#Let's start a Dialogue | Improving governance

1 messages · Page 1 of 1 (latest)

fast eagle
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One of my key goals for this epoch is to improve the way the council receives and distills the information and ideas presented by the community. One key bottleneck we currently have is the existing voting/polling system where someone creates a poll inside the discord, everyone tries to garner support, it gets half lost with all the messages and channels in the discord and then we get a result with 100 votes AT MOST (in a discord with almost 200k people).

I want to formulate powerful solutions to help combat this and get a genuine and accurate gauge of community sentiment regarding a range of topics. Considering the loudest 50 or so voices are heard in any given discussion I would consider 1k responses on any given topic to give significantly more clarity than we may have otherwise.

For full transparency I am still familiarising myself with the end goals of Gov V2 and this may be a temporary solution until that is fully instated but currently I cannot visualise how a web platform would actually change the outcome at all. Gating it behind ILV using snapshot obviously has its own problems as well.

We need a solution that is EASY, very little writing required for those who don't have the time or patience and yet distills the 'topic sentence' concisely. That being said I invite everyone to put forward their own suggestions so that we can build this together. Let's continue to be the best community in Web 3.

Disclaimer: These ideas may or may not be used and Gov V2 might make this irrelevant, but asking you all is ALWAYS helpful, regardless of the outcome.

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glass mauve
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I think the most we could hope for as far as government engagement goes is the number we get from council votes.

My idea is to have a fuller ballot after every epoch that could get sentiment from ILV stalkers while we are voting in the council election. The issue obviously is that these votes are not held often but sentiment vote could be invoked in an instance where the council or community thinks it’s important enough to wait for a new epoch.

For me personally, permanent changes of revdis would be one of those instances where a sentiment vote during council elections should be considered.

proven quarry
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I think you should just release the framework and current Gov V2 prop and let the community make suggestions and build it out with feedback. Allow the community to be the think tank it wants to be 🧠 .

kindred mountain
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I like this post and love the sentiment, right now, I feel many decisions are gated by ‘soon’ or ‘NDA’, and not really setting up a transparent way of communicating. Could be runway (we don’t know how things are) capital raise (we don’t know a status terms or a plan for future funding) forge (got released late - and by that I mean the idea to be commented on by the community - could have been an success) or gov V2 (still not available to the public - like, why on earth not?) so a change in the way the council and community works together would be great, which I think this post is also alluding to.

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6 days ago it was tomorrow

lavish cypress
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I got approval to use a snapshot vote for sentiment, I made it a couple weeks ago. Currently the setup I have it on is the same vILV we use for elections + ILV holders... we have the option to use either. I don't see an obvious reason why gated sentiment through snapshot has its own problem though. @fast eagle
https://snapshot.org/#/ilvcommunity.eth

fast eagle
lavish cypress
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and for votes like rev dis, people wanted to hear from people this actually affected, ie. stakers

fast eagle
lavish cypress
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not everyone uses 1 social platform at all... which is why something in a forum style DAO dash where we are pointing people to go and then advertise on socials, discord, telegram, reddit etc. we get people on the site and logging in to prove their holdings for actual affected parties

fast eagle
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An idea that popped into my head today was why not use ilv?? If you subtract 100 ilv from the council (for example) then that reduces everyone's pay by about 20%. But now you split the ilv evenly amongst voters for things. You participate, you get rewarded

fast eagle
lavish cypress
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We've talked about rewarding voting in past, and that doesnt get you informed voters, it gets you people wanting rewards

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Poaps arent a bad idea, as long as there isnt value tied to them, at least monetary value

fast eagle
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I won't make any judgement on snapshot until I see it actioned. But if it doesn't deliver 100% of what is necessary. We will need to continue this discussion. We will also need to build systems to help push people to snapshot. POAPs are a pretty easy win tbh

soft cave
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We should separate the 2 issues - From what I've seen, there's engagement, and there's voter turnout. Non-ILV holders are mentioned specifically, and that demographic does matter, as Illuvium players are NOT required to hold ILV.

Let's talk about non-ILV holders first. Non-ILV holders don't get a say in governance, but they do need a voice with regards to the game, and managing player sentiment is important. Taking direct feedback from players is important, and that's already effectively implemented. People who feel strongly about something in-game can submit feedback in-game, via Discord channels, or via e-mail. There's multiple avenues for players to be heard. There's also data collection, which is (IMO) the most powerful way to assess broad trends in the playerbase. If you release some new content, and player engagement drops by 20% in a short period of time, you know that something about that content is causing players to stop playing. This isn't necessarily good for defining specifics, but more specialized data can help in identifying the problem. Data collection allows people to be heard without ever making themselves heard.

