Gov4Git: Decentralized governance for collaborative communities based on git

Gov4Git is a decentralized governance protocol with an intrinsic economic model for collaborative communities based on git.

Since the inception of open source, we have been actively involved in its development. We recognize the unique socio-economic dichotomy it presents: while being the foundational pillar of the technology sector, open source simultaneously remains its most neglected component.

A lot has been done to support the flourishing of open source in the past, such as the introduction of open-source licenses, specialized for-profit business models, or the formation of non-profit organizations dedicated to open-source stewardship.

These solutions have been helpful — but only partially — because they focus on the source and not on the people behind it. But open-source is a social phenomenon first, and an engineering outcome second.

We believe the socio-economic aspects of open source are still largely unaddressed:

• Communities cannot scale without governance. Open-source is a natural phenomenon wherein ideas emerge within the minds of individuals or small groups, and grow into large communities. Unfortunately, communities of strangers cannot grow without a governing structure — a fact well known as the "Dunbar number". Companies and charitable foundations have provided such structure for a small fraction of open source projects, whose nature is amenable to extracting profit directly or indirectly.

• Sustainable funding necessitates fair and quantifiable attribution, Heavily-used open-source products are notoriously underfunded, under-maintained and under-supported. This affair is in one part due to the lack of funding models for open-source — which inherits the funding difficulties of public goods (or more accurately network goods), and in another part due to the lack of accurate, credible and quantifiable measures of attribution.

• Authenticity demands a proof of inclusive and equitable practices. How the sausage is made is just as important as the sausage. All products — open-source or not — are bound to collapse if they are built on unfair, discriminative and otherwise unsustainable practices. As a digital good, we believe open-source must be distributed with a digital proof that it has been developed in an inclusive and equitable manner every step of the way.

• Trust and supply chain security depend on peer review. The global open-source software supply chain (embodied by package managers) is vulnerable to its weakest links. Disgruntled or adversarial developers of popular open-source packages have time-and-again injected malicious code into millions of computers. This is inevitable as long as open-source projects remain opaque artifacts from the perspective of the supply chain. We believe that if software package distribution is accompanied by standardized, verifiable records of provenance — that demonstrate peer review of every change — injection of malicious code will be substantially harder.

At the heart of all these challenges is a clear need for a holistic mechanism that governs the workflow of collaborative software development. This prompted us to create Gov4Git.

Decentralized governance for git communities

Gov4Git is a decentralized public protocol — accompanied by software tools and a portable UI — for governing communal open-source projects based on git. Gov4Git can be seamlessly deployed alongside any pre-existing git project to augment it with a configurable plural governance mechanism and an intrinsic economic model.

The core Gov4Git system relies on the git protocol and nothing else, making it easily accessible — at no cost — to anyone who is already using git. Beyond the core system — which is embodied in a powerful command-line tool, Gov4Git supports integrations with development management systems (such as GitHub, Jira, GitLab, and so on) and currently provides a comprehensive integration with GitHub.

Gov4Git utilizes the Plural Management Protocol to address the two key aspects of day-to-day development practices — managing community attention and arbitration. Furthermore, Gov4Git utilizes an intrinsic plural economic model — based on a plural currency — which incentivizes leadership and contribution, and uses market mechanisms to fairly quantify attribution over the life of a project.

Applications

• AI alignment. At its heart AI alignment is about the creation of natural language training datasets which are representative of the values of large communities. In other words, AI alignment is definitionally the process of democratically collaborating on a coding project, for which established workflows for collaborative software development are a perfect fit. When these workflows are mediated by a governance system that enforces fair representation in decision-making, the resulting datasets are provably-aligned at the fine-grain level.

• AI-proof social identity. In the age of AI conventional proofs of personhood (such as all forms of Turing tests) are becoming increasingly unreliable. Governance participation records open a new avenue for establishing social identity and asserting personhood. Unlike with simple bilateral tests, faking successful participation in governance requires fooling entire communities of people over long periods of time — a feat well-beyond the grasp of AI.

• Agreement on standards and specifications. Protocol and data standards are key for interoperability and composability across independent providers of data and services. Standards are developed by self-interested peering organizations, which need a fair arbitration mechanism to make meaningful progress for the common good. Illustrative examples are the authoring of EIPs (Ethereum Improvement Proposals), FIPs (Filecoin Improvement Proposals), or the specification of public APIs that connect the various providers in the EU's open infrastructure, spearheaded by GAIA-X.

• Safe self-organizing. Communities in distress — such as in war zones, disaster zones or under oppressive regimes — often self-organize for purposes of coordination and sourcing of vital information. To prevent misinformation and harm, it is critical that shared information is certified with records of provenance and peer review.

• Deliberation and policymaking. Progressive democracies, such as Taiwan, have proven the effectiveness of plural, bottom-up policymaking. To scale such efforts, communities need secure, transparent and verifiable tools to conduct their deliberations.

Roadmap

• June 2022: The idea for Gov4Git grew out of our hands-on experiences contributing and participating in the large-scale, decentralized open-source development of IPFS and Filecoin. The Gov4Git project was then conceived within the Network Goods organization of Protocol Labs.

• Jan 2023: During the ensuing six months, we formed a partnership with Microsoft Research and GitHub towards building a polished product, and systematically designing the governance and economic mechanisms. We launched the first dogfood deployment of the early Gov4Git prototype. We set as our goal for the year to launch Gov4Git on the Plurality Book Project (by Glen Weyl and Audrey Tang) and to make a public release for general use.

• Oct 2023: We completed the first full-stack version of Gov4Git, including a desktop UI and deep integration with GitHub. We launched a wider-audience private beta deployment to prepare and rehearse for our public launch. Gov4Git had reached a level of technological maturity and was enjoying a growing list of interested users. This prompted the nucleation of the Gov4Git Foundation (a non-profit) dedicated to the development and stewardship of Gov4Git.

• Early 2024: We plan to launch Gov4Git as the official governance technology for the Plurality Book Project, as well as to make the first official release of the software for general use. We hope to launch a few additional public experiments using Gov4Git in the areas of AI alignment, roadmapping, civil deliberation and filmmaking.

Gov4Git is homed by the Gov4Git Foundation — a non-profit dedicated to the research and development of practical, decentralized governance protocols.