Introducing the first Intersect Weekly Development Update! The Intersect team will surface the latest developments and progress across the membership every week, including committee updates, events, member highlights, and more. Let’s take a look at what’s happened over the last week.

Intersect Governance board meeting - In 2024, the Governing Board will convene on a monthly basis. The Intersect board met for the second time on the 31st of January 2024, covering many of the topics raised during the internal Intersect team workshop. Read the meeting minutes.

A new Community Advisory Body has been formed - In its first meeting earlier this week, a Chairman and Secretary were nominated to steer the group forward. One of the principal tasks of this new group will be to design a fair, transparent, and global process to elect community members to the Intersect Board later this year. Building up to this, the group will nominate an observer to Governing Board meetings and elect an Interim Board Member for six months while building out the annual-term Board Members' election process. It’s anticipated that nominations and elections for the two additional member seats will conclude at the Annual Members Meeting in October this year. 

50+ grant applications - the response to develop tools and materials to support Cardano’s governance has been overwhelming. Over 50 applications from members for funding are now being considered with more grant opportunities on the horizon. Read more about funding.

Committee section updates - A new section has been added to Intersect’s knowledge base detailing more on the current operating committees and their roles supporting the core business functions at Intersect. You can access the committee's section here.

Open Source Committee (OSC) enacts its first policy - the new policy on open source governance provides best practices projects can use to self-organize while maintaining an escalation path to the Technical Steering Committee (TSC) as needed. It’s also designed to enable smooth communication paths between those who contribute to open-source projects and their maintainers. A pilot test of the policy will be conducted with the network team to make room for improvement before it is implemented. You can read up on the policy here. Additionally, you can view the OSC knowledge base for all things OSC, including the latest minutes.

Governance Parameter Committee Working Group poll - The Governance Parameter Committee has launched a survey to gather feedback on the initial governance settings (see CIP-1694). The poll closes at 21:45 (UTC) on 9th February. If you’ve missed this chance, there’ll be others as this integral working group presents recommendations for what governance settings Cardano enters at the next upgrade. 

SanchoNet GovTool monorepo restructuring - As we move toward implementing CIP-1694, there is also advancement in governance tooling. In the recent restructuring of the GovTool repository, the GovTool team has prepared it for open source, ensuring its accessibility and ease of use.

The SanchoNet GovTool allows ada holders to experience some of the governance features described in CIP-1694 while within the SanchoNet TestNet environment. The GovTool has already seen a steady increase in visitors/users since its launch toward the end of 2023. This week, the GovTool saw a total of 589 people visiting, an increase of 47% from the previous week, this increase also translated to increased proposals and voting on the platform. If you’d like to participate in testing governance features from CIP1694 follow this link.

And that’s it for this week's update. There is a lot more bubbling under the surface, so make sure to watch out for next week's update!

Finally, we’re always interested in hearing more from you about any of the subjects important to you around Cardano Governance. If you have any questions, ideas, or suggestions, please get in touch via email, Twitter, or LinkedIn.