Governance and Coordination
This lens is for systems where the decisive mechanism is collective steering: who gets agenda power, who shapes the electorate, who signs execution, and who controls allocation once a group claims to be governing something together.
Questions worth asking:
- Who actually gets to participate: token holders, delegates, councils, contributors, or credentialed members?
- Is the binding step tally, signer execution, electorate construction, grants review, or softer social coordination wrapped in software?
- Where do proposal filtering, vetoes, quorum policy, delegate defaults, and execution custody really live?
- Does the coordination surface create a durable market in influence, curation, or allocation rights?
Curated comparison set
- Token-vote baselines with real delegate and execution gravity: governor-bravo, snapshot, and opengov
- Signer-and-role governance where execution rights matter as much as voting: safe, molochdao, and llama
- Privacy-preserving election and tally backends: maci and vocdoni
- Electorate-shaping sidecar before tally or execution: census3
Keep the branch boundary blunt
- Census3 is electorate middleware, not the tally backend.
- Pairwise is ballot-construction tooling, not the governance rail itself.
- Grants-shell notes only belong nearby when applicant intake, review, and round operations are the actual point.
- gauge-wars is the downstream branch where governance power stops being mostly constitutional and starts becoming an explicit market in steerage.