The new Design Authority (DA) charter, strongly supported by the Mojaloop Foundation leadership and board of directors, was approved by the Technical Governing Board on Thursday, September 12, 2024.
Overall, the new charter better reflects Mojaloop’s alignment with the best practices at world-class software development companies that ensure reliability, resilience, security, and regulatory compliance. There is also more emphasis on the close working relationship with the Product Council and ensuring that any changes to Mojaloop reflect the wider financial services and regulatory landscape. The new charter also provides more detail about the requirements for technical and business risk management processes, as well as end-to-end traceability, that will streamline future audits by regulatory authorities.
What follows are some highlights of the changes between the old and new charters. You can read the complete text of the new Design Authority charter here.
Overview of Changes to the Charter
At a very high level, the main changes are:
- Tenure: Council members can now serve terms of two years before needing to stand for re-election, instead of one.
- Staffing: There are now nine voting members (including three MLF directors) plus the non-voting workstream reps. This expands participation beyond the five voting members under the old charter.
- Openness and transparency: DA weekly meetings and voting sessions will now be open to attendance by all members of the Mojaloop Community, although only voting members can cast a ballot. An invitation to the session will no longer be required. (If needed, the DA can have additional closed internal discussions, but no votes will take place during these meetings.)
- Decision making: All decisions will be by vote, although consensus-building is still encouraged as much as possible.
- Responsibilities: The DA now has expanded responsibilities, which have become more specific. Notably, there are new responsibilities for leading community engagement, ensuring effective communication with other governing bodies within the Mojaloop Foundation, and ensuring that any decision-making follows carefully defined processes.
- Rationales for new work: All changes to Mojaloop must have a product-driven justification that reflects the needs of the market.
- New Design and Code Review process: all non-trivial work items and change proposals must be submitted to the DA for review to ensure compliance with risk management protocols. Full traceability for changes from proposal through testing and release is now mandatory.
- More leadership responsibilities: Requirements for the co-chairs are more clearly defined, and include ensuring that all documentation is recorded in GitHub/ZenHub.
To fully understand the requirements, we encourage all members of the Mojaloop Community to read the new Charter. If you have any questions about the changes in the charter, please contact Simeon Oriko at soriko@mojaloop.io or James Bush at jbush@mojaloop.io.
DA Elections are Just Around the Corner
The Mojaloop Foundation team is excited to put the new Charter into practice and is advancing the timeline to September instead of November, as usual. Nominations for the new DA will be opening soon — keep an eye on our social media channels for the announcement, or join our mailing list.
