In his recent thread on Ukraine, Russia and how modern civic tech and deliberative tools could help re-invent the Russian opposition, Vitalik Buterin made a striking observation:

"The newest theories of digital democracy no longer focus so heavily on optimal voting methods, cryptography, etc. Those parts still matter, but nowadays a large share of thinking on the topic has shifted in a different direction: what kind of infrastructure would enable a high-quality 'public conversation'?"

He pointed to tools like Polis — where anyone can post a statement, everyone votes, and AI algorithms identify the ideas most people agree on — as examples of systems that make it possible to find societal compromises directly, without intermediaries.

But then he made a deeper point that resonated with everything we've been learning at Harmonica:

"In order to build democracy, you need people who have the habit of behaving 'democratically.' Democracy cannot simply be installed the way intellectuals plug a USB drive into a computer. I still believe this is the main reason why blockchain teams that say 'first we build a high-performance system, then we decentralize' never actually succeed: the habit within the community of 'letting the core team do everything' becomes far too strong."

This is exactly the problem we've been mapping. Not in nation-states, but in the web3 organizations that were supposed to be governance laboratories: DAOs. And the findings are sobering.

gov/acc

Call to Action If you want to contribute to gov/acc, please consider completing a Harmonica session to map open problems DAOs are facing, their potential solutions, and who is working on them (whether researching or building).

https://gov-acc.metagov.org

In January 2026, we launched gov/acc (governance acceleration) — a research program with Metagov to map the real problems web3 governance practitioners face, the solutions being tried, and the actors building them. Phase 1 consists of structured interviews conducted by Harmonica, where we ask governance leads, delegates, researchers, and ecosystem builders to share their insights.

The result: 11 governance problems, 29 proposed solutions, and 41 actors — all published as simple Quartz wiki articles and mapped into an interactive dashboard. Each problem and solution also has its own detailed wiki article on our Quartz site — covering evidence, related problems, key actors, and maturity assessments — so the dashboard serves as an illustration to a deeper knowledge graph that will be enriched with other data sources besides Harmonica sessions.

The Problems tab ranks all 11 governance problems by urgency — a composite score combining breadth (how many of our 27 participants raised it) and depth (how many messages they spent discussing it).

Token Voting Failure & Plutocracy sits at the top with an urgency score of 86 out of 100. 74% of participants raised it — the clearest signal in the dataset. The pattern is familiar: token-weighted voting concentrates power among whales, making governance outcomes a function of capital rather than competence or community alignment.

But what's more interesting is what clusters around it. Governance Theater (score: 71) — the phenomenon of proposals going through motions without real deliberation — is the second-most urgent problem. Voting Fatigue (score: 59) compounds both: when every decision requires a token vote but the outcome feels predetermined, people stop showing up.

These three problems form a vicious cycle. Bad voting mechanisms → theatrical processes → fatigued participants → even more concentrated power. This is precisely what Vitalik described: the habit of "letting the core team do everything" becomes too strong.

Further down the list, but with striking depth scores: Over-Reliance on Game Theory (7 participants, but 6.5 messages on average — the deepest discussions in our dataset) and Institutional Amnesia (6 participants, 5.8 depth). These are specialist concerns, but the people who raise them are deeply engaged — a sign that these problems are felt acutely by those closest to the work.

The Urgency Matrix plots each problem on two axes — breadth (X) and depth (Y) — revealing patterns invisible in a ranked list.

Token Voting Failure occupies the top-right quadrant: both widely recognized and deeply discussed. That's why it's #1.

But look at the other quadrants. Voting Fatigue is wide but shallow (14 participants, low depth) — universally recognized, well-understood, but not generating much new thinking. People know it's a problem; they just don't have novel solutions.

Over-Reliance on Game Theory is the opposite: narrow but deep. Only 7 people raised it, but when they did, the conversations were the richest in our entire dataset. This is the kind of finding that gets lost in simple polls or surveys — and the kind that structured deliberation surfaces well.

