I’d like to add a suggestion to this:
Indicative voting.
Currently, a proposer’s only guide to whether their proposal needs to change is the ongoing discussion. This is useful and necessary, but hardly an accurate guide. Apart from that, they have a measure of how many votes a proposal has already accrued - but these are votes which will almost certainly not be changed going forwards (unless a new proposal is made), and are from different voters than those yet to vote.
Proposers who are well versed in the opaque power structures of OpenGov have some opportunity to tailor their proposals, between conception and final vote, to fit requirements of large voting blocs.
But this is time consuming for them and near-impossible for most, especially the small useful proposals that many of us are frustrated to see fail so often.
This proposal goes a long way to improve this situation but really, what a proposer needs, is a simple way to gauge in real time the success of their proposal.
So I suggest a norm, backed up in UX/UI for voters, especially large voters such as DAOs and DVs to make 1 or 2 indicative votes over the voting period (ie - ‘I will vote Aye/ Nay, with X vote, Y conviction’; and separately (in discussion), ‘my reasons for this vote are Z: if Z changes, my vote will change’).
There is nothing technical onchain that needs to change to facilitate this - anyone can already change their vote, and it is possible (and many DAOs already do) to state intention in discussion before voting, this is messy UX for a proposer to keep up with to get an incomplete answer as to how their proposal is doing.
What, ideally, would need to be implemented technically is one central non-binding register of indicative votes. If it is integrated with section-based ‘voting’ al the better.
And we would need to propagate this norm, especially among large delegates and whales - which may involve some extra work for them, which they can choose to step up to or not, but hopefully will save time in other ways. Other than that obstacle, large delegates have shown themselves pretty well able to formulate and adopt norms so, especially if supported by UX/UI, this should not be too difficult.