We are starting some work on Nouns governance in a project we are calling Governance Experiments And Research or “GEAR.” We put together a brief outline of our plans in prophouse the other day if you’re interested in our approach.
The first step is to conduct a survey of Nouns governance participants with the primary goal of generating a prioritized list of research topics.
Before we put together that survey, we wanted to solicit some input from the community on what they see as the biggest opportunities to improve governance. Get it off your chest in this thread.
Also glad to answer any questions you have related to this effort.
Ragequit: perhaps the most interesting thing to consider as a pressure against treasury attacks; it’s been discussed a lot and there are a bunch of tradeoffs.
Per-NFT delegation: seems to me like an obvious feature; I think we have all-or-nothing delegation due to inheriting code from ERC-20-based governance. Nowadays big holders move Nouns to different wallets to split up their delegates and it sucks; it’s even worse for sub DAOs to manage.
Using voting delay: currently Nouns DAO takes vote snapshots upon prop creation, so you can’t move your delegation once a prop is live. I don’t have any strong inputs from Nouners that this bothers them, it just seems like a good idea to snapshot when voting starts, to give people time to move their delegation if they disagree with their delegates on a prop they care about.
a few things come to mind (some of which are being worked on right now!)
my philosophy here is that i think governance can be improved by reducing friction as much as possible. governance IS work - there is no way around it - and for people to want to do it, and keep doing it, it should be as painless as possible for Nouners to access information and tools
simple tool on homepage to delegate votes
more information on voting page on delegation
multi-tiered proposals - right now each proposal is totally unlinked, but if we were to be voting on tranche 2 of a proposal based on certain milestones being me, it would be nice to see it all in one place
edit: the first 2 of the things i mentioned both were addressed in an update yesterday
The goals of the survey are to vibe check the beliefs of the community around governance and generate research questions. It’s meant to be unopinionated and focus on general questions.
An example of how the survey results could be used:
Let’s say one of the findings is “Nouners tend to think the governance process is simple to understand but Proposal writers think it’s confusing” (made up example)
A research question that could arise is “How can we make the governance process more approachable for proposal writers.”