The second sentence doesn’t follow from the first. Incentives aren’t going to make votes meaningful to the point where stakeholders see it as being in their benefit to participate in governance, whether by voting, delegating actively, or engaging in discussions.
I do agree we should at minimum consider short-term solutions to juice productive participation, but the more I think about it the more it seems clear to me that we simply need to foster an environment where voting matters, and that’s more of a long game. In the meantime, as much as I hate to say this, it could be acceptable to have less participation and more concentration with an eye toward making votes count, the same way the network itself isn’t sufficiently decentralized though we have the intention of making it so. The most important thing is laying down the infrastructure so we can grow and build for success.
The conditions I’m imagining as prerequisites for the kind of participation we want:
- broad participation in the network itself (in terms of users and projects) as a share of all crypto
- both token house and citizen house in a semi-mature state of operation
- at least one round of RFPG in the books
- successful round of governance grants; i.e., grants with results exceeding expectations
These ensure there’s a sufficient participation base and a demonstration of the promise and intent of distributing grants as a governance
These are off the top of my head so might be incomplete, but this is all to say that we should be looking forward to what the world needs to look like for voting to matter, rather than reacting to the state of things with band-aid solutions.