Orbs Governance - the Next Frontier

2022 so far has been an eventful year for the Orbs network, with the three-year anniversary of mainnet, the launch of V3 and the continued expansion of the Orbs ecosystem.

With these milestones accomplished, the time has come to take a step forward in the project's governance and decentralization. While the Orbs Network has always been open-source and community driven, this is an optimal juncture to formalize the community governance aspects that have, until now, been more behind the scenes.

Several aspects of the upgraded community governance will be rolled out over the coming months.

The major components of this governance initiative are currently planned to include the following:

1. Formal Governance Votes: the first step will be introducing formal votes from staked tokens for major protocol decisions on the new Orbs space on Snapshot.org. This mechanism will add another layer to the existing informal process of consensus building and discussions between Guardians, Delegators and Orbs core developers that has always characterized the Orbs Network.

2. Community Development: all of the Orbs project's code has always been open-source on Github and all have been welcome to contribute. To make contributing more accessible and streamlined, the Contributing Guide has been updated - https://github.com/orbs-network/orbs-contributing. Anyone interested is welcome to engage with Orbs core developers there and on Discord, and ultimately to contribute your code to Github.

3. Orbs Improvement Proposals: for more high-level suggestions, we will be releasing a dedicated open platform for "Orbs Improvement Proposals" (OIPs) that can be used by the community and the public at large, as well as the team, to suggest improvements and changes to the Orbs network. While the project has always been open to suggestions from the community in various forums, including our telegram chats, discord and direct communication with Guardians and regular token holders, we recognize the value of having a dedicated place where suggestions can be organized and publicized.

4. Community Development Budget: A special grant program will be initiated in which a budget of ORBS Tokens will be set aside to be allocated directly by the community as grants or bounties to outside developers or contributors who contribute development efforts to the Orbs project.

More details on all of the above to come soon. All feedback and suggestions are welcome - please join the discussion on our Telegram and Discord.