Hey shawn - this is a good approach, and marries closely to where we’re moving with our approach to designing a more engaging, interactive and exciting governance stack.
A few thoughts based on our experience / what we’re working on / where this can get better.
My primary point is what is the fundamental outcome we have in mind when designing all of this stuff.
We should be very clear as to what certain developments aim to optimise, for who and what purpose, since these problems are all part of a bigger picture wrt to driving ‘intelligent adoption’ of the underlying tech/resources/funding, rather than just creating incentives that independently optimise for one narrow but specific outcome.
Without aligning on a core motivation we are in danger of collectively making the overall system worse in aggregate.
A starting point for this is sourcing, sustaining and scaling collective network intelligence.
This is a very different proposition to simply ‘driving adoption / participation’.
First problem, outcome, solution:
- Problem: complex voting systems
- Outcome: poor voter participation
- Solution: simpler mobile app UX/UI w/ swipe / notifications
Making governance voting easier is definitely something we should aim for and simple more proactive UX/UI is important, but it can also optimise for dumb decisions - aka, there should be some time cost to making a good decision and that should be implicit in the design principles.
Other projects such as Proof of Chaos also aim to create incentive systems for encouraging voters - an idea that’s both brilliant in its simplicity, but also potentially dangerous in its current design… e.g. you earn an NFT for voting, but that NFT is not necessarily non-transferable, and so might be tradeable, which leans into the emergence of financial incentives which abstract away the actual ‘vote’ as the purpose of the interaction, ultimately making the system dumber over time.
When seen this way, we can also understand voter participation as an entertainment problem. Yes we want to get people to swipe easily, (tinder for governance) but we also need to make proposals more engaging, so people will stop and read / listen / watch and make decisions in a proactive way - delegating their intelligence, as well as their vote.
Second problem, outcome, solution:
- Problem: no standardisation of proposal data
- Outcome: standardised proposals
- Solution: proposal forms
This is a problem I’m very well aware of, having written Edgeware’s proposal templates, written / structured many proposals for myself and others and reviewed/voted/commented on many more.
The standardising of data inputs - is something we have debated endlessly, since we have no lack of proposals, but a lack of data standardisation causes issues nonetheless, with everyone essentially creating their own structures.
The issues of no standardisation:
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For proposers: a blank sheet of paper is harder to fill out than a few boxes which trends towards proposer apathy / missing info / administrative time suck.
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For voters: makes comparison hard when comparing two proposals on a like for like basis this effects voter engagement, participation and confuses overall sentiment.
A form is the obvious answer to address short term issues, but when we approach this challenge from a longer term perspective of optimising for a bigger picture - sourcing, sustaining and scaling collective network intelligence we can see that some standardisation is useful, but given the diversity of talent we have the potential to fund, across many domains, who each may prefer a different medium of expression, we can then see that standardisation also constrains the intelligence of the collective - voters and proposers.
Put more simply - when we start with the idea that no proposal is final, or correct, or cannot be improved, then we begin to design different systems, optimising for advancing coherence between proposers and also voters. who we should aim to move towards contributors and even co-creators of proposals.
This starting intention has two primary effects on the way we imagine and design these systems:
- We take the pressure off people to write ‘great proposals’ to convince voters.
Currently we are headed towards ever longer documents, associated materials, references, spreadsheets, colourful language and big promises that adds to the administrative burden on everyone and further reduces voter / proposer participation and makes the whole process into something that optimises for a certain type of specialist proposal writer.
- We move the system away from binaries - proposers / voters who end up in an adversarial relationship, and towards outcomes that prioritise collective endeavours.
This is perhaps a radical, but obvious approach, that aims to optimise once again for a larger aim, than simply engineering away the symptoms of much bigger issues.
Preferendums
Referendums offer binary votes on some package of information, but as we know they are very dumb tools.
We are developing Root - a collective creation and decision making system that uses a composable voting system inspired by Borda’s Count to compute voting and allow contributors to create preferendums directly linked to the governance pallets.
As a proposer, I can create a draft with as much or as little information as I am able, using whatever titles / headings / structures or even in the future mediums (code/text/gif/image/video etc).
As a participant, I can create alternatives to a proposal’s content, structure or subject, add my own view directly on-chain, and tend to a consensus by voting for my preferences for a better decision-making process.
On first impression, this might sound like it will have an even greater administrative burden on proposers and voters - but this is before we consider:
- Economic participation.
Suddenly we can open up proposals as economic opportunities for anyone to review/improve/iterate proposals and indeed the projects themselves.
Engagement can have a reputational, financial and creative upside, that aligns incentives between all parties better than the current system.
It also starts to solve other issues - namely, information assymetry between voters (who are likely more familiar with the core chain/tech/culture) and outsiders, namely those wandering into the lion’s den - with excitement and energy ready to be pummeled out of them…
We can see how from here we also begin to solve issues such as talent acquistion, development and accreditation using the system to bootstrap the sourcing, sustaining and scaling collective network intelligence.
- Imaginative proposals
We inspire more originality and opportunity. By pushing in exactly the opposite direction to form creation and data standardisation, we design in a more humane way… appreciating that what works for some, will not work for all.
- Boostrapping on-chain organisations (creative collectives)
If the process just ends with voters approving funds into a ‘project’multsig’, we essentially leave the funded team successful in one part of the process (getting funding approval) but left entirely on their own to figure out delivery of what is in essence something that almost always needs to mesh with a complex and ever changing underlying system.
This leads to proposals taking far longer, teams being paid far less, whilst voters get irate at the time taken, which leads to mistrust, which further exacerbates tensions, which further degrates the governance process. Both sides move apart, and lessons are never learned.
If we can drive forward more nuanced and interactive decision making, that leads to more imaginative proposals that enable us to share financial value and credit more fairly across a group, we can then begin to see this whole process as the pre-formation process for talent sourcing and the setup of fluid and optimistic on-chain organisational structures like shokunin’s proxies.
I’ve written more about this approach in a previous post.
We need to manifest the murmeration - in many ways, with this forum, we are already seeing that happen…
This is core to realising and indeed releasing polkadot’s potential - if we don’t, the existing incentives will exert their own gravity and pull inwards with inevitable consequences.