The Solutions tab maps all 29 proposed solutions on a Wardley Map — positioning them from Genesis (experimental) through Custom and Product to Commodity (widely adopted).

The most striking pattern: the execution layer is far more mature than the deliberation layer.

Financial solutions like VE Buyback Models and Contributor Streams are already at Product or Commodity maturity. Structural approaches like Specialized Committees and Optimistic Governance are solidly in Product territory.

But sensemaking tools — the infrastructure for "high-quality public conversation" that Vitalik calls for — remain largely experimental. Polis Opinion Clustering, Signals Protocol, and deliberation platforms like Updraft sit at Custom maturity. Knowledge infrastructure (Governance Memory Systems, reference tools) is still at Genesis.

This is the governance gap. We're good at counting votes. We're bad at the conversation that should happen before anyone votes.

AI-augmented governance is emerging fast — AI Governance Agents received 5 mentions, unusually high for a Genesis-stage solution — but it's still early. The question isn't whether AI will play a role in governance infrastructure, but whether it will be used to automate voting (dangerous, as Daniel Ospina has warned) or to support better deliberation.

The detailed Wardley Map makes the opportunity clearest. Solutions in the bottom-left (Genesis, low in the value chain) represent the biggest gaps between problem urgency and solution maturity.

Knowledge infrastructure — governance memory, institutional learning, context preservation — is the largest disconnect. Institutional Amnesia scores 54 on urgency with 5.8 depth, but the solutions addressing it are almost entirely at Genesis stage. Organizations keep losing hard-won governance knowledge because no one has built the infrastructure to preserve it.

The Actors tab visualizes 41 projects and individuals as a network graph, with nodes sized by mention count and color-coded by category: governance infrastructure, reputation & identity, sensemaking, financial, security, research, and service providers.

What stands out is the clustering. Governance infrastructure actors (Aragon, Tally, Agora) form one cluster. Sensemaking actors (Polis, Lighthouse, Mission Public) form another. Financial actors (Karpatkey, Steakhouse) sit separately. The connections between clusters are thin — teams working on voting infrastructure rarely overlap with teams working on deliberation tools.

This siloing mirrors the maturity gap from the Solutions tab. The ecosystem has invested heavily in execution infrastructure but underinvested in the deliberation layer that should feed it.

The Sankey Diagram ties everything together, showing flows from problems through solutions to actors. You can trace, for example, how Token Voting Failure flows through Reputation & Merit Systems to projects like DeepDAO and Kokonut Network. Or how Institutional Amnesia flows through Governance Memory Systems to Metagov and related research projects.

The thickest flows — the most-connected problem-solution-actor chains — tend to run through execution-layer solutions. The deliberation layer has thinner flows, fewer actors, and less investment. This is the infrastructure deficit.

Vitalik's insight about democratic habits applies directly to what we're seeing. The web3 ecosystem has spent years optimizing the mechanism of governance (token voting, delegation, on-chain execution) while underinvesting in the practice of governance (deliberation, sensemaking, shared understanding).

The result is exactly what he described: communities that have the technical infrastructure for decentralized decision-making, but not the habit. And so the core team keeps deciding.

Tools like Polis — incl. Harmonica — represent a different approach. Instead of optimizing how votes are counted, they focus on the quality of conversation that happens before anyone votes. They build the habit of collective sensemaking. They create the infrastructure for communities to discover their own compromises and consensus, "directly, without intermediaries."

The data we've collected as part of Phase 1 confirms that this is where the gap is widest and the opportunity is greatest. The deliberative layer — the infrastructure for high-quality public conversation — is where governance acceleration needs to happen.

gov/acc is our latest collaboration with Metagov. Explore the full interactive dashboard at gov-acc.metagov.org. Phase 1 is ongoing — if you work in governance and want to contribute, you can join a structured conversation to share your experience.

