This is my opinion as a community member and not represent any of my roles as Celo Community moderator and CGP editor.
Thanks for your post and for the productive discussion that formed around it @Thylacine
Here are some points that are very close to my heart:
1. Easy access to voting
When members find it easy to vote, they are more likely to stay engaged with the DAO, contributing not just votes but also ideas, discussions, and other forms of participation that are vital for the DAO’s long-term success. For a mobile-first blockchain like Celo, voting access should be very seamless for smartphone/mobile wallet users. This is not the case if in order to vote you need to use a CLI, Celo Terminal, or if the leading frontend platform that shows the current votes is showing incorrect information or is 1 day off.
I was very excited when the possibility to vote with stCelo was announced in the Celo 2.0 Roadmap, and I was happy to use it 1 month ago when it was implemented (with some bugs). Now is the time to push it and communicate to the community that this possibility is now a reality.
2. Transparency of voters
Accountability is vital for a governance system. If a person or entity has a substantial voting weight in a DAO, be it through capital or delegation, it is in the interest of a DAO that they can be kept accountable for their voting behavior. Otherwise, they can manipulate the DAO without the risk of being exposed. Currently, the Celo Governance vote is mainly influenced by 4 addresses that account on average, for 70-80% of the total votes, and we (as a community) don’t know who this entity are. What I suggest is to adopt a signaling system like the one used on the Arbitrum DAO where under every forum post, all the biggest delegator announce what they are going to vote and why in order to give a reason that goes beyond a vote and be held accountable by the users who delegated to them and choose them as their voice in the governance process. I know that not all the Celo Governance voters are validators with delegated voting power and there might be whales with a lot of voting power with no interest in signaling their choices or revealing their name and I don’t have the solution for that, but maybe in this sense quadratic voting might come to help. I’m also very excited to see solutions like the DVP proposed by @ericnakagawa Celo delegated voting program that will only increase vote diversification and discussion under proposals to foster a more decentralized governance process. Furthermore, I find the implementation of a website like https://snapshot.org/ (already supporting voting with Celo) as a positive step forward to attract more voters on Governance proposals.
On your points:
2. Increase the CELO bond for an application, make it non-refundable
I’m in favor of increasing the Celo bond for an application and we could start a discussion around what’s the best way to do it. I don’t feel so sure to make it non-refundable but maybe a higher bond pegged to a Celo value in $ is something we should explore.
3. There needs to be a cool-down period before the same application can resubmit
I think it is fair, and I like the options you have highlighted, also here happy to start a conversation around the right amount of cool-down period and how to enforce it.
5. Governance Proposals Content
Here I like a lot what @Xochitl suggested differentiating the type of funding requests and allocate a % of the fund in each category. On top of that, I would also like to discuss with the community the possibility to introduce a yearly spending cap for the funds in order to alleviate the selling pressure on Celo token.