Firstly, I think now that YIP 10: Transitionary YFI Only Voting has passed, we should stick with the existing system for awhile, to understand how group-wide voting among YFI holders is functioning for awhile. This will allow us to detect if there are any issues and address them over time.
Secondly, it is a good point re: trying to encourage voting to meet quorum. The problem however lies in the following: Incentivizing people to vote may lead to people voting regardless of their beliefs just for the sake of a reward. Typically, such incentive behaviour means the person who votes solely for the reward tries to vote with the crowd (whichever vote is leading at the time) on the principle that he/she will try to “do no harm” by sticking with the crowd. This also leads to the variant (which I do not support) which is to incentivize early voting by offering rewards to voters in an early period (e.g. 1st 24 hours).
A method of incentivizing early voting without the corruptive distortion of monetary incentives: The model that I like for incentivizing early voting is to give additional voting power on early votes cast. Here is an example (assumes a 4-week voting period):
All votes cast in week 1: 2.5x voting power
All votes cast in week 2: 2x voting power
All votes cast in week 3: 1.5x voting power
All votes cast in week 4: 1x voting power (no boost)
This ensures that everyone who casted a vote early, didn’t do so for an upfront monetary reward. They did so because their vote counted more early.
Apart from the above, I think these are some potential areas that should help improve governance.
(1) Designate a FOR advocate and an AGAINST advocate for every YIP: Each advocate puts forward analysis & canvasses for/against points amongst the community. These advocates rotate and are different for each YIP. Something like juror selection?
(2) More cost-benefit impact analysis behind each YIP, which also ties back to (1).
(3) Minimum time period plus quorum decay:
(3) (i) Have a minimum time period for each proposal to ensure wide dissemination of notices. Some people may have other work during the week and only check back on weekends. A 3-day period for proposals is insufficient. A 4-week period for each proposal, ensures sufficient awareness time.
(3) (ii) Introduce quorum decay: If a sufficient percentage of the membership has voted in a short period of time, especially on an important issue, then the vote accelerates towards closure. So, for example:
- When 75% of YFI has voted anytime in the 1st week, it triggers a countdown to closure of the vote in 3 days.
- In subsequent weeks, the required number of YFI to meet quorum steadily declines e.g. 50%, 25%, 15%.
The steady decline in YFI required to meet quorum - especially when it is pushed out far enough - ensures that any fears of vote manipulation by a small group is dissipated because it is mitigated by the length of time that the vote has been aired. On the other hand, ensuring a high quorum is required for “quick votes” helps ensure that such critical proposals are passed after a broad set of the community has weighed in.
(4) Introduce a cost to submitting a proposal: However, I think this should be an impermanent cost e.g. locking 30 YFI (0.1%) as a proposer for 90 days after the end of the voting period. At the end of the voting period, this should be returned to the YFI. The proposer technically doesn’t receive a monetary penalty as he/she could stake the locked YFI into the rewards contract. But it will help steady the influx of proposals.
(5) Require ALL proposals to go through a pre-vote community discussion: No proposals go on-chain for voting until they have had a preliminary 2-week community discussion.