Thanks for creating this thread @Ugbuericsam, it’s an important topic! So important, that we’ve recently hired a Strategic Delegation Lead to focus solely on this problem space.
To respond to some of your ideas:
Minimum Activity Standards for Delegates: Delegates must maintain 70% voting participation to maintain delegation through governance programs and/or to receive governance participation rewards. Removing someone’s delegation as a result of voting participation would be a violation of tokenholder rights but they could be marked as “inactive” and would be ineligible for governance programs and participation rewards.
Clear Designation for Retired or Inactive Delegates: Agree! There is a process for this and Agora does show “inactive status” for these delegates (see Linda’s profile, who resigned.)
Notifications for Inactive Delegates: Agree! We are experimenting with Agora on different type of email notifications for voters. In terms of the ability for delegates to reassign their delegation if they resign or no longer wish to vote, it’s a functionality that requires an upgrade to the OP token contract, which should be a one-time event that will need to occur to enable interoperabliity.
On incentivizing participation: I would encourage everyone to think about whether this tactic is the most effective tactic to achieving the (assumed) ultimate goal of having an incentive aligned, highly knowledgable, and very active voter base. I think the work to be done is probably more related to finding participants that have those characteristics and non-monetary motivations to participate, but this is a harder problem to solve.