Q&A - Where to Find the EOS Governance Documents

Josh answers the common question about where to find the governance documents used for the EOS mainnet.

EOS Mainnet GitHub repo: https://github.com/EOS-Mainnet
Governance repo: https://github.com/EOS-Mainnet/governance

Still have more questions? Join us on Telegram
https://t.me/EOSCanada

Hey everyone. A lot of people in the community are asking, "Where do I find the governance documents? I don't know where the Ricardian Contracts are. I don't know how to find them." So I'm going to walk you through where they are kept, and how to look them up.
So the first thing you should do is go to the GitHub repo for the EOS Mainnet. So if I were to click on the EOS folder right here, you can find under the `contracts` all of the system level contracts. So let's just walk through `system` real quick.
So let's just say I want to look at the voting contract. This is the actual code in C++ and let's say I was interested in voting for a producer. So I see right here that it's on line 126 till line 128. Just a quick tip for you, if you want to ever use a link for this code to give to someone else so they can find this really quick, you just hit the 126, shift, 128. Click the three dots. Copy permalink, and now you can paste that to someone. If you ever want to give someone a direct link to the line of code that you're referring to.
So that shows us the actual C++ code that handles the contract. What if I want to see the governance related Ricardian Contract for this, so I can see the English version of this code. What I would do is go back to the main page, scroll down a bit and go to governance. And this is where you'll find a lot of the ABIs, the Ricardian Contracts for it. For example, I would go into `system` because I'm looking at `voteproducer`. I would scroll down to the `voteproducer` Ricardian Contract right here. And now I have the actual description that matches the C++ code that I'm looking for.
So another thing to note is, why are all of the governance documents within the EOS Mainnet repo, and not in the Block.one repo? The reason is, Block.one has provided a software, the EOS.IO software, that is usable by anyone. The EOS Mainnet, where you are probably using EOS and interacting with it, uses its own set of governance documents. Someone else could start up their own version of EOS, call it whatever they want, using the same software, but using different governance documents.
So they wanted one place that has all of the software, and now we had to create another place that has the software plus our governance documents. So whenever a change is proposed to the governance documents, it would have to go through a referendum. You can see that here in the Constitution under Article 11. So that is what has to be done to change any part of the governance documents, till another referendum is held if we wanted to modify these parameters as well. We'll leave links in the description below to all of the things I'm showing you here.