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Governance Turnout Reporting

userCsaint02
4 years ago

Hey everyone! I'm Caleb, a passionate community member learning more and growing each day in the DotSama ecosystem. It's been an amazing ride so far and I have met a ton of incredible people already. Recently, I have started to be interested in learning more about governance, and over the past few days I have talked with a few community members about governance turnout reporting.

I understand that an important goal for the Council, as well as the greater ecosystem, is to have a more decentralized governance structure and to encourage everyday users to participate. Recently, Gabriel started an amazing initiative of rewarding voters and delegators with an NFT which has already shown much success.

As he mentioned in his proposal, governance turnout reporting is typically in the single-digit percent or sub-percent range which, from an average voter such as myself, is quite discouraging. The community has noticed that the calculation of the turnout includes locked crowdloan tokens which are not available to be used for governance. This, of course, makes turnout appear to be less than it truly is. There are a couple points to consider and would be happy to hear more from the community on this, especially those with a more technical understanding of governance.

  1. Is there a technical reason why crowdloaned tokens are unable to be used in governance?

  2. If so, and this is difficult to change, it seems that the easiest solution would be to adjust the calculation for turnout to exclude crowdloaned tokens (which are on the order of millions). I imagine this would drastically improve the viewed percentage on .js

There have been other thoughts from the community on this that include an NFT that represents your crowdloaned tokens and could be used for governance voting, airdropped governance tokens that represent your crowdloaned tokens, and more. However, I think just adding in a step to the calculation to exclude crowdloaned tokens would be pretty straightforward and a step in the right direction. This will show a higher turnout which may help with the issue of voter apathy, even by a small margin. There are other issues with governance that are being tackled on a larger scale, but I hope we can spark more conversations on this front within the community. Thanks for reading, and I'm interested to hear what everyone thinks!

Comments (3)

4 years ago

I agree on excluding any type of tokens that are locked and not able to participate in governance from the turnout calculations: I also believe that this is indeed the way turnouts are calculated in the new governance design, which should be up for vote by the community soon - https://github.com/paritytech/substrate/pull/10195. In these new design, the calculations of thresholds and turnouts are key in the approval of proposals with different root origins.

Is there a technical reason why crowdloaned tokens are unable to be used in governance?

I am not quite sure about this decision: but I am sure a team member from the FRAME team will be able to explain the reasoning behind this - it is considered the cost of crowdloan participation, along with the inability to transfer crowloaned tokens.

4 years ago

Is there a technical reason why crowdloaned tokens are unable to be used in governance?

Yes. As things are implemented today, crowdloan contributions are transferred out of the owner account, into the crowdloan account, and thus cannot be used for voting by the original owner, since voting tokens look only at the free balance of the user account.

Of course with programming, we could probably create systems which make this possible in the long term, but I don't think that any solution is trivially easy to implement, so that would need to be a larger effort. Furthermore, there is a potential question as to whether these crowdloan voting power should be in the hands of the Parachain or the users who contributed, which would again change the ultimate logic here.

it seems that the easiest solution would be to adjust the calculation for turnout to exclude crowdloaned tokens

This will be supported in the next iteration of the governance pallet, as noted here: https://github.com/paritytech/substrate/pull/10912

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