Problem:

Voter apathy is common in DAOs. This is unsurprising when we compare the amount of time and energy that's necessary to figure out how one should vote vs the potential rewards of voting for small-holders.

Consider the following scenario. A good decision would increase the value of your tokens by 1% (compared to a bad decision). if you have a large holding of tokens, that 1% could represent thousands of dollars, but if you only have a handful, then 1% could represent pennies. Hence, in economic terms, dedicated participation in governance is unsustainable for small-holders.

To decentralise governance, it is thus necessary to redress the balance of incentives for small-holders.

Alternative Solutions to be discarded or explore in parallel:

One way to do this is through delegation. However, on its own, delegation is likely to lead to rather centralised decision making and a principal-agent problem between large-holder politicians and small-holder delegators.

An alternative strategy could be to pay holders for voting, but then this is likely to lead to many people voting at random and thus adding very significant (and dangerous) noise to governance processes.

Vision for this solution:

A decentralised decision economy, where decision-making is rewarded as a service and crowd intelligence (as opposed to group-think or crowd stupidity) is enabled through algorithmically facilitated processes,

Strategy:

Only highly engaged voters are rewarded. Highly engaged members have not only committed their financial capital but also their (perhaps even more precious) time, attention, and social capital to participate in the network. As such, they are unlikely to vote at random as that would potentially damage their community.

Implementation:

SourceCred allows the computation of data from interactions between network participants to generate a numeric output. This output can be used as a reliable enough proxy for member engagement.

We can create a plugin that can capture data from voters (on the Aragon sub-graph) and combine it with the SourceCred output. For voters above a defined engagement threshold, each vote can be translated into rewards.