Introducing SIPS and Sommelier’s Governance Structure

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Introducing SIPS and Sommelier’s Governance Structure

Fellow Sommeliers, The Sommelier protocol software has features that enable the Sommelier Community of users to propose and run a governance of the software itself so that the protocol broadens community participation in grows the network. Thus, the protocol will reflect the collective will of Cosmos builders and Sommelier community members from around the globe.

Thanks to Sommeliers Tendermint roots and it's on-chain governance software features for collecting and measuring votes regarding onchain proposals, consensus parameters, and spending funds from a community pool, Sommelier is a self-governing network.

Sommelier network decision-making is driven by the Sommelier community, and Governance discussions can happen in a number of places moderated by diverse community members, including:

The Sommeliers Forum
Discord
Telegram
Any publishing platform

For a discussion to inherently become a proposal that gets submitted and voted on-chain, contributors will need to create and post a Proposal on our Governance Forum. We call these Proposals SIPS 🍷.

One SIP at a Time

The SIPS process is not just about fulfilling Sommelier’s functional duties. A streamlined and accessible SIPS process can help cultivate a community which values open collaboration and ensures contributions are recognized and given a clear path to success.

SIPS are proposals to update some function or standard within the Sommelier Ecosystem. SIPS can vary widely from proposing new community initiatives, to requesting funds from the community pool, to changing consensus parameter

The Sommelier Protocol is decentralised and community owned, members can freely submit their proposals and suggestions through this guideline (Governance process: How to submit your proposal?). Sommeliers and Cosmonauts alike can suggest any ideas to the Sommelier ecosystem and build the blocks together. A Governance Proposal Template can be found here (SIP Template). To begin the process of forming a new SIP, one should do research first and have discussions on Discord or the Governance forum with other Community participants. This is an informal process to gauge community interest in a potential Sommelier Improvement Proposal. Once a contributor feels they have a rough consensus that their SIP is valuable, original, and achievable, they should submit a Sommelier Improvement Proposal on The Sommeliers Governance Forum.

For Proposal to successfully pass on chain, four criterias have to be met:

A minimum deposit of 10 SOMM is required for the proposal to enter the voting period.
- Anyone may contribute to this deposit
- The deposit must be reached within 14 days (this is known as the deposit period)
A minimum of 40% of the network's voting power (quorum) is required to participate to make the proposal valid
A simple majority (greater than 50%) of the participating voting power must back the 'yes' vote during the 14-day voting period
Less than 33.4% of participating voting power votes 'no-with-veto'

The criteria for submitting and passing/failing all proposal types is the same.

If a proposal has passed, the SIP is moved from proposed to approved. If a proposal is rejected the SIP may be moved to be Rejected or back to Draft to be revised for future consideration.

You can check out The Sommeliers Governance Forum here and get ready to vote! (We heard that some of the Validators are already preparing their proposals as we are typing this)

To learn more about Sommelier, please visit https://sommelier.finance/

To use Sommelier, try the Pairings App at https://app.sommelier.finance/

To participate in the community, please join the Telegram group https://t.me/getsomm or our Discord https://discord.gg/gZzaPmDzUq

To follow the project on Github, please Star the project https://github.com/PeggyJV/sommelier.