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Low voter turnout is something that is seen both IRL and in DAOs, and if it were easy to solve, I'm willing to bet it would already be solved. I definitely recommend anyone interested look at some case studies to see ways voter turnout has been addressed historically, as there's lots of information about potential ways to increase turnout. We're already doing most of the possible things to increase turnout, including directly reaching out to voters by e-mail, social media announcements, reminders, thanking voters etc. Something that could be worth considering in the future is an extension to the voting period, to effectively make it as convenient as possible to vote.

We should also talk about paying voters, because it would absolutely increase turnout.
If we make our goal metric engagement, there are ways to improve engagement, but it's always going to come at a cost. It's absolutely possible to reward voters to turn up and vote - adding fiscal incentive is an effective way to get people to change all sorts of behaviors. However, like Rich mentioned, for many people you're changing the incentive from: "Let's make sure the best, most qualified people get elected to ensure the future of Illuvium" to "Let's get a vote in so we get paid". You're doing so for most of the demographic that wasn't already voting, so if you 5x or 10x turnout by paying people, most of those new voters' main incentive is to get paid. That's not necessarily desirable, but it does achieve the goal metric.

It's subjective whether you believe that informed voters are better than a high number of voters. From my perspective, I value informed votes more, both in a DAO and IRL. If someone is ticking a name on a ballot because "This is a funny name, and I'll get $5.", I don't think that's working to serve the interest of ILV holders in any way.

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We could also talk about mandatory voting. To be clear, I don't think this is a good idea. There's a LOT of implications to this that need to be considered. You could gate revdis or a portion of revdis behind voting. This is a subset of the argument for paying voters to vote. I don't believe it's necessarily fair to expect ILV stakers to get informed and vote every epoch in order to be eligible for revdis, but this would massively increase voter turnout in the long run (post-yield), as the token would effectively be reduced to having no utility for people who didn't both vote and stake their ILV. To reiterate, I think mandatory voting is a heavy handed approach that is more likely to alienate new and existing investors than to bring net benefit to the protocol.

From my perspective, low voter engagement isn't a good thing. It means we're sampling a smaller portion of ILV stakers, and it also means that less people are interested in governance. We're getting worse data on people's opinions and priorities, and people care less. Unfortunately, this is pretty normal. We're in a bear market, and the primary reason, from a utility standpoint, to buy and stake ILV is for revdis. Sustained revenue isn't a thing yet. Token prices are down, not just for ILV, but for many projects, and so engagement is down as well. I fully expect the trend of lower engagement to reverse as the game launches and more people start getting involved with holding and staking ILV tokens. This isn't to say that there aren't improvements that can be made, but this problem may resolve itself, to the extent that solving voter turnout is even possible.

hearty plume
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Don't see why the need to increase turnout in governance. ILV is a governance token, this don't mean that everyone has to use it for that purpose. Only thing is important is that ILV holders who want to participate in governance was the means to do it easily.

fast eagle
soft cave
# fast eagle I think we derailed from my goals here. I am discussing more specifically about ...

There are parellels between most of what I talked about for elections and general engagement on ideas.
You can increase engagement, there are always ways to accomplish that goal, if engagement is the metric we're trying to optimize.

For example, if we use ILV holder snapshots to get sentiment, that WILL get lower engagement than using the ideas forums to get sentiment. Alternatively, we can have Discord threads (like this one, for example), which increase engagement and accessibility, but are open to the public. Opinions aren't necessarily representative of ILV holder sentiment, so we've lost accuracy. Similar arguments apply RE: providing a fiscal incentive to participate.

You can make things easy, with very little reading or writing, at the cost of accuracy and clarity. You can have full accuracy and clarity, at the cost of difficulty to engage. I don't believe a solution is possible where complex governance topics are covered in a 1-liner that's easy to engage with.

The #1020759212172775464 forums do solve one of the problems your original post identifies. Someone can make a clear proposal, and the community can "vote" on it via emojis for sentiment. The original post is not lost in the noise. It's possible there are ways to increase engagement with the #1020759212172775464 forums, but there's also a risk that you cause people to start ignoring announcements, because some people don't care, or don't have time to engage.

All I'm trying to illustrate is that there's a cost to increasing engagement. Nearly everything that can be done cheaply or freely to increase accessibility and engagement has been done, from my perspective. I don't think the barrier at this point is that people can't engage, it's that people don't want to engage. You can make people engage, but there's a cost to that.

fast eagle
uncut temple
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My observation can be boiled down to two core concepts: (1) Awareness; and (2) Anonymity.

