Dear Celo community,
Earlier this year, Celo Foundation launched Governance Evolution, a workstream aimed at improving how governance functions at Celo — with a focus on increasing transparency, alignment, and coordination around how we use our shared resources.
Governance Evolution is an ongoing process and is part of our commitment to gradual decentralization, inspired by Ethereum Foundation’s philosophy of long-term thinking, subtraction, and stewardship of values. We believe that governance is living, iterative, and ultimately shaped by many contributors. To put this into practice we’ve been engaging with stakeholders across the ecosystem, surfacing feedback through hosting open sessions, and co-developing the foundational elements needed to improve Celo Governance long-term. In this post, I hope to share what we’ve been working on so far and what is coming up on the governance roadmap.
Introducing Season 0
The primary objective of this governance evolution is to shift Celo’s governance to a seasonal cadence. We launched Season 0 to prepare the ecosystem for this shift by establishing a shared structure and setting expectations. For this season, we set a number of deliverables and here is how we worked towards fulfilling them:
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Communicating a clear governance timeline — A major milestone from Season 0 was coordinating all existing partners to align on a shared timeline and structure, something that hadn’t existed in a formalized way before. This foundation will allow Celo governance to have more predictability and allow our ecosystem partners to focus on building. With Season 0 coming to a close, we are in the process of kicking off a community-wide retrospective, another new process that is inspired by the need to increase transparency and accountability.
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Creating multiple avenues for community feedback — Presented progress on governance calls, engaged with community members in 1:1’s and small groups, established a Feedback Committee with 30+ people, hosted open feedback sessions on June 3rd and June 5th, and gathered valuable feedback on the Intent setting process.
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Building strong bridges between Celo Foundation and community initiatives — Held weekly calls with community partners, including CeloPG, Regional Council, Prezenti, Celo Camp, and Opera to share valuable context and work towards shared goals.
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Setting up initial frameworks to guide capital allocation during Seasons — currently in progress: sharing a draft of a community-wide Intent and Budget for Season 1.
- Intent is a document that will outline the goals for the next 6 months (July–December).
- Budget will provide guidance for onchain treasury spending for different categories to work towards the goals outlined in Intent.
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Ratify changes through onchain governance — upcoming: posting a proposal, discussing on a governance call, and submitting for onchain governance to ratify Intent and Budget for Season 1.
Prior to this effort, we heard concerns from members in our community that governance wasn’t working as intended — it can be hard to navigate, unstructured, and disconnected from real impact. We took this feedback into a workshop at the Celo Foundation offsite during Devcon 2024 and it resulted in creating a governance evolution workstream. We prioritized these particular deliverables for Season 0 because they address top concerns by providing clarity, coordination, and space for iteration to adjust priorities in future seasons with community feedback.
What makes up Celo Governance today
Celo Governance is how we collectively make decisions to grow a thriving ecosystem around the Celo protocol. When we say ecosystem, we’re referring to the builders, companies, users, and other community partners and participants that contribute to the growth of Celo’s onchain economy.
Celo Governance is made up of several types of proposals, including technical proposals, ecosystem funding proposals, and Mento governance proposals. Funding proposals allow us, as Celo ecosystem members, to coordinate our shared resources and contribute to furthering our goals of growing the Celo Ecosystem.
Diving another layer deeper, Governance at Celo is made up of:
- Technical protocol: governance smart contracts and interfaces like Celo Mondo that make it possible to have proposal submission, voting, and execution
- Social protocol: norms and practices for how we engage with governance, including forum discussion, feedback processes, delegation, engaging in voting
- Metagovernance: contributors and workstreams that help operationalize existing governance process and work on iteration of governance design
Governance evolution is an example of metagovernance at work that will have an impact on both the social protocol and potentially parts of the technical protocol with future potential deliverables including updates to Celo Mondo or other governance tooling.
The primary way it will influence the social protocol is by adding structure to the governance process in the form of Seasons. Technical proposals will continue to align with the engineering timeline driven by cLabs, and therefore can be submitted as necessary. However, the funding proposals, if ratified by governance, will correspond to the Seasonal cadence to give predictability and deeper alignment to our ecosystem.
Contributors to Celo Governance
Celo Foundation
The Celo Foundation helps facilitate metagovernance by providing coordination, prioritization, and stewarding early versions of the evolving governance process. In my role I have worked closely with many stakeholders to launch this initiative and create the space for gathering and integrating feedback.
Celo Governance Guild
An independent body composed of community contributors, including @0xj4an-work, @0xGoldo, and @Wade. The guild plays an important role in providing checks and balances for the governance process and essential operational support, including:
- Reviewing and editing proposals, formerly known as CGP editors
- Supporting proposers through submission and onchain process
- Hosting governance calls
- Moderating the Celo Community forum
- Ensuring transparency and consistency across governance processes
Metagovernance Contributors
In Season 0, a new category of contributors began to take shape: a group focused on improving governance itself.
This metagovernance workstream includes Celo Foundation’s ongoing facilitation and design work in partnership with:
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Community partners like CeloPG, who have provided key input and are driving key activities that will help us expand metagovernance, including retro contributor rewards and treasury accounting services. Community partners also include Regional Council, Governance Guild, Prezenti, members of cLabs, and others.
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The Celo Feedback Committee, made up of builders and engaged community members, was formed to evaluate and give feedback on Season 1 Intents and will continue to evolve to support the needs of Intent setting in following seasons.
Part of Season 1 will shift this workstream to focus on improving more aspects of Celo Governance that were out of Season 0 scope, potentially including but not limited to: delegation program, improvements to Celo Mondo, launching or improving new governance tooling, creating more spaces for community to connect, driving value creation and impact evaluation frameworks.These areas surfaced in the sessions hosted with the Feedback Committee.
Metagovernance is about stewarding governance evolution — making sure our structures, tools, and norms are improving in tandem with, and in response to, the ecosystem’s needs. As we formalize this further, I welcome anyone passionate about governance to volunteer to join, give feedback, and help shape the future of this workstream.
Feedback and Potential Metagovernance Actions for Season 1
Last week we hosted two open feedback sessions as part of our commitment to source community input on the Intent (find notes from sessions here), leading to a rich discussion about metagovernance as a whole. Below are some of the proposed ideas that came out of the feedback groups to implement in the future as part of metagovernance:
- Start with Values — Establish or revisit shared values.
- Map Key Areas of Governance Work — Create a high-level overview of governance-related tasks and workstreams (including but not limited to intent setting, budgeting, proposal evaluation, values development, and delegation).
- Organize by Season and Intent — Clarify which governance activities fall under which intents and determine which ones belong in Season 1 vs. future seasons.
- Draft a Timeline and Ownership Matrix — Plot tasks along a seasonal timeline and identify potential volunteers, contributors, or stewards for each area of work.
- Develop a Strategic Metagovernance Roadmap — Translate the above into a clear, step-by-step plan to guide governance evolution and avoid misalignment between structure, priorities, and implementation.
Next Steps
The final weeks of Season 0 are dedicated to a retrospective with community initiatives. Retros will be posted on the forum in the new category Transparency & Accountability for everyone to have visibility. Additional efforts closing out Season 0 will be:
- Finalizing the Intent and Budget frameworks and integrating feedback from community sessions.
- Ratifying Intents and Budget through onchain governance.
- Opening timeline for proposal submissions aligned with Season 1 goals.
Each season is not only a time to fund great work — it’s also an opportunity to reflect, evolve, and collectively improve how governance functions. Thank you to everyone who has contributed to this work so far. We look forward to continuing to build this together.