the member is unable to defend their position to their peers.
Suspension can happen only through a referendum, which ensures that the Fellowship's bias alone does not necessarily result in expulsion.
To prevent the Fellowship from becoming a cabal (popularity with Fellowship peers alone should not be enough to gain access to a top rank), gaining access to the top tiers of the ranks will require a referendum.
Whitelisting
In OpenGov, it allows the Fellowship to authorize a new origin (known as Whitelisted-Root) to be executed with Root-level privileges and will only work with specified commands that have been approved by the Fellowship.
The Whitelist pallet allows one Origin to escalate the privilege level of another Origin for a certain operation. The pallet verifies two things:
The origin is the Whitelisted-Root (i.e. that the referendum passed on this track)
The Fellowship has indeed whitelisted the proposal.
If both conditions are true, the operation executes with Root-level privileges.
This system enables the ability to have a new parallel Track (Whitelisted-Root Origin), whose parameters allow for a shorter voting turnaround. Through an open and transparent process, a body of global experts on the Polkadot protocol have determined that the action is both safe and time-critical.
Becoming a Fellowship Member
Currently, the only way to become a fellowship member is through an existing member who submits a fellowshipCollective.addMember extrinsic. See more information on this Kusama SubSquare discussion, which points to these guidelines. (Same as on Bifrost)
Future plans include that public members can apply to become a Fellowship candidate by placing a small deposit (which will be returned once they become members). Their candidacy will go through a referendum to be approved to become a member.
Council members
Technical Committee
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