We thank @Tane for all the effort put into this. We had a great conversation at the Uniswap workshop in Denver about the proposal, and are happy to see it has made its way to the forum.
Generally speaking, we’re for the idea of broadening the delegate set. Ideally, we should try to do more than simply extend it, but add specific expertise we believe the DAO is either lacking or could strengthen.
For example, how is “underrepresented” being defined here? Is it just the fact that these delegates hold a too small amount of voting power to be deemed influential in governance? Obviously if we need to increase delegations because we think we have quorum issues, that’s fine and we get that. But we believe it would be more useful to categorise areas of expertise that the DAO could benefit from having/adding, and tie this “underrepresentation” to that and add delegates accordingly. We think permissionless tech and ethos is great in many ways, but we also think that DAOs should try to incorporate more meritocratic principles. At some point, and we are probably not there yet, just adding additional “proposal reviewers” may not bring much more value to a DAO.
We also agree with @Juanbug on the significance of proposal making. If anything, proposals at least provide some form of proxy for “real” contributions. Circling back to “underrepresentation”, there seem to be this notion of “fairness” floating around where supposedly anyone should be able to join the paid delegate set as long as they show up for every vote and community call. While participation rates are clearly important, the fact is that anyone can do that. Getting a proposal through governance not only requires effort, but usually also a deeper understanding of Uniswap in one way or another. Having said that, it does become tricky in situations where delegates are pushing proposals as part of another committee or working group gig they are already getting paid for, and by extension of merely doing that job, they get to secure their place in the rewards program.
We would also like to see a cap on the final voting power that these newly selected delegates can gain as a result of this program. As we understand it, participation in the program will be filtered by setting a maximum amount of VP that anyone interested in applying cannot exceed. Selected delegates will then receive a fixed amount depending on which tier they’re selected for, and as we understand, this number may be as much as 2M VP. This means that if we have an initial max VP threshold of 1-1.5M VP, said delegates could end up with 3-3.5M VP via the program (these VP numbers are examples, but you get the point). We think this would be discouraging to many of the delegates that have been involved with Uniswap for years who are currently sitting at around 2.5M VP (including us), and don’t think it makes sense to fast-track new delegates to the same level of influence unless they bring unique knowledge and capacity that the DAO can benefit from. Instead, better to structure the program so that selected delegates can be topped up to a set bar of say 2m total VP, which would only require some minor Excel calculations to figure out. Maybe a time-centred variable could also be included to allow smaller delegates with a significant participation history in Uniswap to apply.
Just some of our thoughts at this point - thanks again @Tane and looking forward to see how the program develops!