Governance for the People by the People – Contribute to Council now

Council is quickly becoming an essential pillar of the crypto ecosystem, offering a new framework for DAOs to create and manage decentralized governance systems in ways not possible before. At DELV, we’ve been passionately working on Council to ensure crypto communities have more robust and complete on-chain solutions available to them in their quest to be truly decentralized, and not just for name's sake.

Since its launch, Council continues to be adopted by many DAOs including Element DAO, Gyroscope, and Arcade. Many more have expressed interest in using Council as they gear up for governance launch and several others have expressed interest in migrating their existing governance systems over to one powered by Council.

We’ve built Council Kit with feedback and insights from many early supporters and launched v0.0.1 in early March of this year. Now we’re officially inviting anyone to join us as collaborators in our mission to cement Council as the gold standard in on-chain governance. We will continue to build out new features and improvements to extend its capabilities and welcome anyone currently building or planning to build on Council to join us in building out the codebase.

First a quick refresher on Council – what it is, what makes it different, and what’s included in Council Kit:

Council is a flexible governance framework built to adapt as your community grows. Its modular design allows DAOs to launch a custom governance system that can be easily modified over time as a DAO’s own needs and requirements change – think governance lego pieces. This modularity is precisely what sets it apart from existing systems that often require custom development and integration with disparate tools to be truly “full stack”.

The Council framework is ready to use right out-of-the-box, comprising both the Council Protocol smart contracts and Council Kit. Council Kit includes a reference UI, deployment template, CLI, and Typescript SDK. In addition, we’ve made available comprehensive documentation, including templates and tutorials. Take a tour of the docs to learn how to configure and deploy the Council contracts, set up the reference UI, interact with the contracts to create and execute proposals, and create custom scripts using the SDK. It's all open source, DAO agnostic, and designed to be forkable; experimentation is encouraged :)

What can I contribute?

The opportunities to contribute are endless and span across both the Council Protocol and Council Kit:

• Voting Vaults
• Protocol / smart contracts
• SDK
• CLI
• General UI improvements
• Integrations

One of the most important features of the Council Protocol is the concept of voting vaults. Learn more about them here, and then check out this tutorial which walks you through how to create an NFT voting vault.

Contributor Showcase

Below are some ways existing contributors are experimenting with voting vaults and extending the base functionality of Council. These new governance primitives built into Council Kit are for all to use:

	Gyroscope has created several new voting vault types including a Sybil-resistant NFT vault, LP shares locking vault, and a Council of DAOs vault. Their governance system draws extensively from Council while providing several new functionalities beyond just voting vaults like an emergency recovery in case of a gov system bug (secured by optimistic approval), and a new system of checks and balances to align gov incentives with end users of the protocol.
	Arcade is currently working on a Unique Multiplier Voting Vault (UMVV) which boosts user voting power based on NFTs they are holding.
	Karma is working on a reputation voting vault which will assign voting power based on a score generated using a DAO member’s activity across various platforms like on-chain voting, Snapshot, Forums (Discourse/Commonwealth), Discord, and Github. Aside from their work on the reputation voting vault, Karma makes contributor activity analytics available to any DAO that uses the Council framework.
	BarnBridge – Prior to joining forces with BarnBridge, the team at FIAT DAO built out a veToken vault for the Council framework. Now BarnBridge is in the process of merging the existing work that went into Council with another governance framework called "Default". This will bring the concept of “topic" centered voting processes to Council, such that the different governance needs across a protocol and its corresponding DAO can be better compartmentalized. BarnBridge is excited to contribute these developments to the Council Kit as they hone them for the launch of FIAT II this summer.

How do I contribute?

The Contributor Guide outlines a detailed framework for contributions to Council Kit. Create issues, submit PRs, and join the contributor community.

The framework covers roles (Contributors and Maintainers), the lifecycle of an issue, and a roadmap that will be stewarded by both DELV and external contributors. Release v0.1.0 is currently in progress – you can check out the current status of new features and improvements in the Council Github Project. We want to ensure visibility on the progress we are all making together – this board provides a visual way for everyone to keep track of what’s in flight, what’s coming up next, and what's been shipped to date.

Initially, we’ll target quarterly releases to keep a regular cadence and allow enough time to complete planned work for each release, particularly for those who are contributing outside of their primary work – we appreciate you 🫶. Our first release planning community call will take place at the end of May; please reach out if you’d like to join.

Where do I start?

Join our discord to share ideas and get feedback from others – we welcome anyone interested in charting the path forward for Council. If this is the first Council post you've seen, consider starting by familiarizing yourself with the docs and tutorials, and of course, follow the process outlined in our handy contributor guide if you're ready to start contributing. Council awaits you.