Increasing community governance power

The purpose of this post is to advance the conversation around community governance power.

If successful, this post will spur Coop contributors to circle around the ideal solution(s) that then lead to action.

Situation

Community governance power has been a topic for months

Further, three recent proposals have addressed this challenge to a degree, though not head on

Complication

Despite the importance of this topic, no concerted effort has yet been made to push forward solutions.

Question

This begs the question, what do we do?

Potential answers

There are many ways we can address this. I see 3 broad categories:

  1. Increase current INDEX holder participation (i.e. EPNS when live, more/better vote rallying, enabling LP tokens to vote)
  2. Increase voting power of engaged voters/contributors (i.e. KPI options, other incentives)
  3. Concentrate voting power (i.e. enable INDEX delegation, enable WG multi-sigs to vote)

My current hypothesis is that we will need to implement more than one solution.

When it comes to solving substantive problems, I default-assume that there is no “silver bullet.”

Next Steps

A form of INDEX delegation is being specced out by @puniaviision & @DarkForestCapital to get the ball rolling. You can expect to hear more as soon as a hardened-enough proposal exists for feedback.

Beyond, INDEX delegation, the rest are just ideas. The goal of this post is to push the conversation forward so that we can begin circling the best option(s) together.

:point_right: What do you think would be effective?

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Thanks for getting this conversation started @anon10525910! A few thoughts from me:

  1. Definitely think we should allow LP tokens to vote.

  2. I am really interested to see the effect that delegation will have. There will still have to be education and some strong initiatives to get delegation off the ground, given that it isn’t incentivized. But I think if we can make delegation a focus and part of our culture/community, then we could see some strong governance gains over time.

  3. We have the open discussion around partnering with UMA to do KPI Options. My personal opinion has been I don’t see a problem/need there to warrant an experiment to try and improve. However, I see a much more urgent application for a KPI options experiment here! This seems like a perfect opportunity to experiment and see what we learn about incentivizing governance as well as creating an unforkable partnership with UMA. @Mringz / @Gottlieb / @Mringz / @kiba / @defijesus

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Am excited to hear what comes from the EPNS info gathering. On the other points, I will think. Great to get this rolling properly.

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just popping this :point_down: here* as one step taken, per “Next Steps”

Want to surface the idea that I discussed briefly with a few folks - running an incentive campaign with Rabbithole to reward those who delegate their INDEX.

The problem: one of the main problems with our Snapshot voting is that only 100-200 addresses vote. That’s out of 3,000+ holders. We need those other 2,800 who hold INDEX but don’t vote to delegate.

Rabbithole campaign hypothesis: we can partner with Rabbithole to offer meaningful incentives for people to delete their INDEX. The hypothesis is that a $100-200 reward might get a lot of folks to delegate. The campaign can actually be ongoing. And we can continuously promote it. We could do a bonus on impression mining to publicise it, for example.

Path forward: If there’s support for this, we need to decide on the amount of rewards. Which, in my mind, depends on how important this is to us. If we offer $100 or say 4 INDEX, every 100 addresses that delegate cost us $10k or 400 INDEX. As an ongoing campaign, it will only cost us money if people delegate, which is the end goal anyway. So I would say 4 or 5 INDEX should be enticing enough, while still being reasonable for us to achieve one of our main goals (namely increasing community governance power + increasing turnout).

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I love the idea of a campaign that increase the participation of Index Holders. Getting the passive holders to delegate their Index to the delegator would greatly boost the participation (as per the main goals of increasing community governance power + turnout)…

In the same time, i think this kind of campaign should be like a short high engagement event, to push those passive holders to delegate. And not be a long running campaign. My suggestion is probably do like an annual campaign to engage our passive holders to delegate.

Curious how do we target those who are passive holders? Can we send a CTA to them to delegate?

Hi @verto0912 fully love the idea of incentivizing delegation, however we should also have the option of declaring one’s self as a delegate as an alternative completion criteria of the quest.

IIRC Gitcoin did a similar thing, where you either delegated or declared yourself as a delegate.

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I would disagree. We can not guarantee that people will see the campaign. It doesn’t really matter to us if they delegate in a week or in a month. So, in my mind, it makes sense to have it open ended until we reach a certain milestone, like X addresses have delegated or X INDEX has been delegated.

How does that help us increase community governance power? Like if there are 100 delegates, 80% of whom we have never heard of (because there’s really only 20-30 or so people who know what’s going on at Index), what is the benefit to the Coop from that?

My concern is that by saying you need to delegate to X, Y, or Z person we are promoting centralization of the voting power a bit too much. Especially if the incentive is only available to those who have been “whitelisted” by the coop. By adding the option to declare as a delegate (and maybe adding a threshold of needing to vote in X consecutive votes or X out of the next Y votes) an alternative path can exist, especially if you are a new member who wants to get more involved with the Coop.

hmm this seems like a problem that if it becomes true, we can address later.

It seems like the goal is to get more INDEX voting power in the hands of trusted/knowledgable delegates. They will be accountable for their votes.

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I’m also in favor of incentivizing delegation.
Since the Snapshot Delegation User Guide was published 8 days ago, we had 10 people listing their address as delegates and 7 wallets that actually delegated their $INDEX to some of the delegates. So there’s definitely potential for improvement and we can assume that incentivizing delegation is a good motivator to do so.

Regarding the amount, I’d say that the minimum is set by the gas costs which occur when delegating and the max amount is probably so that it’s still fair compared to what a contributor can earn for “small tasks”, 50-100$ seems fair.

I’d also like to see more community contributors list their address as delegates, as with only 10 I’m sharing the concern raised by @oneski22.

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Thanks @anon10525910 for the thoughts and getting the ball rolling. I believe this is a very important topic and I don’t think we need to overcomplicate the approach here.

To me, this is our most useful weapon.

I believe a concerted community push over x period of time could really drive the nail in the coffin. Further, I think the community would be best served without exploring incentive, but rather through collective push around messaging.

Let me have a think (while I’m more fresh) and create an outline on how this can be achieved, required community effort and over what timeframe.

In the meantime, would love to hear @Pepperoni_Joe ’ s thoughts!

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