Interesting, I see the main arguments for shorter delegations are desire to experiment, expectation that the delegates need to prove their worth to the DAO, and fear that they will become inactive with time.
I suppose the DAO should not delegate to unworthy/unaligned organizations or individuals in the first place, but if that happens, an emergency vote of no confidence can be called outside the normal process.
As for inactivity, ideally we would have some way how to see the voting activity of an address on-chain, from the upgraded Franchiser contract, so that DAO treasury delegates who have become inactive can be automatically removed. Brevis or similar coprocessors could help. A less ideal alternative would be to have an off-chain solution for the same.
For longer delegation periods I see these arguments:
- from a delegate’s standpoint, reduced uncertainty about whether it will continue to be able to post proposals and meaningfully contribute to quorum after the initial 12 months
- reduced campaigning overhead for re-election, and other overheads for the DAO
- precedents from other delegations - to my knowledge, third party tokenholders tend to delegate for 3 years or longer. In addition, these parties exercise almost no control / quality assurance over their delegates, while the DAO would do that.
The first two points are especially important for non-professional delegates such as developers and other aligned actors that we want to attract to the program.