Addressing Voter Apathy

Governance
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Inflection Point

This is an important inflection point for JetDAO. Many DAOs needed to navigate the past week, and many DAOs came together to pass emergency proposals in response to a crisis.

Background

It should be noted that in the week leading up to chaos, JetDAO had only 5 forum participants vote in the off-chain forum poll. This is near the average off-chain voter turn out for the last 6 votes.

In comparison, On-chain votes have consistently gotten a larger voter turn out than the off-chain votes, but there has been a consistent decay on voter turnout. $wBTC however had a massive drop off - an 80% decrease from 50 to only 10 holders participating.

The State of Governance in JetDAO

Governance’s relationship with the voter participation rate is a consistent problem space for DAOs since the structure’s genesis. We have been working on introducing a refreshed Asset Management Framework for JetDAO, however we believe we need to identify a high impact <> low effort solution we can implement as soon as possible to turn the trend around.

Quick remedies for Vote Apathy

The three swiftest responses we propose to support curbing voter apathy are:

  • Change quorum
  • Reduce re-submission deadline
  • Improve awareness of vote and impact to the protocol.

wBTC Resubmission

For a robust asset such as $wBTC, we support getting this proposal re-submitted for a vote as soon as possible.

Parameter Change Suggestion

A weakness of our current framework is the lack of clarity on how to change the overall process, and what powers the Governance Committee has over the framework itself. In our current state of Governance, we would suggest the Governance Committee to leverage their powers to announce a parameter change.

Data-based Frameworks

The framework should define the resubmission freeze period as 2 weeks instead of 3 months. The original amount of time was arbitrarily selected in order to prevent the spamming of a poor proposal and reduce the impact the Governance Committee. With the data we now have from using the framework for almost over a year (the framework turns 1 next month :birthday:) let’s loosen this parameter, and challenge both the Core Jet Team & the community to turn out to vote.

Better Defining (and understanding) Quorum

We also would like the Core Jet Team’s help to understand the quorum better. We found in the current version of the docs that "someday the Jet Team may set a quorum, however, we don’t see it defined anywhere easily accessible. Based on some quick research, it appears the quorum is set to 5% (under the rules tab). But based on the information provided on realms.today for the $wBTC vote quorum for this vote was 395,280 tokens - which is 5% of 7.9m?

“We can accept failure, everyone fails at something. But we can’t accept not trying." ~ Michael Jordan :basketball:

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the first two are easy to do and we should prob consider them - as for the latter what’s the best path forward? How does the community want to be communicated to in regards to voting?

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Personally I believe that considering the first two options would be a good idea to facilitate the asset onboarding process, at least for the time being. When it comes to the third option, and we question how to increase user awareness for voting, I propose JetDAO using Substack as an additional channel for voting announcements. A Substack should be sent to JetDAO subscribers every #TokenTuesday when a vote is ready to be cast, whether it is on-chain or off-chain.

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Quorum

In JetDAO’s current state of governance, lowering the quorum amount shouldn’t present increased risk. The outcome of votes is still independent from their on-chain execution.

The precedent it sets is however far more dangerous.

  • The ability to swing an outcome of a vote is dependent on how many tokens can be acquired. Liquidity and price impact this. We’re lowing the barrier for a Governance Attack with the current $JET token metrics.
  • If a Governance attack occurs, and the Governance Committee must overrule the outcome. Confidence in the Token Holder’s ability to govern would be a simple secondary attack vector at the social level creating disruption and potentially grid locking governance.
  • The signal from $wBTC’s vote outcome is lack of attention and participation. This is the challenge. We are ignoring data, not fixing the root cause of a problem, and instilling an ethos counter to the goal of a mature data driven organization.

We strongly encourage accepting the challenge, and welcome additional failed votes due to lack of quorum as the signal we need to continue to invest effort and attention to fixing voter apathy.

Considerations regarding the allocation of resources and work on other aspects of Jet may impact our perspective.

Re-submission Deadline

The risk of this change is spam of non-quorum meeting proposals.

The risk of spam is almost a solution that’s welcome to fight voter apathy.

With the Governance Committee’s approval, I can complete the work for this change faster than reading a page of a book.

And it supports ‘configuring’ the state of the DAO to experiment, test, study, and fix voter apathy.

Feature ≠ :lady_beetle:

Communication

Can you describe the current process of notifying token holders of votes? Please share any data that’s available related to engagement of this content to date.

I am not a marketing expert, nor hobbyist. Assistance from the community is needed.

I am fairly confident that a video piece of content drives better engagement over other mediums. How can we leverage the opportunity to fix awareness to not only solve the problem of voter apathy, but additionally drive growth for the DAO and the community?

@marco https://www.synthesia.io/ allows you to turn text into video.

:rock::skull_and_crossbones::bird::bird:

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We have updated the Asset Onboarding Framework and it is ready for the Governance Committee to accept. A summary of the changes:

  • An on-chain vote that does not meet quorum no longer has a hold period, and can be resubmitted for an on-chain vote by any community member or the original interested party on the application.
  • An on-chain vote that is rejected is now subject to a 2-week hold before resubmission. Every failed on-chain vote adds 2 weeks to the application’s hold period (id est, 3 failed on-chain votes = waiting 6 weeks for resubmission).
  • #TokenTuesday’s has been formalized. All off-chain and on-chain votes related to Asset Onboarding begin a Tuesday.
  • General formatting & typos.

@ Governance Committee, requesting to make these changes active, today.

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James from the governance committee here - I think this makes sense to keep progress with onboarding assets and limiting downside risk re: governance

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  • Once the forum receives a new Asset Onboarding proposal, an announcement is made on Twitter and Discord. For both Off-Chain and On-Chain votes. The same happens when there are 48 and 24 hours left for the vote to end.
  • Thanks for sharing synesthesia :smiley: Have you seen other DeFi protocol using it?
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Thank you for the swift work here @dante!

I think the changes are reasonable. We should revisit resubmission tolerances in the future to avoid potential spam vectors. But for the time being this is more than sufficient.

Approved.

1 Like