[TEMP CHECK] Proposal for Senate to Enable Dedicated Tooling for Aave Governance

Title: [TEMP CHECK] Proposal for Senate to Enable Dedicated Tooling for Aave Governance

Authors: @Kohei and @PauloFonseca from Senate Labs

Date: 2023-09-03

Summary

This proposal aims to get consent from the Aave community to implement a set of dedicated features for Aave’s governance forum, providing the Aave community with a tool to easily stay on top of Aave’s governance activities, to increase the voting participation rate and the number of new voters, and to prevent proposals from not reaching quorum.

Motivation

Decentralized governance is crucial for DAOs/Protocols to be robust and secure, but it can be a significant challenge to stay actively engaged in governance, especially for high-activity governance like Aave. With proposals emerging on different platforms (offchain & onchain) without a schedule, it’s easy for voters to miss out on crucial decisions that can lead to low participation rates or missed quorums. 11 proposals failed to reach quorum in the past year alone and this situation can be a significant stumbling block to Aave’s governance and growth. Senate is a new set of governance facilitation features that reduce the friction of participating in governance. We currently support 30+ DAOs by providing a proposal dashboard and a daily bulletin email to help voters easily stay aware of what’s happening in governance. By implementing a set of dedicated features on Aave, Senate can provide the community with a tool to stay aware of the governance with ease. This can help increase the voting participation rate and the number of new voters, as well as prevent proposals from not reaching quorum.

Specification

The following set of functionality outlines the scope of this proposal, in sequence:

1. Aave governance notification

We’ve built an email governance notification that is dedicated to Aave. This allows delegates and voters to easily stay informed about active proposals (offchain & onchain), including the due time and voting status of each proposal.

2. Subscription widget on the forum

To allow the Aave community to sign up directly from the Aave forum page, we’ve built a widget that enables community members to subscribe to the Aave governance notifications from the Aave governance forum.

3. Quorum threshold notification

To prevent proposals from not reaching quorum, we’ve added support for Aave proposal quorum and created Aave quorum notifications to be sent to voters who haven’t voted in a proposal that is about to end and has not reached quorum yet.

4. Real-time notifications Aave has one of the most active governance, and emergency proposals sometimes require immediate voting by the community. Currently, we send an email governance notification once a day, but we’ve realize that we need to enable real-time notifications to support Aave’s governance needs better. Therefore, we’ve also implemented Discord and Telegram notifications that each user on Senate can set up on the servers or group chats they are admins in, if they so desire, as it can be seen here for Discord and here for Telegram.

Rollout

Since all points in the specification above are already developed and fully tested by the Senate Labs team, the last step missing is to install item number 2, "Subscription widget on the forum", in the official Aave's Governance Discourse Forum.

For that to happen, an Aave Discourse Admin needs to install the Senate Discourse theme component hosted on Senate's repository, and add it to the current active theme of the Aave Governance Forum.

The source code, code quality tests and their results, for this Senate theme component have been previously checked and okay'ed by Aave Companies.

There is also a live demo Discourse forum where the same production widget can be tried and tested by anyone, here.

Additional References

Senate App Senate Twitter Senate Github

Disclaimer

This proposal is written by the Senate Labs team.

Next Steps

If the snapshot outcome is YAE, the Senate Labs “Subscription widget on the forum”, which is a Discourse theme component hosted here, should be installed by an Aave Discourse Admin, on the Aave Governance Forum hosted here.

Copyright

Copyright and related rights waived via CC0.