[RFC] Should Uniswap Enable a Dedicated Governance Tool for Delegates and Voters?

Governance-Meta
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Hi, everyone. I’m Kohei from Senate Labs. We are building Senate, a governance facilitation tool to address governance apathy and help increase voter participation. We currently support 47 Uniswap voters, and as we consider expanding our scope for Uniswap governance, we wanted to share our proposal to receive feedback from the community before submitting it to Uniswap Foundation.

References

  1. Senate app
  2. Senate Github
  3. Senate Twitter

Summary

The purpose of this grant proposal is to enhance Uniswap governance capabilities through the implementation of dedicated features. These features are designed to increase the voting participation rate, attract new voters and make sure proposals reach quorum by providing Uniswap community with a tool to easily stay aware of the governance.

About Senate

Senate is a new set of governance facilitation features that make participation in DAO governance easier. We reduce the friction in governance by aggregating all active proposals (offchain & onchain) along with due time, voting status, and quorum status for each proposal in one place.

Usage metrics:

  • Currently, 47 voters are following Uniswap’s governance through Senate

Previous work:

Others:

Deliveries

We currently support 30+ DAOs by providing a proposal dashboard and a daily bulletin email to help their voters easily stay aware of what’s happening in governance. However, each DAO’s governance is unique. To continue contributing to Uniswap governance, we concluded that we should implement features that are tailored to Uniswap.

The following work packages detail the project scope:

1) Uniswap governance notifications

We will build a notification that is designed for Uniswap governance. It will enable delegates and voters to easily stay informed about active proposals (both offchain and onchain), including the due time, voting status and quorum of each proposal.

Uniswap_Daily_Bulletin

2) Subscription button on the forum

To enable the community to easily subscribe to the governance notifications directly from Uniswap page, we will implement a Uniswap-themed subscription button that can be integrated into the Uniswap forum.

Uniswap_Forum_Integration

3) Quorum threshold notifications

To ensure proposals reach quorum, we will add support for Uniswap proposal quorum and implement Uniswap-themed quorum notifications to be sent to voters who have not yet cast their votes in proposals that are about to end without quorum.

Uniswap_Quorum_Email

4) Enabling Slack, Telegram, and Discord notifications

Although email is currently the only channel we support for sending governance notifications, we recognize that many Uniswap delegates, particularly blockchain clubs and professional delegates predominantly use Telegram, Discord, or Slack. As a result, we will be expanding our support to include Slack, Telegram, and Discord as additional notification channels.

Why integrate Senate with Uniswap?

To ensure the security and resilience of protocols, decentralized governance is crucial. However, actively participating in governance can be challenging due to proposals emerging on different platforms (offchain or onchain) without a set schedule. As a result, it’s easy for voters to miss out on crucial decisions.

Moreover, Uniswap’s multi-chain expansion has led to a significant increase in the number of proposals over the past 4 months. It is reasonable to expect that this number will continue to rise as more deployments are made and the cross-chain governance space is further explored.

By implementing the dedicated toolings listed above, Uniswap can provide the community with an easy way to stay aware of the governance. This can help increase the voting participation rate and the number of new voters, as well as make sure proposals reach quorum.

KPI we expect to achieve

Senate aims to improve the following key metrics

  • Voter participation marginal increase
  • Number of net new voters increase
  • Forum participation increase

Grant Size

We would like to request $5K for implementing the tools listed above + expanding notification channels + conducting a test pilot for 3 months.

Next steps

  1. Discuss concerns or questions regarding the integration of Senate
  2. If there is enough community consensus, we will apply to Uniswap Foundation
  3. Once it’s approved, we will start implementing
  4. After 3 months from the integration date, we will share the results of the changes to the KPIs

Disclosure

We have recently received a grant from AGD to integrate Senate with Aave, and some of the backend work overlaps in the implementation of governance notifications. Therefore, we plan to concentrate solely on Uniswap and Aave for the next 3 months and develop dedicated features to address the issue.

9 Likes
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Love what you guys are doing and believe anything that incentivizes or aids more participation is worth exploring. Senate to me sounds like an optimized version of discourse email updates, something I know would be super helpful for staying up to date on governance for me. Out of curiosity:

  1. Does Senate have a way to mitigate spam given its increase of late (airdrop proposals and what not)?
  2. How can we ensure that contributor data stays safe and is not abused.
  3. Will you be monetizing users in anyway?
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Thank you @MattOnChain for taking the time to consider our proposal and shareing your valuable questions.

Regarding your inquiries:

  1. In order to ensure Senate remains impartial and neutral, we will never filter out/hide any on-chain or off-chain proposal, the only exception being canceled or deleted ones.

  2. We value users’ privacy. Please have a look at our privacy policy and cookie policy.
    In order to subscribe to Uniswap governance notifications, users can use proxy email addresses and burner wallets while tracking the activity of any voting address.

  3. While we are considering the possibility of adding additional premium features, existing Senate features and the features outlined in this proposal will always remain free and will not be subject to monetization.

1 Like
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We are in support of this proposal. Fragmented information around DAO governance is still one of the main friction we experience. We are looking forward to the additional work packages, especially point 4.

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Thanks @kohei Having bumped into the team at various governance forums and chats, I can defiantly say that they are a dedicated bunch with a goal to help DAOs improve governance. Since this is not a huge ask to test these features within uniswap gov. I do recommend the team to gather key stats before and after the implementation to be able to efficiently update the community on the long term benefits of this integration.

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Thank you for supporting our proposal @BristolBlockchain
We’ve been chatting with Uniswap Foundation for a while and should be able to share an update soon!

FYI we just released one of point 4, the discord governance notification so check it out: https://twitter.com/SenateLabs/status/1673364971881742346?s=20

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Thanks for your support and sharing feedback on our proposal @jengajojo
We’ll ensure that key stats are gathered in advance and the results from the integration with Senate are analysed. We’ve been chatting with Uniswap Foundation for a while so should be able to share an update about this grant soon!

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Thanks for letting us know!

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We’re thrilled to share that Uniswap Governance Notification has been successfully integrated into the Uniswap Forum!

So that anyone can set up email notifications to easily stay informed about Uniswap’s active proposals (both offchain and onchain), including their due time, voting status, and quorum status.

Starting from the implementation date, we will closely monitor the governance metrics to assess its impact. Also your valuable feedback and requests are most welcome, so please feel free to reach out to us anytime (tg id: @koheingt)

UF Announcement: https://twitter.com/UniswapFND/status/1684244342045650951?s=20
Tagging some community members: @MattOnChain @BristolBlockchain @jengajojo

Uniswap_announcement

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I come bearing a crucial update regarding Senate and our integration with the Uniswap forum.

After thorough consideration, we have made the difficult decision to shut down Senate, including the app and its associated company.

All the promised features, including Uniswap Governance Notification, Subscription Button, Quorum Threshold Notifications, and Slack, Telegram, Discord Notifications, have been successfully developed and can be found in our repo. However, we regret to inform you that we won’t be able to provide the above features from our end (last notifications were sent on Sep 25).

We sincerely regret having to share this update. Despite discontinuing Senate, all the dedicated features for Uniswap are fully open-sourced. We would be grateful if these resources prove useful for the Uniswap ecosystem.

Our commitment to supporting decentralized governance remains strong, and we are still motivated to explore new ways to contribute to the Uniswap community and the degov space as a whole.

If you have any questions, please feel free to reach out.
You can find me on Telegram with the handle @koheingt.

1 Like
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Sad to hear but thanks for your update Kohei

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