The main question should be “How to balance power in our governance processes, taking into the account low engagement and current distribution of tokens and influence?”
What I see here is an idea that a delegate voting tool is a holy grail of governance.
From our history and experience we know that delegate voting is not working in the most of traditional systems, so what will make it work in decentralised?
The answer to it is “method”. Yes, some new innovative or old and proved method of application of delegate voting. So yes, experimenting is a great idea, trying to apply this tool to a specific processes, testing on possible attacks, comparing results - looking for a method! But not shifting all the DAO to it - sorry guys, with my great respect to you, I have to say it - is a horrible idea!
Why is it bad?
Because of distribution of power
Based on the fresh analytics dGov: Participation in Discord and Forum, we have strong leadership influence over the information flow. That means that few people are pushing the agenda - few people influencing political capital. This is normal and happens in any social group, I highly appreciate energy and hard work these leaders put into the Aragon Network
Also we all know about token distribution - we have few whales that are also influencing decisions simply because they have more of political capital. This is also normal and it happens in any free market.
So what will happen when we will shift to delegate voting only?
These 2 classes of people will find a way to meet each other and communicate privately: Influencers will look for Electorate and whales will look for Lobbyists. And we all know how this works in a real world when whales and influencers working together for their own benefit.
How to fix this?
Hence, the four great strands of democratic decision making: direct democracy, representative democracy, participatory democracy, and deliberative democracy cannot be viewed as inherently practically or morally superior to one another. Rather, you need to see which types of decisions can reasonably be made by which forms of democratic governance.
3 Design Principles for Protopian Governance | by Hanzi Freinacht | Medium
By diluting the power of few and empowering many.
It doesn’t actually mean to redistribute tokens or increase governance engagement, it simply means to setup an open and inclusive process of empowerment - give anyone a guided way to participate in every stage of a decision. We will always have leaders, influencers, investors and whales, what we need is an equilibrium of power maintained via collective intelligence.
So lets get back to the question we need to ask: How to balance the power?
The most effective method was to create interconnected institutions - organisations of specific culture and procedures, like legislative, judicial and executive branches of power (Lately we understood that media is also branch of power, only hidden). Why exactly this institutions? Simply based on decision-making process: we agree on an action, comply this agreement with current rules, execute an action and report results so we can agree on the next action. Does it look familiar to the sub-DAOs structure? yes, indeed.
As a regular member of our community, contributor, I don’t want to repeat history, I am here because of opposite - I want to create history!) we are all here because we believe in a decentralised governance as an evolution of human cooperation and we are looking and creating and testing new methods and tools.
As a solution I propose a procedure of agreement with formal debate-based meetings and open and inclusive participation. Procedure, that we will record and share with the network, showing that governance is not so complex as it looks like for a regular member trying to navigate in a forum, discord and notion. Procedure that anybody can join at any moment, can contribute by the idea, question, argument or a vote.
During this procedure we will outline all the questions and issues we need to address to effectively update the charter and find how to govern better together.