Empowering Governance: The Launch of Metropolis to the Filecoin Community

Introducing Metropolis, a temperature check tool for early-stage Filecoin Improvement Proposals.

Filecoin Foundation is pleased to announce the launch of Metropolis, a temperature check and crowdsource polling tool, built in collaboration with Canvas Technologies. Metropolis was created as a fork of the open-source Pol.is tool, which has been used to support digital democracy efforts in countries around the world.

Filecoin Foundation is proud to deploy this new tool to empower the governance of the Filecoin network better.

With Metropolis, community members can more easily share their opinions on Filecoin Improvement Proposals (FIPs) by signaling their overall feelings toward the proposal, using “positive”, or “negative” descriptors. The goal is to provide temperature checks to give FIP authors and Core Devs an earlier indication of overall community preference for certain proposals, which will help governance stewards more accurately direct resources as needed for proposals and ideas.

Metropolis also allows anyone in the Filecoin community to open community crowdsourced polls. Unlike existing discussions opened in the FIPs Discussion Forum, which allow community members to engage in written, long-form conversations about a given topic, Metropolis polls allow community members to quickly signal their support or disagreement with a given idea. In addition, anyone can add on to the original discussion by proposing additional polls. These polls may ask a further question, propose an alternative idea, or add additional options, which all community members are then also able to vote on. Much like with FIP temperature checks, one of the immediate goals for this tool is to allow community members to propose and parse big ideas in an easier, quantitative way.

Next Steps

As Metropolis becomes available to the community for use today, we remind our community that this is a test tool, and Filecoin Foundation will continue to moderate this tool, including submitted community polls.

FIP discussions will continue to take place in the FIPs repo on GitHub. In contrast, Metropolis will be a community-focused interface where community members can signal their opinions on FIP ideas and surface polling needs on ideas. Metropolis will only function as an opinion crowdsourcing tool that will not gate the broader FIPs process.

We invite the Filecoin community to utilize this tool and share feedback with the Governance team. This is still a proof-of-concept product requiring user engagement to make the tool useful and valuable to the community. The best way to provide feedback is to participate in the monthly Community Governance Calls and join the Fil-Gov Slack channel.

The Collaborative Effort

Stemming directly from continuous feedback and requests from the community for a sentiment analysis tool, Metropolis is part of our efforts to reform and improve the governance process of Filecoin. It complements other improvement areas captured in FIP0001v2.

Metropolis with its current functionalities could support various development and maintenance teams to prioritize various Filecoin improvement projects that are in the pipeline. Teams like FilOz could create polls on various improvement areas or functionality enhancements and seek thoughts from community members on what they consider useful to the network. In addition, it can also help Core Devs and FIP Editors as they provide peer reviews for FIPs. Community members could use the polling function to also signal to these development and maintenance teams other areas needing further work on or to be suggested to be prioritized.

Future Directions

We call on the Filecoin community to utilize the benefits of this tool. There are many other use cases this tool could support in the future such as the tool functioning as the main landing page for FIPs and a tracking board where community members can see how FIPs are moving through the stages. Through utilization, community members could identify other needs Metropolis could solve.

We are also working to identify helpful ways to utilize the data generated from Metropolis to enhance the FIPs process.

Explore Metropolis and share your feedback. We ask that community members explore other use cases Metropolis could service and share the feedback with the Governance Team at Filecoin Foundation. The best way to do this is to participate in our monthly Community Governance Calls, you can register here.

To have an initial deep-dive into how Metropolis works, watch the demo here.