ghost
commented
5 years ago See TLDR & suggestions below I have this problem too. I joined Politeia this week and there were 7 proposal in pre-voting and voting phase. Even for the simple but well prepared proposal like one for YT videos took time to read properly the proposal and comments, and then understand the choices being made like price, future usefulness, details of content, revisions etc. this easily takes few hours. since this proposal was already in voting stage nothing further was possible but i still provided feedback about why this is a good/bad proposal so those who had not voted yet can make a better decision. and then i voted.
For a proposal that is in pre-voting apart from above i asked questions about things that were not clear to me and got answers on them. This question-answer cycle question takes abot 12-24 hours (mostly due to timezones and when people are free i guess) in my short experience with 3-4 proposals Sometimes it takes 2 or 3 such cycles to get clear understanding and answers. Sometimes i had to post links to my comment in chat to get answers, some of them were given in chat which then i had to link back to Politeia in my own comment.
Based on above i think at the very least a week of pre-voting period should be default and i recommend 2 weeks as optimal for someone who missed a proposal being submitted.
This was one side of the problem from stakeholder point of view. Other side of problem is that submitters have experienced no engagement when they submit the proposal on Politeia. This has led to people first discussing it in chats and then on reddit before submitting it to Politeia. This leads to whole process of refinement from draft to final submission remaining undocumented and unarchived on Politeia. Also this might be the reason for low engagement later on Politeia. People have answered that question i am asking was already discussed elsewhere, probably in chats/reddit and probably implying that i should have been involved then to receive the answer and i am just repeating past discussion. I assume this as no links were provided to these past discussions. This is the disadvantage of not doing this process on Politeia, not everyone is or can be present in all chat/platforms all the time and valuable discussion is lost.
So to summarize
- Even simple proposals can have nuanced discussion/decisions that require time.
- Due to timezones & busy schedule, question-answer cycle can take 12-24 hours.
- A week seems just enough but not optimal for this process, 10-14 days seems optimal.
- There is also a problem of people not wanting to comment on Politeia, even the people submitting proposals.
- Discussion outside politeia (in chats/reddit) is not visible and thus does not help when engaging or voting on a proposal, probably a cause of further low engangement on Politeia.
Suggestions to improve
- Make 10-14 days as default for pre-voting, which can be expedited by Admins after 7 days if there are no unanswered comments and, they and submitter feel it is okay to do so.
- Encourage submitters to do draft to final version editing on politeia itself instead of chat platforms and allow people to submit comments on draft versions which can be moved to a separate tab or can be viewed by selecting draft versions from version dropdown, later once the proposal is finalized. This way people can see all past discussion and won't ask already answered questions. I think this is why Politeia has comments and edit facility for proposals, which is not getting used.
- To motivate people to engage on Politeia, maybe announce once a day or every other day via twitter handle @@slices_of_pi when a proposal is in drafting or pre voting phase. This can make more people aware of a proposal in a pre voting phase.
- Give special flair to people in chats for commenting on Politeia if possible, can do this in discord but most people are on slack. A little social status incentive.
More suggestions are welcome.
xaur
This issue captures a concern that pre-vote discussion and vote itself are too short, which may negatively affect comment and vote engagement.
Personal "late voter" perspective: studying a typical proposal easily takes me 2+ hours. If several proposal surface concurrently, I need some 8-10 hours to form opinions and come up vote choices for the batch. When proposals show up on Politeia, they sort of demand that I allocate time among other activities, usually within ~1 week. As a result, I barely make it with some proposals, and a few I skipped entirely.
This is a manifestation of the "attention span" problem that was anticipated well before the launch of Politeia. People are busy and can only afford X hours per week on the proposal activity.
Perhaps I'm just bad at organizing my time and this issue is to learn if many people are having this problem. If not, close this issue and use it as a reference.
As a general rule, I would suggest longer discussion and voting windows for proposals with bigger impact (in both spend and policy). For anything larger than $50K, I think a default should be 14 days to discuss on Politeia and 14 days to vote.
One idea to study the problem better is to survey how long people spend to decide on an average proposal.
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