Tuning Guidelines

Authors: BlockScience and SDF, July 2023

Quorum Delegation can be tuned to capture phenomena within a community. Besides parametrizing, additional logical adjustments can be made.

• Tuning Story 1: When to change the quorum sizes (eg. max quorum candidates or minimum quroum size)

  • Candidate Pool: The quorum candidates are limited by the maximum amount of other users that might be taken as input for a quorum. Setting this value lower requires users to put more thought into their choice, but might result in insufficient active voters to succesfully come to a quorum agreement. Setting this value higher allows users to make a wider selection of candidates, but could result in unintended outcomes for the user if his primary candidates do not actively vote, leaving only back-up candidates for the quorum.

  • Quorum Size: Allowing lower quorum sizes can increase flexibility for users, such as allowing for traditionally known delegation with only 1 other user being delegated to. However, low quorum sizes can increase the likelihood of users accidentally abstaining due to their delegates not voting. Setting a higher minimum requires users to choose more candidates, which decreases the effect of individual delegates. At the same time, this increases the cost of time for users to delegate.

  • Candidates vs Quorum Size:

    • Setting the maximum amount of candidates equal to the quorum size increases the risk of a user accidentally abstaining, as no further candidates can be drawn from to form a successful quorum. Increasing the gap between candidates and quorum size allows for a higher likelihood of a succesful quorum, while also increasing the risk of less representative voting outcomes if backup candidates do not reflect a users opinion as accurate.

• Tuning Story 2: When to change the absolute / relative agreement thresholds?

  • A quorum comes to an agreement (which results in a user voting with their choice) only when a certain number of quorum members actively vote, and when these quorum members reach a set agreement threshold.

    • Setting the minimum number of actively voting quorum members:

      Lowering the fraction of required active votes increases the likelihood of a successful delegation vote, while also increasing the potential effects of individual delegates. Raising the fraction of required active votes decreases the likelihood of a successful delegation vote, while also decreasing the potential effects of individual delegates.

    • Setting the absolute agreement threshold: A community might face a decision where the expected impact is highly specialized. Increasing the absolute majority threshold can result in quorum votes to only be counted when quorums are in high agreement, while a larger band is allocated for non-voting due to missing agreement.

• Tuning Story 3: When to disable/enable re-delegation?

  • Re-delegation of votes - as in User A delegates to User B, while User B delegates to User C - can enable more complex voting scenarios to be represented. As an example, a community might face a decision that only a smaller subset is truly knowledgeable about, while this subset is not widely known. Allowing for redelegation could channel voting decisions through this community, until it reaches those who are more certain about their vote. However, this increases the risk of many users abstaining, as circular delegation can result in quorums not reaching their agreement thresholds.

• Tuning Story 4: What to do if there are more than yes/no/abstain actions?

  • Currently, Quorum Delegation represents three choices - yes, no, abstain. However, certain decisions require more nuanced representation and might require voters to pick a parameter value that they see as most representative of their opinion. In such a case, Quorum Voting could help to aggregate values picked by a representative sample chosen by the user. In this scenario, QD would need to be tuned to accept values, aggregate them, then provide as output a direct vote by the user on the aggregated value.

• Tuning Story 5: Deciding internal Quorum Votes through vote or voting power?

  • In the reference PoC implementation, a quorum's outcome is decided by individual votes of delegates. This puts equal importance on each quorum member. Alternatively, one might decide that the voting power of each member should factor into the internal vote decision, or that users could set individual weights for quorum candidates (which can be somewhat similarly enabled through allowing users to set the same candidate more than once for their quorum).