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Dynamic Council Importance/Powers
Dear community,
In my humble opinion one of our main challenges for the near future will be to become a truly decentralised network. With this post I would like to bring forward an idea to move into that direction. I look forward to an open and engaging discussion.
Some very important decisions (that affect the whole network) are currently undertaken by a small group of people: the council. Specifically, the council members currently have full control over motions and tips. Yes, depending on the type of motion, the community will vote next through a referendum but that is not the case for all motions (proposal approvals for example).
The concept of the council was called into being to represent the non-active voters in our community. Under the current system the council actually represents the whole community, going far beyond its original purpose and creating a centralisation of power and decision bottleneck. I would like to bring forward a new approach that limits council vote importance to represent only the non-active community members and at the same time allows active community members to cast their vote directly.
The idea: Dynamically calculate council vote importance
This approach entails opening up motion and tip votes to all KSM holders while simultaneously dynamically adjusting the council vote importance based on recent historic community voter turnout for motions and tips respectively.
Implementation
Concretely, this would entail calculating a moving average of community voter turnout over the last X periods for tips and motions respectively.
The council vote weight/importance for the current tips would then be
100% - community_voter_turnout_moving_average_tips
and
100% - community_voter_turnout_moving_average_motions
for current motions.
There are multiple ways to calculate voter turnout. I will present a few that I can think of right now and leave it up to the community discussion to discuss them (or potentially extend the list).
- Calculate the percentage of KSM that voted with respect to all KSM in circulation
- Calculate the percentage of KSM that voted with respect to all available/unlocked KSM
- Calculate the percentage of KSM that voted with respect to all KSM locked/bonded in governance
Effect on the network
In the case of little community involvement in the form of votes for tips and motions, the council vote weight will remain close to 100% (status quo).
In the case of more community votes, the council powers would be reduced proportionately.
Summary
With this approach, the council powers would be limited to representing only the non-active voters in our community which should make for a more inclusive and democratic network.
Comments (1)
slight clarification - motions are not something separate from council, motions are not how council as an entity makes decisions within itself - the issue here is that council has basically become the default entity to manage anything onchain that involves a financial payout or requires a rapid response, it is not simply the case that council is in charge of representing passive holders.
all that said, honestly, looking at potentially upcoming changes to the governance model (see: this) I don't see council continuing to exist in the form it currently does, or with the responsibility it currently has, much longer anyway - might be worth looking into the vote design in the pr above and trying to reconcile it with the goals you're stating here.
In case it seems opaque, the changes/new functionality of the PR will allow
and
You can imagine that for every single "authority/power" that exists on chain, you can have a different set of voting delegates, ie - you would give technical folks your delegation for runtime upgrade authority, and you would give community-minded folks your delegation for tipping authority, and you would give business/finance minded folks your delegation to approve or disapprove treasury proposals.
The idea and goal behind these changes is to allow people to represent their preferences based on the actual expertise of the people they're delegating in specific subject matters, address the partially permissioned nature of certain aspects of the current design, and address the decision making and technical bottlenecks that prevent the chain from progressing as rapidly as it potentially could.
My opinion is that it's not really worthwhile tweaking the design of council, because at the end of the day: most participants, the overwhelming majority, are passive, and; the council is overwhelmingly composed of early adopters backed by votes that are largely completely static.
That is fine if those "delegations" of power were for specific roles and responsibilities, but as you may have seen, the authorities granted to council are more expansive than what the original voters of councilors may have considered.
So we should either put it in the trash, or significantly prune it's responsibilities and grant them to an alternative system.