From the Wikipedia page on Governance:
Governance is all the processes of interactions be they through the laws, norms, power or language of an organized society[1] over a social system (family, tribe, formal or informal organization, a territory or across territories).
In the context of cryptocurrency, governance is related to the network processes like block creation, but also to the person-to-person processes like ecosystem development.
The ICON Network is a community-run organization. This is reflected in many ways, including that the large majority of projects from the official ICON project are open-sourced on Github.
The main blockchain-based network, as an extension of the computational network structure, contains community members with raised roles and responsibilities as voted upon by the community. These raised-role members are called delegates, who are responsible for proposing changes for the purpose of improving network state given current context and future goals. These are referred to as network proposals.