We are looking to get community feedback on a few topics. Please vote on the poll below and leave your comments! These are to serve as a community check - this is not an official governance proposal!
Delegation allows members to give their governing power to another member so that they do not have to vote in every proposal.
There are pros and cons to enable delegation at token issuance. Here is a short but potentially non-exhaustive list:
Pros:
Encourages increased governance participation (by a percentage of voting power used).
Allows for an increased voice of lower participating groups (typically, for example, founding team has very high participation while airdrop members has lower participation).
Avoids requiring a separate process for delegation post-launch.
Cons:
The claim & delegation process is more complex, requiring a delegation nomination & selection process being built out (possibly delaying the token launch).
The claim & delegation process is more expensive (it will cost gas to delegate your vote).
It allows voting power concentration by others.
Continue to look to build out delegation at token issuance.
Delegation seems very important (again, imo). Itâs hard to keep up with all the comings and goings of the DAO but I do know who I trust to represent - broadly - where I think things should be headed.
For the delegation part, itâs too early to introduce that part of the DeGov and I prefer to keep the voting power distributed fairly and equally at least till we get to mid-Season 1 as I believe in the saying âyour vote is your responsibilityâ
On the other hand, we have lots of members that are busy or inactive on the discord to be aware of an active snapshot vote. Looking at the last snapshot, around 1.11k members participated in voting out of 5.5k members i.e. 20% of members. This really makes it complicated to decide whether delegations is useful or not, as delegating 80% of voting power is dangerous and make us lose the decentralization essence
Agreed. I do think members should prioritize the DAOs theyâre participating in. Governance requires vigilance. Itâs not about inclusivity, but responsibility. Votes determine how the org runs as a whole.
I think it is too soon to bring in delegation. We need to find ways to increase member participation that includes keeping up with important votes and executing their responsibilities as voting members of the community. If folks end up being passive participants and delegating, we may end up having centralized voting.
We should take more time to see what membership participation with respect to voting looks like before including delegation. IMO, delegation should be considered edge case, where folks are truly unable to effect their vote for a credible reason; and a minimum expected participation from members should be to show up when votes are needed.
It concerns me that we could end up with a very large percentage of members delegating to a small group that results in centralized voting power. That would not give me the impression that the time and hard work folks are putting into this community are being given the consideration they deserve and their efforts would be subject to the opinions of what could essentially be a popularity contest.
Touching on what @PeterPan mentioned that we only had about 20% participation in the last snapshot, that feeds my concern.
The delegation is important but not necessary. Delegating or not, it is personal choice. Personally, Iâm a bit of regret to delegate my ENS voting power. Everytime I check snapshot, it remind me I have ZERO power to vote.
Too soon to implement voting delegation I think because of the slippery slope risk to over-centralization.
If we had a much more fleshed out âokay delegate candidates will solicit each season or year, they will hold delegation for x amount of timeâ or other more formalized systems I would be in favor.
Low governance participation is a separate conversation. I believe a large part of this could be due to noise overwhelm from everything pinging and happening in the discord.
It should be easy to subscribe to notifications for only voting participation, ideally with multiple reminders for addresses that havenât voted yet and no additional reminders for addresses that have already voted.
For option 3 (solving another way) can we mitigate the cons of delegation by capping delegation to less than 50 percent of annual voting events? This would get around the concentration issue and provide participation opportunity and at the same time not dissipate active participation too much. In theoryâŚ
I canât see any pro for delegation, which will foster centralization and unfairness.
I think it takes time for people to get used to voting. During this time, some kind of incentivizing tings can be used to drive more voting engagement.
I think since the whole governence token thing emerged across the blockchain space we thought we could democtatise everything with tokens and yet they end up as money spinners on secondary markets. Luckily in the dev space, and some others, thereâs is a real appreciation of governence. But as was suggested here only 20% participation.
Are you ready for crazy? Iâm only a budding dev, btw!
What we really need is a smart contract (sorry, canât find your contract on Github, Nader) for the token with a built in quizâŚor something. âDo you realise the responsibilty youâre taking on by holding this token? etc etcâ Yeah, nice and gas efficientâŚnotâŚI know. And if you fail the quiz, the contract reverts and the token doesnât get transacted. And then code in time/frequency of participation (as some of you have mentioned here) into the token contract itself.
Hopefully when ZKs are more prevelant and we maybe even have post-merge shards, L2s, parachains, etc specifically used for voting and gas is much less of an issue, this might be possible. Okay, maybe a crazy suggestion and increasing the chances of attack vectors in smart contracts (my main concern after computaional overuse), but weâre facing exactly the same situation in the digital world as in the real world. How do we get folks involved (to the ballot box) and, or rightly [me being subjective] mentioned repeatedly here in this brainstorm, how do we avoid centralisation of decision making? We are in the same place as the real world. Weâre trying to change human behavior AFTER something has happened i.e. the token is issued, the election cycle and the right (for some, I donât btw) to vote.
What if we could put the responsibility into the code itself as opposed to the token? Then you know you have responsibility for holding it. I do a lot of work/research around citizensâ assemblies which mean folks are called up through stratified selection to take part in deliberating on ideas (social projects, climate change related issues, policy changes). Theyâre called up in a similar way to jury service in some countries. ZKs will sort out the anonymity, and the possibility of stratified selection in time and link this to token holders.
And plus the fact that not all the best decisions are made by the âmost educatedâ on a subject. We already have way too much of this top down attitude all around us. People who think they donât know about issues can often team up with others to find the best solutions. Quite often for the simple fact that they âdonâtâ understand the issue.
Sorry to just throw these question out there, but I have a couple that I canât find any discussions on in the forum.
Will we weigh delegated votes differently? Like, will we use e.g. quadratic voting to prevent voting power concentration?
Also, did we already decide on the governance process going forward?
If we stick to snapshot, isnât the only way to handle the delegation of voting power via Snapshotâs delegation feature (Snapshot / Delegation - Snapshot) ?
Or will we move to on-chain voting utilizing something like OpenZeppelinâs Governor contract?
I might have been out of the loop on these topics, but if they havenât been touched yet, then I believe theyâre quite important to talk about now.