In his recent thread on Ukraine, Russia and how modern civic tech and deliberative tools could help re-invent the Russian opposition, Vitalik Buterin made a striking observation:

"The newest theories of digital democracy no longer focus so heavily on optimal voting methods, cryptography, etc. Those parts still matter, but nowadays a large share of thinking on the topic has shifted in a different direction: what kind of infrastructure would enable a high-quality 'public conversation'?"

He pointed to tools like Polis — where anyone can post a statement, everyone votes, and AI algorithms identify the ideas most people agree on — as examples of systems that make it possible to find societal compromises directly, without intermediaries.

But then he made a deeper point that resonated with everything we've been learning at Harmonica:

"In order to build democracy, you need people who have the habit of behaving 'democratically.' Democracy cannot simply be installed the way intellectuals plug a USB drive into a computer. I still believe this is the main reason why blockchain teams that say 'first we build a high-performance system, then we decentralize' never actually succeed: the habit within the community of 'letting the core team do everything' becomes far too strong."

This is exactly the problem we've been mapping. Not in nation-states, but in the web3 organizations that were supposed to be governance laboratories: DAOs. And the findings are sobering.

gov/acc

Call to Action If you want to contribute to gov/acc, please consider completing a Harmonica session to map open problems DAOs are facing, their potential solutions, and who is working on them (whether researching or building).

https://gov-acc.metagov.org

In January 2026, we launched gov/acc (governance acceleration) — a research program with Metagov to map the real problems web3 governance practitioners face, the solutions being tried, and the actors building them. Phase 1 consists of structured interviews conducted by Harmonica, where we ask governance leads, delegates, researchers, and ecosystem builders to share their insights.

The result: 11 governance problems, 29 proposed solutions, and 41 actors — all published as simple Quartz wiki articles and mapped into an interactive dashboard. Each problem and solution also has its own detailed wiki article on our Quartz site — covering evidence, related problems, key actors, and maturity assessments — so the dashboard serves as an illustration to a deeper knowledge graph that will be enriched with other data sources besides Harmonica sessions.

The Problems tab ranks all 11 governance problems by urgency — a composite score combining breadth (how many of our 27 participants raised it) and depth (how many messages they spent discussing it).

Token Voting Failure & Plutocracy sits at the top with an urgency score of 86 out of 100. 74% of participants raised it — the clearest signal in the dataset. The pattern is familiar: token-weighted voting concentrates power among whales, making governance outcomes a function of capital rather than competence or community alignment.

But what's more interesting is what clusters around it. Governance Theater (score: 71) — the phenomenon of proposals going through motions without real deliberation — is the second-most urgent problem. Voting Fatigue (score: 59) compounds both: when every decision requires a token vote but the outcome feels predetermined, people stop showing up.

These three problems form a vicious cycle. Bad voting mechanisms → theatrical processes → fatigued participants → even more concentrated power. This is precisely what Vitalik described: the habit of "letting the core team do everything" becomes too strong.

Further down the list, but with striking depth scores: Over-Reliance on Game Theory (7 participants, but 6.5 messages on average — the deepest discussions in our dataset) and Institutional Amnesia (6 participants, 5.8 depth). These are specialist concerns, but the people who raise them are deeply engaged — a sign that these problems are felt acutely by those closest to the work.

The Urgency Matrix plots each problem on two axes — breadth (X) and depth (Y) — revealing patterns invisible in a ranked list.

Token Voting Failure occupies the top-right quadrant: both widely recognized and deeply discussed. That's why it's #1.

But look at the other quadrants. Voting Fatigue is wide but shallow (14 participants, low depth) — universally recognized, well-understood, but not generating much new thinking. People know it's a problem; they just don't have novel solutions.

Over-Reliance on Game Theory is the opposite: narrow but deep. Only 7 people raised it, but when they did, the conversations were the richest in our entire dataset. This is the kind of finding that gets lost in simple polls or surveys — and the kind that structured deliberation surfaces well.

