The IOTA Governance Forum

The New Face of Community Participation

TL;DR:
The IOTA Foundation welcomes you to its brand new community governance forum, govern.iota.org, and invites you to explore the go-to tool for participation in the future of IOTA, Shimmer, and Assembly networks.

Governance and participation have always been key features of open-source projects and a cornerstone of engagement with an active community. The IOTA Foundation in particular relies on the passion and commitment of its community members, who deserve a clear channel to voice their opinions, share their ideas, and propose new solutions. Social channels like Discord and Reddit are a great place for our community to interact, but we've also seen the limitations of those channels when it comes to focussed discussions on a specific topic.  

Therefore, we've restructured our research forum (formerly known as iota.cafe) into a governance-focused community forum to make it easier and more effective for our community to contribute to the future of IOTA.

We have based the forum on Discourse, which has clear advantages in terms of meaningful community discussions compared to tools like Discord or Reddit. Specifically designed for more extended conversations, the new forum offers a highly logical, topic-related structure for easy and fruitful participation and governance discussions.

All posts and topics in the forum are publicly visible and indexed by search engines. This way, finding topics, questions, and answers for ecosystem members or other audiences that aren’t yet aware of what IOTA, Shimmer, and Assembly are, is easier compared to discussions on a closed platform like Discord. This is another important aspect that supported our decision to extend our set of available platforms and enable our community to interact on a more familiar platform.

The structure of the forum is straightforward. It has three main categories:

Governance: A category to discuss general ideas and propose changes to topics around IOTA, Shimmer, and Assembly. Submit your ideas around strategies, DAOs, tokenomics, and other "non-code" improvements for the three networks.

TIP (Tangle Improvement Proposals): Here, developers and engineers can have deep technical discussions about protocol improvements and topics related to the TIP process on GitHub.

Research: The place for mathematicians and computer scientists to discuss ideas for future protocol implementations. A fascinating, research-focused section where you can directly contact the IOTA Research department and contribute to core research topics.

The first posts in the governance section have already received broad interest from the community and have led to an exciting exchange of ideas around the features of the Shimmer network.

• The first post is by Dominik Schiener, in which he proposes a changed denomination of the Shimmer token supply.
• The second post is by community member Kappy, who proposes a 20% increase in the Shimmer token supply to give the community an amount of Shimmer tokens distributed to a DAO.
• Another post by IOTA Foundation community manager Holger proposes the first building blocks for a governance proposal process.

Take the first step to sharing your views on the future of IOTA, Shimmer, and Assembly by creating an account on govern.iota.org (or use your IOTA Discord account) and become part of IOTA's future!