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Polkadot Governance Improvements by Wei

5 years ago

Wei, one of Polkadot Councillors and long-time member of the Polkadot community, shared some ideas related to Polkadot's governance improvements. Specifically, introducing "blind voting", the option to "abstaining" and Council voting process restructuring. The three write-ups can be found here:

The goal is to try to boost interest for people to discuss improving Polkadot's governance mechanics design, increase participation and reduce inactivity, hold community members accountable (including Council members) and make the overall process more efficient.

Please leave your feedback and questions on these notes, now up for discussion!

Comments (13)

5 years ago

Adding here a few notes and questions on these topics that came to my mind when I read the ideas:

- Blind voting for Polkadot:

  1. I do not understand if we would get to see the vote process in real time or not.
  2. Are there any actions to be taken by users in the revealing phase?
  3. what do you think its needed UI wise to make this as user friendly as possible? Pushing a preimage hash to the network adds an extra step of complexity to a process that, by some, is already considered complex.

- Allow Explicit Abstain in adaptive quorum biasing:

I think in general counting abstentions in total turnout would be a good way to balance out the representation of opinions in the democracy module, a much more accurate measurement. I am wondering if we could add an Abstain option also for Council members when voting on motions - and what you think of this idea regarding how it should be designed.

  • Council Keep-Alive
  1. Regarding the special motion category and emergency proposals: would this type of motions follow the same process as an external motion? External motion --> External queue --> Fast-track --> Referendum
  2. I am wondering if Aliveness checks might make the Council too volatile: what about trust referenda, where the community votes on the councillors' performance?

5 years ago

Thanks for this overview.

Re: Council Keep-Alive
I'm glad that the council is getting a revamp that will hopefully keep it growing sturdier in the near future. I'm totally in favour of the Aliveness check: gotta give those runners-up a chance to flex their governance muscles! :)

Re: Blind voting
As you said, there is a requirement for users to take 2 separate actions for 1 vote: this is not strictly-speaking "time consuming", but it still means keeping some time aside in one's schedule.
My concerns are:

  • It is very likely that users will do step 1 and forget entirely about step 2, especially if the blind voting period runs longer than 1 day. Will there will be some form of system alert to remind them to complete step 2?

  • If users don't complete step 2, what will happen to their secret phrase? Does it count at all in the overall turnout? It is important to be clear on this to avoid people feeling like there was a "ballot fraud".

Personally, I think it would be much better to use the labels "Blind voting PHASE" and "Revealing PHASE" when writing the official wiki. The term "phrase" can be misleading for people who aren't familiar with cryptography lingo.

RE: Abstain in AQB
This is good! The more data we have about voters' perspectives, the more transparency in the overall governance wheels. :)

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