You’ve made two great points @anon10525910, and they are questions that I have been considering myself for the past several days.
From an operations perspective, it is likely that the Set team will have to handle executing snapshot votes. The DPI can only delegate its snapshot voting power to a non-contract address. This is because, in order to vote on Snapshot, you must sign a message, and a smart contract (like a multi-sig) cannot do this. The consequence of this is that we must have a trusted entity (the Set team), take ownership of this address.
What we can do to alleviate the amount of effort on the Set team to execute meta-governance votes is to form a “meta-governance committee” to execute votes, excluding those that are on Snapshot, which must be executed by Set for reasons described above. This committee would be tasked with simply executing the will of INDEX holders for meta-governing Uniswap, Compound, and Aave. From a technical perspective, this is quite simple, as we already have the ability to delegate these votes to a multi-sig. This idea was originally pitched to me by @setoshi, and I think it is definitely worth pursuing.
As for your question on engagement, I think this is a much harder problem. The number of protocols we govern will grow. I’ve already written the implementations for the Snapshot and Aave V2 governance, and hope to add more in the future. Governing all these protocols will be a strain on INDEX holders, and we must provide positive incentives to ensure that we reach quorum for all these new votes. I think @DarkForestCapital’s post on governance mining can potentially provide a solution, but it will definitely be something that we need to consider further.