DFINITY Foundation

Internet Computer Association

Disable default following for proposals on the governance topic and weigh the voting rewards based on the topic

## 1. Intro: Changes to governance proposals and voting reward weights

Today, before the proposed change, all proposals are rewarded equally. This means that automatic voting through following on exchange rate proposals, which happens every 10 minutes (circa 144 times per day) and maintenance proposals (typically 1-6 per weekday) provide the same voting rewards as a deliberate manual vote on a motion proposal. This means that neuron holders deliberating and manually voting on motion proposals have a negligible impact on their voting rewards.

This proposal, by Johan Granstrom, is to make two changes to incentivize more community participation in the governance process.

You can read forum conversation here: https://forum.dfinity.org/t/changes-to-governance-proposals-and-voting-reward-weights-proposal/9172

### a. Disable default following for proposals on the governance topic

First, we want to disable default following for proposals on the governance topic (which currently includes motion and uninstall proposals). The main reason for this change is that most neurons follow the beacon neuron of the Internet Computer Association (neuron #28) as this has been the default value since Genesis. For most neuron holders, it makes sense to follow the ICA beacon neuron for maintenance proposals, like adding and removing nodes and upgrading the replica version. However, for governance proposals, the ICA or the DFINITY Foundation should not be the arbiters. While we encourage neuron holders to deliberate and manually vote governance proposals, neuron holders that do not want to manually vote on governance proposals can still configure their neurons to explicitly follow a neuron or set of neurons that they trust on the governance topic.

### b. Weigh the voting rewards based on the topic

Second, we want to weigh the voting rewards based on the topic so that exchange rate proposals receive a much smaller weight (our proposal is 0.01) and governance proposals (motions in particular) gain a much higher weight (our proposal is 20). Proposals on other topics have a weight of one.

## 2. Motivation for the proposal

In a typical week, the total weight of exchange rate proposals will be roughly 10 (144 * 7 * 0.01) and maintenance proposals will add up to a weight in the range of 5 to 30 (based on historical data).

As a significant portion of voting rewards will now come from voting on governance proposals, neuron holders have a strong incentive to either vote directly on all governance proposals or explicitly configure their neurons to follow such proposals.

## 3. Further background 

Neuron holders have been able to change their default followees since Genesis, as well as specifying overrides for specific topics, but this feature is not yet widely used.

As a final note, if this proposal is adopted, the NNS dapp user interface will be updated to say *All Topics Except Governance* instead of *All Topics*.

## 4. Consequences of this motion

a. If it passes, there will be subsequent NNS proposals to update the code of the NNS Dapp and NNS

b. If this proposal fails, the status quo will remain.