The Solutions tab maps all 29 proposed solutions on a Wardley Map — positioning them from Genesis (experimental) through Custom and Product to Commodity (widely adopted).

The most striking pattern: the execution layer is far more mature than the deliberation layer.

Financial solutions like VE Buyback Models and Contributor Streams are already at Product or Commodity maturity. Structural approaches like Specialized Committees and Optimistic Governance are solidly in Product territory.

But sensemaking tools — the infrastructure for "high-quality public conversation" that Vitalik calls for — remain largely experimental. Polis Opinion Clustering, Signals Protocol, and deliberation platforms like Updraft sit at Custom maturity. Knowledge infrastructure (Governance Memory Systems, reference tools) is still at Genesis.

This is the governance gap. We're good at counting votes. We're bad at the conversation that should happen before anyone votes.

AI-augmented governance is emerging fast — AI Governance Agents received 5 mentions, unusually high for a Genesis-stage solution — but it's still early. The question isn't whether AI will play a role in governance infrastructure, but whether it will be used to automate voting (dangerous, as Daniel Ospina has warned) or to support better deliberation.

The detailed Wardley Map makes the opportunity clearest. Solutions in the bottom-left (Genesis, low in the value chain) represent the biggest gaps between problem urgency and solution maturity.

Knowledge infrastructure — governance memory, institutional learning, context preservation — is the largest disconnect. Institutional Amnesia scores 54 on urgency with 5.8 depth, but the solutions addressing it are almost entirely at Genesis stage. Organizations keep losing hard-won governance knowledge because no one has built the infrastructure to preserve it.

The Actors tab visualizes 41 projects and individuals as a network graph, with nodes sized by mention count and color-coded by category: governance infrastructure, reputation & identity, sensemaking, financial, security, research, and service providers.

What stands out is the clustering. Governance infrastructure actors (Aragon, Tally, Agora) form one cluster. Sensemaking actors (Polis, Lighthouse, Mission Public) form another. Financial actors (Karpatkey, Steakhouse) sit separately. The connections between clusters are thin — teams working on voting infrastructure rarely overlap with teams working on deliberation tools.

This siloing mirrors the maturity gap from the Solutions tab. The ecosystem has invested heavily in execution infrastructure but underinvested in the deliberation layer that should feed it.

The Sankey Diagram ties everything together, showing flows from problems through solutions to actors. You can trace, for example, how Token Voting Failure flows through Reputation & Merit Systems to projects like DeepDAO and Kokonut Network. Or how Institutional Amnesia flows through Governance Memory Systems to Metagov and related research projects.

The thickest flows — the most-connected problem-solution-actor chains — tend to run through execution-layer solutions. The deliberation layer has thinner flows, fewer actors, and less investment. This is the infrastructure deficit.

Vitalik's insight about democratic habits applies directly to what we're seeing. The web3 ecosystem has spent years optimizing the mechanism of governance (token voting, delegation, on-chain execution) while underinvesting in the practice of governance (deliberation, sensemaking, shared understanding).

The result is exactly what he described: communities that have the technical infrastructure for decentralized decision-making, but not the habit. And so the core team keeps deciding.

Tools like Polis — incl. Harmonica — represent a different approach. Instead of optimizing how votes are counted, they focus on the quality of conversation that happens before anyone votes. They build the habit of collective sensemaking. They create the infrastructure for communities to discover their own compromises and consensus, "directly, without intermediaries."

The data we've collected as part of Phase 1 confirms that this is where the gap is widest and the opportunity is greatest. The deliberative layer — the infrastructure for high-quality public conversation — is where governance acceleration needs to happen.

gov/acc is our latest collaboration with Metagov. Explore the full interactive dashboard at gov-acc.metagov.org. Phase 1 is ongoing — if you work in governance and want to contribute, you can join a structured conversation to share your experience.