I propose increasing the quorum for Snapshot votes to 1,000 Citizen NFTs, ie 10% of the outstanding NFTs. Arguably our most important vote to date (CIP-28 on the formation of the council) had only a 6% turnout, representing far fewer individuals since many of those wallets held several NFTs.
It’s our job as a DAO to encourage community engagement, and more specifically, to set up our governance in such a way that citizens feel compelled to participate. If fewer than 10% of citizens are showing up to vote on essential issues, it’s a sign that we are not functioning well as a democratic organization and we need to turn our attention to this foundational problem before passing any future proposals.
New votes and propositions could be their own channel within the #citizen session, tagged @ all citizens. It would help increase visibility for members unable to check in more then a couple of times a week.
I really agree that we need to get people show up for voting. Considering a total of 5000+ holders, the number of people directly participating should be a lot more than that. However, I would like to add that if this proposal is to be implemented, it need to be done carefully and timing is very crucial for its implementation. If we implement it when we can’t really get more people to vote, and then struggling in doing so later, we might actually create a very tight deadlock that will prevent project and future voting from going further.
From what I observe, people here are mostly from a long-term prospective, which, in itself, is considered healthy for the DAO as a whole. However, some significant portion of us (or at least from my local community–Thailand) actually just plan to just “HODL” and do not really plan to seriously participate, or even participate, in any governance decision since the first day they joined here. These people are not wrong by any mean as we welcome everyone into our community, but they are unlikely to be swayed to participate more as well. From my point of view, this is not something we can change without a considerable amount of time and a well-defined plan that slowly change this state of affair from within, might taking many months or even years to actually successful also.
However, we might be able to speed up the process by providing some “incentive” to citizens who show up, but we might need to think more about what that incentive should be (and if that incentive will actually turn into a problem itself by luring people who never seriously participate in the DAO to just randomly vote or swayed to vote for some decisions / candidates instead of making a thoughtful vote we really need)
In short, I totally agree with the proposal, a more democratic and decentralized way of governance is what we all long for, but I would suggest that we must carefully outline the scope where it’ll be used and also when exactly are we going to use it (I personally don’t think we can actually change this state of affair before the election of council, tbh). If we are too rush too pursue a more democratic stance right now–requiring more participation when some people actually have currently no intention to participate–we might actually create a bottleneck for ourselves and slow down a project significantly.
@elmo Appreciate your thoughtful response, thank you. I think there are a few ways to mitigate the issues you’re talking about and not cause a bottleneck. One is to simply allow proposals to stay on Snapshot for a longer period of time. Anecdotally, I’m pretty present here and I’ve missed a couple of votes. Another is to add a proposal channel to our Discord, as @LeTempsPerdu suggested, to alert all citizens when new proposals go up and when they go to Snapshot. I think encouraging more voting participation at the expense of a few extra pings is a minor compromise. This would also carry the ancillary benefit of alerting the community to the existence of all proposals (right now proposals generated by the core team go into the announcements, but a lot of others don’t, this one included).
As to your point about when to implement this, if we agree we need to increase voter turnout at some point, why not now, before arguably the most important set of decisions we’re about the make? The work can start today. An announcement about this particular proposal. More frequent announcements about the upcoming elections, their importance, and a call to more members to participate (think of all the mail you get around actual election day… we should be doing the Discord version of the same).
If we don’t have meaningful participation in electing our governing body, what does that say about us? Are we trying to make waves in the DAO space or skimp on the most important parts in the name of “progress?” I wouldn’t be so concerned if we were not CityDAO. What is more important to a city than a functioning government?
The hard road may be a bit slower, but the view is sweeter from the top.
Attach a cost to inaction and reward action simultaneously. For example, airdrop additional votes for future proposals to those who vote on the current proposal. Use Quadratic Voting to limit power-concentration. This would have the added benefit of curbing rent-seeking and making Citizenship tokens more productive.
In the short term, the way to increase participation in voting is to lower the cost of participation and increase the incentive to participate.
In the long term, we need to establish DAO community contribution evaluation system
Lower the threshold of participation
—we can remind users of their citizenship and the significance of exercising their right to vote from the moment they join the discord.
—broadcast the matter of voting in channels such as announcements (already done) and tweets to ensure that everyone is aware of it.
To increase motivation
We can make it clear that for active contributors to the community (including members who actively participate in voting governance), they will be given priority in the distribution of future incentives to the community ( No commitment that there will be an incentive, but rather a commitment that every vote and other community contribution you make will be taken into account and evaluated once there is an incentive arrangement).
