One of the obvious design goals for Threshold Network governance is to empower our community to proposal and implement meaningful changes to the upgraded network with minimal engagement friction.
Since Threshold Network is a community driven project we want to explore all potential ways of empowering our community even on an individual level. One idea is to experiment with governance amplifiers that serve to increase the vote weight of engaged community contributors in the governance system. The end goal of this system would be to reward active community members with increasing vote weights to more directly impact network decisions.
This could likely happen with onchain tweaks to the current state of GovenorBravo but a better approach is to delegate vote weight from team members or the Keep project to our active community members. This approach does not require technical lift and there is no artificial dilution on voting power across the network.
There are many ways to go about implementing this. It could be taken as far as a community wide level up type program with weight caps and clear guidelines on how to accumulate governance amplifiers based on tangible contributions and participation in the Threshold Network community ecosystem.
What do people think about governance amplifiers? Are they practical? Empowering? Exciting? Is this something we want to think more about and experiment with in our community?
Yes. This is a really good way to avoid two issues:
(1) Community not getting involved because they don’t have enough of a vote.
(2) Community getting frustrated that the team has outsized voting power.
I’ve seen and experienced both of these issues many times and I think it’s a good way to avoid these common governance traps. It’s no use if people don’t understand how it works though or that it exists, so it’s essential that it is explained well and frequently to the community.
This is just straightforward delegation, correct? When I see governance “amplifier” or “boost” it makes me think of something like veCRV where you’re accepting a lockup for additional voting power, which is also something we could do.
Yes just a straightforward delegation. That could be an mvp approach for us for governance amplifiers. There are a lot of ways we can go about setting the system up for people in our community to earn the amplifiers. Can involve NFTs. I’ve seen the lockups for more voting power and definitely like that too. Heard someone recently talking about vote power increasing per time tokens are held which I also think is an interesting concept.
Here’s an interesting twitter thread re: Aave governance playing out now. To me this shows a real need to implement something like the proposed governance amplifiers, even if only as a safeguard against situations like this. It is also important that the org itself doesn’t act unilaterally to negate legitimate votes, but instead regularly (not just near voting periods) distribute/delegate voting power to community members who have proven to consistently act in good faith.
This issue is important enough to explore that Stani highlighted it, and both Lex Node and Chris Blec engaged.
Not to say that the VC’s in this instance shouldn’t vote, but having two competing VCs decide a governance vote? Will be interesting to see the final results of this.
Update: Tweet thread from the BarnBridge perspective after the proposal failed
Will be interesting to see the final results of this.