Hey @amanwithwings,
Thank you for the detailed proposal!
I’m not sure now is the right time to pursue a report on governance participation among tokenholders, given we’re in a bear market and participation is down across the board for a variety of reasons. The main priorities for the Foundation and DAO teams are outlined in the Nexus Mutual Roadmap. While growth is the number one priority, it’s unclear how the analytics you’re proposing would contribute to increased engagement.
On voter fatigue
While we have various governance discussions happening now, new on-chain votes for all members or DAO Snapshot votes usually occur on a quarterly cadence. For example:
- There have been two (2) on-chain votes in 2023 so far.
- There have been three (3) Snapshot votes in 2023 so far, with 2 of the 3 votes being signalling votes.
I don’t think voter fatigue is a contributing factor to lower engagement rates on governance votes. The Community team is working with Marketing to better understand where our members are viewing governance updates. I’ve been working to rearrange the forum to make it easier to contribute, engagement, and navigate governance discussions within the mutual. Through this and other work, we’re looking to make it easier to stay up-to-date and engaged.
On NXM token holder profiles
Here, I think, the information could be valuable, but I can view some existing data on Deep DAO about the mutual here. This only captures Snapshot votes, which only applies to the DAO treasury and not on-chain governance, which is where any vote regarding (1) Upgrades, Technical Changes, Use of Funds or (2) Critical Decisions happen. I don’t see this information included on DeepDAO currently and it’s not included in the stated methodology.
On a whole, I do think it’s important that anyone who takes on this work understands the different ways that members engage with the mutual (i.e., NXM stakers, staking pool managers, claims assessors, governance participants, etc.). I’m not sure the proposed analysis would capture the data the Community team would need to drive further engagement.
On timing
On the whole, we’re in a bear market during the summer months and participation has been trending downward across many protocols over the last few months. In the future, this kind of in-depth research could be valuable, but I’d prefer to revisit such a proposal once the new tokenomics project has been completed and the various teams contributing to the protocol have progressed on our current 6-month roadmap and high-level objectives.
I’d be in favour of picking this discussion up in 6 months and talking about changes to the methodology.