At Intersect, we are committed to empowering the Cardano ecosystem through tools that enable transparent, inclusive, and effective governance. Today, we want to address recent feedback regarding Cardano GovTool following the Plomin upgrade. We hear you, and we highly value the constructive criticism that has been shared.

Acknowledging the feedback

The core issue raised by community members revolves around the lack of Governance Action (GA) type support in the proposal submission area of GovTool following the implementation of the Plomin Upgrade. This is a valid critique, and we acknowledge that the plan and roadmap needed to be communicated more effectively. This would have allowed for broader feedback to help adjust the direction, as well as made it easier to identify ways to contribute, thereby better aligning with the wider needs of the community.

GovTool was designed to evolve alongside Cardano’s governance capabilities but we underestimated both the urgency and complexity of supporting all GA types after the Plomin upgrade took effect. Governance actions can be raised by using the CLI, but recognize that the lack of the feature within the GovTool interface is a barrier for non-technical users. This planning misstep has caused frustration, and we sincerely apologize for it. We will also seek to address this capability in the coming weeks.

Our approach to prioritization

To provide context, GovTool’s development has followed a phased approach, prioritizing features based on user needs and technical complexity. Last year, our focus was on ensuring that the most common participation avenues—DRep registration, delegation, and voting—were accessible and user-friendly, supporting the technical bootstrapping phase following the Chang Upgrade on September 1st, 2024. Additionally, we ensured that all Governance Action (GA) types could be rendered properly for DRep voting, a critical feature to enable full governance and broad community participation.

For GA submission and off-chain discussions, we began with the simplest governance actions: Info Actions and Treasury Withdrawals. These were chosen because they are the least complex and most immediately useful for the majority of users. We are expanding support to other GA types, focussing on Constitutional Updates, which will have the most significant impact on the ecosystem at this time.

Varying degrees of complexity of governance actions

Each type comes with its own technical and user experience challenges. For example:

• Info Actions and Treasury Withdrawals are relatively straightforward, requiring only metadata and, in the case of treasury withdrawals, additional fields for stake addresses and amounts. These were implemented first.
• Constitutional updates require metadata, a constitution hash, a URL, and a proposal policy script. As mentioned above, with the delegate-endorsed Constitution now on-chain, the absence of accessible, non-technical routes for submitting alternative constitutions needs addressing immediately and is a priority.
• Protocol Parameter Changes and Hard Fork Initiation are highly complex and typically require input from highly technical users. While these are important, they are relatively lower priority given their specialized nature.

Since the Plomin upgrade took effect: Addressing UI feedback: 

The vote count dashboard

One of the specific pieces of feedback we received was about the UI for the NO VOTE count, which some users found misleading due to it including the “NOT VOTED” amount along with active “NO” votes . We understand how this could create confusion, especially for new users, and does not accurately reflect the state of a governance action. 

On Friday Jan 31, we pushed a fix to address this issue and improve the clarity of the voting interface.

Roadmap: What’s next for GovTool

The Governance Tools Working Group, in collaboration with the Intersect members on the development side, has outlined a roadmap for Q1 to address community feedback and expand GovTool’s functionality. Here’s an overview of what’s coming:

Short-Term priorities (this week and next)

• Constitutional updates: The team is finalizing the approach for handling discussions and submissions for the “Update to Constitution” governance action (GA). An early version of this feature will be available on preview.gov.tools for community feedback.
• Community input: Feedback on the updated Q1 plan, which prioritizes the “Update to Constitution” GA, will be gathered through the Governance Tools Working Group. Community members are encouraged to join the weekly meetings or share their thoughts via the feedback button on GovTool and the CC Portal.
• Moderation features: Work is underway to add moderation functionality for proposal discussions, ensuring a constructive and organized environment.

Mid-Term goals (February)

• Enhanced proposal listing: Improvements to the proposal discussion area are in progress, including expanded sorting and filtering options, pagination for search results, and additional sorting criteria such as name, date added, proposer, and engagement metrics (e.g., comments and likes).
• Search improvements: The search functionality will be refined, including clearer labeling for filters, such as renaming “Active Proposal” to “Discussion Open.”

By end of Q1

• Governance Action outcomes: Support for governance action outcomes will be delivered, enabling clearer tracking and reporting of results.
• Open Source analytics: Integration of Matomo data into the participation dashboard will provide transparent analytics for community use.
• Preview release: A preview version of GovTool will be made available for broader testing and feedback.
• CC elections: Support for Constitutional Committee (CC) elections will be added to the CC Portal.
• Additional GA support: Discussion and on-chain submission support for all remaining governance action types will be live, rolled out based on community needs and technical feasibility.
• Open APIs: Open APIs, starting with the proposal discussion section of GovTool, will be introduced to encourage community innovation and integration with other tools.

We are also exploring ways to streamline the user experience for complex governance actions, ensuring that even highly technical processes are as intuitive as possible.

This roadmap reflects the team’s commitment to addressing community needs and improving GovTool’s functionality. We'd love to hear more, with your feedback playing a central role in shaping these priorities, and we encourage you to join the Governance Tools Working Group or share your thoughts via the feedback button on GovTool.

Open source and community collaboration

Cardano’s initial suite of governance tooling is maintained by Intersect members, WeDeliver, Byron, Lido Nation, and Bloxico, with its direction guided by the Governance Tools working group. This group sets the vision, roadmap, and priorities, ensuring that GovTool—including the “Outcomes” feature and the Constitutional Committee portal—evolves to serve the broader Cardano community.

Cardano GovTool and the Constitutional Committee Portal are open-source projects with a publicly accessible backlog. The backlog is actively shaped by community feedback, which is reviewed regularly by the Governance Tools working group. While this collaborative approach ensures general alignment with community needs, it also means development may not always progress as quickly as we’d like.

Contribute

Everyone is welcome to contribute at any stage—from discovery and design to development. The current maintainers and Intersect staff are here to support and enable contributions. To keep track of progress, we provide regular updates in our weekly development reports and encourage you to join the working group to share your feedback and thoughts. The group meets every other Wednesday at 10:00 UTC, with the next session on Wednesday, February 5. You can join here.

Submitting governance actions without GovTool

It’s important to note that Cardano’s on-chain governance is permissionless. While GovTool aims to simplify the submission process for the non-technical user, it is not the only way to submit governance actions. Following the Plomin upgrade on January 31, 2025, any ada owner can submit a governance action directly on-chain using other tools or Cardano’s Command Line Interface (CLI).

How to create Governance Actions using CLI 

Moving forward together

While the prioritization decisions for GovTool this time did not meet community expectations, the Governance Tools Working Group—with active input from the community—is driving improvements to ensure the tool evolves in the right direction. As always, your feedback has been essential in reshaping priorities and guiding development efforts.

We will continue to provide regular updates on progress, and accountability remains central to this process. GovTool is a community tool, and Intersect is committed to supporting its growth and improvement.