What is "Governance?"

Governance. It's one of those things, we think we know all about.

But what does Governance actually mean when you start to dive in deeper? And what does it mean within the context of Braintrust?

Outside of Braintrust, and outside of cryptocurrency, we understand “Governance” to be a social structure that every participant agrees to follow. Everything we use is under some form of governance. Its core purpose is to meet the user or participant’s needs with available resources as efficiently as possible and achieve the long-term sustainability of the structure. It applies to any type of group, be it in the real world or the digital world.

As an institution, organization, or network grows and evolves, governance becomes indispensable to respond to people's evolving needs. Governance - as a system itself - also needs to keep evolving to be relevant to the current need.

Governance at Braintrust: The Old Way and the New Way

The old way? Centralized hubs where the company makes all the decisions.

The Braintrust way? Braintrust is a decentralized network.

Most companies and governing bodies are centralized in nature, putting the leadership team at the center of the decision-making hub. A few people make decisions that are then pushed out to the larger company and stakeholders. Braintrust believes this is antiquated, old-fashioned thinking.

Braintrust embraces the decentralization that blockchain enables. A Decentralized Network means that everyone within it can become an owner and make decisions. This is an ever-evolving system that should strive to adapt and adjust to the user’s need to offer better user benefit and user control. Therefore the mechanism of how blockchain can adapt and stay relevant to changing times and requirements is called blockchain governance.

Braintrust's goal is to build a decentralized network where the community will have a powerful voice in governing and evolving Braintrust.

Who is involved?

Anyone who earns and/or holds BTRST tokens can be involved in governance.

• Talent: Freelancers who join Braintrust and get BTRST tokens when signing up and in other ways.
• Core Team Members: Employees at Braintrust often hold BTRST tokens.
• Community: Community members earn BTRST by helping build and grow the network. That could mean everything from writing code, designing UI, helping promote the network, inviting talent, vetting talent, inviting clients, onboarding clients, writing academy courses and so on.

Why it matters to you!

As a Braintrust owner, you hold BTRST tokens which are governed by Braintrust. Any change to how Braintrust functions will likely affect the network and its performance which will ultimately affect all of its participants. Therefore, any governance change at Braintrust will directly or indirectly impact your BTRST tokens and their utility.

We invite you to help us make Braintrust more useful by being active in governance in general to keep evolving the network and the way it is governed to always meet the users’ needs.

What you can propose to change?

Governance at Braintrust will evolve over time. As a start, you’ll be able to voice your ideas and vote on the below areas:

1. Admin permissions: Adding or removing permissions for specific users.
2. Marketplace fee: Changing the marketplace or platform fee that Braintrust charges employers on talent billed fees.
3. Marketplace category: Changing the “Roles” that are used on the platform. Currently the first level of role categories are: Engineer, Designer, Product, Other.

We are not yet supporting feature requests. Why?

• We have a large dev backlog with foundational elements that are required
• We are expanding our dev resourcing and need to be able to better predict outputs before we open it up
• The dev backlog has to be prioritized right now toward programs and features that support the public token launch.

The community is expected to adopt additional support features. Please make feature requests through this form.

Okay. What's the TL;DR?

Governance at Braintrust is a system and process that allows anyone from the community to propose an idea that can improve Braintrust. (Here's a fun example: changing payment providers for payment processing.)

It all starts with an idea that materializes into a “proposal”, which is a write-up of the idea in more details with some description and argumentation to make the case.

Members from the community then express their opinion on the proposal by voting on it with the BTRST tokens that they hold in their crypto wallet, which will act as votes signaling voting power to their vote. The more BTRST tokens you have, the more voting power you will have when casting your vote.

If the results of the voting process for a proposal are favorable, the proposal gets executed via code on the blockchain and a new governance of Braintrust goes live!