Establish DAO community contribution evaluation system
For DAO governance, a complete evaluation system is needed rather than simply rooting for NFT holdings to vote in the future. There are some attack vectors present in on-chain time-boxed voting for DAO governance: vote buying, plutocracy, sybil attacks, last minute vote swings and on-chainVoter apathy. A possible solution is to create an evaluation system for DAO organizations, where we can quantify the voting weight and details of each member, such as the degree of community contribution, NFT holdings (one-person-multiple-NFT’s have progressively lower weight based on the number of holdings).
This is a really important discussion but I will second @Fugyeah that we should let the Council consider these points (including debate) for the Charter.
@gugz If turnout is low, we should think about how to increase the turnout rather than raising the minimum threshold. If people don’t show up, a higher minimum threshold will have no impact.
The Council can consider how to balance reward / penalty mechanisms to increase engagement. Also think that the idea of rewarding people with increased voting power for constructive participation is worth considering. Funnily enough, if we go down this path, we will naturally see a hierarchical structure forming in the DAO (based on voting power). Is that good / bad / fair / not fair? I’m not sure yet; however, if people are gaining power based on participation, that has elements of meritocracy in it.
I’d just like to see some quicker action to get the Council formation and voting paradigms establish. Once we create additional momentum, I think participation levels will automatically go up. People will always be excited to participate in something moving more quickly; that’s why startups are what they are.
Btw, I do think that steadily increasing the minimum threshold could be a forcing function to increase participation. We may want to test it out in the future, but I think we could get to a higher level of maturity before we kick that in.
We can issue an announcement that citizens who participate in voting will be rewarded by the community in the later period, so as to encourage community personnel to actively participate in voting.
I think @gugz makes an important point. I think @elmo’s suggestion of incentivization is valuable, but a challenge to implement. Once we are paying people to vote, has the intrinsic value of being a citizen lost some of its meaning? My suggestion would be something that reaffirms the meaning of citizenship. Voting is a key element of citizenship, but not the only element. Greater citizenship will lead to increased voting.
A punitive possibility would be that a citizen misses a certain number of votes, they retain their citizenship but lose their right to vote until they have contributed sufficiently to the forums.
I am not a big fan of punitive measures, but I also think that we need to find a way to encourage citizenship voting rather than just paying people to do it. I would argue that people need to be incentivized to visit the forum and discord to see what CIPs are even on the table. Citizens need to be incentivized to post in the forum on topics. Otherwise, we are not paying people to be better citizens, but just to show up once a week and vote to get it done with and preserve their rewards.
It is very important to encourage citizens to participate in the discussion and voting of community organizations, otherwise it will deviate from our original intention. The team should find a way to encourage citydao citizens to actively participate in the community construction by means of rewards and incentives as soon as possible. For example, if the citizens who actively participate in the later stage develop tokens, they will put them in according to their activity, which is a kind of incentive means, or discuss other ways. We need the support of more people, and if necessary, we need to seek the help of some celebrities and promote and build them.
Thanks for making this CIP @gugz. The discussion here is fantastic.
Outside the intriguing conundrum around how to incentivize voting, I think it’d be helpful for the DAO to get a better sense of how frequently citizens want to vote or how they’d prefer to hear about a vote. For example, maybe setting up a weekly email with citizens who want to opt-in that includes a few updates and any current votes going on is an effective reminder mechanism.
We also have a lot of room for improvement around onboarding and educating citizens on the process and how they can get involved. This may be a bit off topic, but one idea I’ve been thinking about is if we had a bot generate a private onboarding channel for every new citizen that included TL;DR on getting started and some interaction with a citizen in the DAO (could have bounties for citizens to help onboard new citizens and show the ropes). I don’t think there’s so many citizen NFT changes that this would be overwhelming.
I’d love to see us experiment with quadratic voting as well.
Would anyone here be interested in forming a working group in discord to brainstorm, plan and execute on experiments to improve voter turnout? If so, let me know and I’ll get a space for us and tag you.
This is the age old question of politics. I personally believe having one or maybe 36 hours of voting is the way to do it. This is not going to be without controversy, because it’s counterintuitive but you can more easily drive voters and message around one single date (for example we could hold a vote after the community calls for 24 hours) etc. That way there is open debate and then voting for 24 hours every Thursday if there’s a proposal. The long duration of these initiatives and votes is hurting us because it slows us down and we get lost in the fog of web3
Another way to do this is via proxy voting, similar to how ENS does it.
