Proposal: Nounish Vibe Checks - on-chain sentiment polls

What is it

An on-chain measure of Nouns voter sentiment

Nouns voters may be asked to:

• Temperature check upcoming onchain proposals
• Align on social norms (e.g. “what is nounish”)
• Form consensus on goals and targets

Anybody can create a poll but only polls created by Nouners or delegates will be automatically broadcast to the community.

How does it proliferate Nouns

An on-chain sentiment polling tool improves the efficacy of the governance process.

• Voters want to establish norms and best practices to reduce governance overhead
• Voters want to align on goals for the DAO
• Voters want more opportunities to learn about and discuss proposals
• Proposers want to gauge sentiment for their ideas before putting them on chain

This complements discourse but has a better chance of being a schelling point for sentiment because it’s on-chain and easier to participate in (just vote vs post).

How does it work

To start, we can use snapshot and a discord channel as an MVP.

• Create a snapshot poll with the naming convention NVC###
• Polls created by Nouners and delegates get cross-posted to a the #nouns-vibe-checks channel in discord
• The channel contains threads only

Over time, we can automate everything or build our own system similar to Maker’s Governance Polls. Would want to see decent adoption and usefuless before investing in that.

Example

• Someone approaches the DAO with a proposal to fund a political donation
• As we discuss it, it seems like many think that political donations are not Nounish
• To gauge sentiment, someone puts up a NVC asking “Should Nouns avoid funding all political causes” with the options Yes and No.
• This NVC is posted in the discord channel and people can discuss there
• The result after a week is that 90% of voters agreed Yes
• Now every time a political proposal comes through, we can link to this NVC instead of rehashing the topic

Who is managing this

Nounsintern will manually bootstrap this

Ask

Just the appropriate rolls to moderate the discord channel. May need snapshot admin as well to enable delegated voting.

I’d be open to a retro grant later on but my plan is to propose the funding of a Metagovernance Working Group down the line after I’m convinced I can repeatedly create value for the DAO with these experiments.

Disclaimer: I haven’t been actively involved in a DAO that uses temperature checks like this so I don’t have an actual sense of how it creates efficiency versus complications, so thoughts below are theoretical not based on experience.

One concern I have with this approach is whether ppl will come to think that the lower stakes & lower participation temp check polls come to be viewed as “how the DAO views X matter”. Contentious things like whether the DAO should fund political donations are a perfect example. If the temp check has too much weight, then now I have to vote on every temp check (or at least need to be scanning the temp check for contentious things I might care about) since I don’t want it up somewhere that the DAO thinks X or Y on some contentious matter without having expressed my view. If the temp check has too little weight, then it’s not really useful?

So the concern is that it has issues on both ends of how much weight it has. Maybe it has a perfect mid point where it’s enough signal for it to be useful, but not enough so that ppl don’t consider it as gospel (or outsiders don’t use it to paint a false picture of how the DAO thinks), and it all works beautifully. I’m open to that possibility esp since I don’t have first hand experience of such a layered token voting governance system, but initially I’m a bit skeptical.

This is a really great framing of the trade-offs @noun40 thanks a lot for the input.

Let’s focus on people taking them “too seriously” because temp checks having insufficient weight for people to care about is the same as them not existing.

The potential benefit of the temp checks is more efficient (less overhead) and more effective (better result) process.

The potential cost is the new overhead of the temp checks themselves.

It’s a win if the efficiency+effectiveness outweighs the overhead and vice versa.

I don’t think we can know for sure which it is unless we try it. So the question is if the DAO is motivated enough to try it.

Yeah, so my main concern is that if we focus on ppl taking them “too seriously” then you loose much of the efficiency (less nouners having to pay attention/vote or engage in the dialogue). You might as well just use an on-chain voting as the temp check at that point is the counter argument.

With Nerman (Prop 77) I have plans to create a #nouner-poll channel for informal polling in Discord. Anyone with a Nouner roll in Discord can create a poll (/nerman create-poll), it’s off-chain, not weighted (one vote per Noun holding discord user), a very informal consensus tool. I imagine it being useful for things like simple contests where Nouners pick their favorite selection to allocate a prize, AB testing language in DAO proposals, general group questions and tomfoolery.

This is well underway, hoping to demo and launch Nerman’s voting functionality soon. I think an on-chain solution could also be interesting, don’t mean to discourage any dev work, but echo 40’s thoughts about taking the results too seriously. I generally think Nouns DAO’s true opinion on anything contentious can only be found with an actual on-chain DAO vote.

On-chain proposals should be reserved for on-chain state changes like transferring funds or changing a protocol parameter. Because of that, you can’t use it to ask a question like “Should the DAO fund political causes” or “Should the DAO make equity investments in private companies.” You could argue that we shouldn’t even need to ask those questions and instead just put proposals on chain to do those things and let the votes for individual proposals do the talking, but if you want to get a sense for where the DAO stands on those issues, it’s a lot more work to look through all of the proposals of that category and approximate an answer rather than look at the results of a sentiment poll.

As for Nerman, that sounds really useful! My personal view is that we should be trying to use transparent, verifiable protocols for anything integral to the protocol, but centralized shortcuts are useful until those protocols exist and are adopted.