Awareness.
Current iteration of getting sentiment through the #1020759212172775464 channel was a good direction but suffered from lack of awareness since users had to constantly check on the channel for new topics/proposals. Most popular proposals obtained awareness through organic discussions that occurred both in #💬〕general, voice, and even discussed in #809220563397902346. This then spilled over to other mediums such as twitter and YT as content creators picked it up.

We need to supplement the current iteration of "awareness & engagement" by providing roles that notify those interested in Proposals & Governance to which an announcement is made in a separate channel which directs to the specific thread.

Another is what @spiral trellis has started to do, having weekly governance newsletter which includes the recent topics. Having opt-in email notifications, etc.

Anonymity
More people will vote if they can be anonymous as not to be "targeted" or have no fear of repercussion in expressing their opinions. The adding emote somewhat addresses this but you can still see the names of people who agreed or disagreed.

If we look at the previous elections, we can see wallets ranging from 400-1000 voting while our sentiment voting as Scoriox mentioned hits 100 at most. We provide a way to vote anonymously then I believe we can get those rookie numbers up.

With vILV sentiment voting, this may already solve this problem but then we also lose sentiments from non-ILV holders who are still affected as players of the game as Blickter mentioned.

For comparison, @lavish cypress's gleam survey seemed to only have 160+ responses. Im of the opinion that had the proposal been announced it would have a stronger turnout.

Summary
To summarize, provide a system that announces or spreads awareness of the ideas/proposals AND allow anonymity survey/voting may increase the sentiment turnout.

Now whether it should only reflect ILV stakers and/or holders, or include non-ILV holders is another issue altogether.

(edit: pressed enter without finishing lol)

lavish cypress
# uncut temple My observation can be boiled down to two core concepts: (1) Awareness; and (2) A...

This could be solved in a few ways, as I’ve mentioned a few places @lone bison and I working to get collab land set up so that can enable us to do a few things, a “Governance Role” then would enable us to tag all of those interested in governance also gated forums. So we continually raise awareness with this role and keep that section updated as your saying with other things, newsletter, proposals etc. this doesn’t solve the non-ILV holder issue but ILV is a Governance Token. Wanna participate in governance? Buy an ILV token (or a bit of it) then you can participate in a meaningful way. I understand gamers may not own ILV but that issue can be solved down the road as @scarlet thorn has mentioned with some sort of NFT holding verification or maybe even a combination of both would work. You can’t force people to engage but I think with ideas like this spider IIP getting passed (if it does) that’s a selling point the team and @quiet quest have been advertising for some time. Long story short I think there is some things we are going to be do even before gov v2 that can help improve this process. Discord forums are limited in how they function it’s not ideal, I also didn’t have access to making proposal threads in iip for a while but that’s fixed as well now.

glass mauve
scarlet thorn
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I would rather have 1,000 community members voting and giving feedback who are plugged into what’s going on in Illuvium than 10,000 with a majority who are just involved trying to win a free 5 ILV tokens. That ‘engagement’ is toxic to most pfp projects and results in people with short-sighted focuses having more of an influence. It’s working at cross-purposes to be discussing giving weights to long-term stakers while also talking about paying to incentivize more people to vote just because we want higher turnout. I’m all for making it simple by having easy to access info and sentiment analysis. I’d like to see this built into a single toolset.

Also, keep in mind that most Illuvium community members are involved in dozens of other Web3 projects. Some more or less heavily. Most of those here are Illuvium first (and sometimes only!!) and spend the majority of their time in this project. It’s unrealistic to expect someone invested in and building alongside 20 other protocols to take the time to learn and engage with every idea or IIP. Those individuals are expecting the more highly active Illuvium community members to carry the community sentiment and are effectively ok with them being represented by a smaller number. That’s a feature, not a bug. There’s only 24 hours in a day for all of us. How many of you are following board member minutes and reading quarterly financial statements from every investment in your retirement funds? Should that be mandatory or even desired?

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All that said, I think the right focus is on making a solid technical solution that allows us to get and gauge sentiment. Ideally this is aligned with Gov V2 in some way but let’s have the discussion with the team about possibilities and see what makes sense. For better or worse, Discord is where 60% of discussion is going on and another large portion is out on Twitter and YouTube. If we’re leveraging Discord (especially with a simple collab-land gate) for sentiment and it’s being shared on Twitter and discussed by content creators in YouTube we’re getting the vast majority of the community that WANTS to be involved up to speed.

uncut temple
lavish cypress
uncut temple
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👀

glass mauve
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One thing I think could be a barrier is being able to contribute to a shared doc. I know I'm always a little worried about clicking google docs just in case I accidentally dox myself.

If Etherpad (which allows for anonymous real time editing) or something similar could be part of an IIP writing/drafting/proposing system that would possibly solve that issue for me.

fast eagle
glass mauve
fast eagle
lavish cypress