How to get more transparency for Catalyst voters?

Governance Project Catalyst
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I’m spending quite a lot of time with Cardano since November as users of the forum may have noticed.

But for the two Catalyst voting rounds since then, I didn’t really assess all the options, but voted some proposals (far from a significant share of all proposals) up or down based on skimming through them in the voting app and gut feeling.

It’s not that important, because my voting power is not that high, but it’s still wrong. There is significant money given out (quite often, it seems, for things that other projects or even individuals give to the community for free, which gives me a little headache). And it should be possible to submit better educated votes.

But going through all of the proposals would be a full-time job during voting time. The assessments are probably there to help a bit, but they also have to be at least skimmed or we could just replace the voting by the assessment. And already looking at all the assessments would take hours.

After one proposal was presented here in the forum (Why are not more presented here? On the other hand, all of them presented here would make the forum quite unusable.), I finally got an Ideascale account. The flood of proposals is a bit better to grasp on a Desktop computer than on a phone, but it’s still overwhelming.

Is there some possibility to safe a list of “I plan to vote for this.”/“I plan to vote against this.”/“I need to evaluate this deeper.” decisions (for me personally) in Ideacale that I am overlooking? I only see “Subscribe” and that’s not what I want and much too broad. Also, importing this list into the voting app would be something between nice and necessary.

Are there other plans to make this whole thing more comprehensible for “just voters”?

Also: Why is there an Input-Output logo on Ideascale? I thought, the Catalyst process and funds are managed by the foundation? And why does the app greet me with a very prominent statement, what Charles himself thinks should be done in the current voting round?

Also also: Seriously?!?
screenshot-2022-03-19-18:04:04

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I’ve been here since mid-2021 and find the voting process time consuming as well. It is not easy, not intuitive and offers a horrible UX. It is doubtful if any changes will be made soon which is unfortunate.

Someone more knowledgable than myself will mention dReps as a solution for most of the voter issues you brought forward.

And actually it was the title is that caught my attention. The irony is an “informed community” is “required” for the dRep process to function according to IOG;s own research paper. Pretty difficult to be informed when there is so much opacity. Transparency is a huge issue.

Voters can share their proposal selection with others using the Voter Tool on CardanoCataly.st if memory serves.

IOHK, IOG are the “owner/operators” of Ideascale. It also appears, based on wallet address and other conversations, that IOG is responsible for the treasury disbursements.

As for Charles’ wants… I care less. CF’s or, to a lesser extent, IOG’s goals would be more appropriate and valuable v. a single person.

Improvements are needed indeed, with many persistent issues that I have no intention of listing. Apparently, some improvements are in motion but are SLOW to progress, as most things in Cardano.

The absolute easiest improvement to Ideascale is, for instance, giving read permissions to anyone visiting the site instead of requiring every voter to create an account in order to read the proposals. When encountering situations that require an account to move forward I will typically leave, never to revisit. We could also go so far as to say this is the same action found across Web2.0 as related to data collection.

The voting app, given its mobility, is the simplest platform to ascertain community sentiment and feedback. Right now it is another over-valued under-utilized resource.

Multiple wallets, on the voting side, do not present any sybil vulnerabilities at this time. One wallet one vote would. Multiple wallets do present other issues within Catalyst but I am not here to debate this. They are an opportunity to increase metrics and accrue Tx fees.

No idea if any of these comments make sense, answer your questions, or puts your mind at ease. Was rather perplexed that no one commented until now.

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Hi HeptaSean,
There are currently a lot of options for voters to look through, but are you sure this is a bad thing? You are not required to vote on every proposal, and voters can take the entire voting week to vote for a few proposal per day if they wish. Personally I think more options gives the voters more power and transparency.
How would you suggest we acquire “better educated votes”? Do you mean more education should be available to the voters, or are you suggesting reducing the number of voters to those deemed (by who?) to be more educated? (this is the direction where dreps is going, where you can choose the option of voting for people to vote for you, which would be more similar to existing political structures than total decentralization where everybody votes on everything)

You can save your votes in the voting app, and cast them when you please, so you can save and edit the votes in the app, and then submit them to the blockchain at anytime during the voting week.

There are many plans to make things more comprehensible for voters, but the reality is that many of the processes are being built and decided on by the community in a decentralized way, so some things take a little time and may not look as organized as they would in a more centralized system. I have witnessed some pretty significant progress and growth in the system over the last year, so I am confident it will continue to improve rapidly. We are just getting started.

Voting with multiple wallets is to allow for every ada to count as a vote. If a person has multiple wallets, they can vote multiple times, with each of their wallets, but I agree this is not very user friendly or intuitive. I suggest looking into eternl wallet if you wish to manage several wallets and vote with all of your voting power.

Hope this helps

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Hmm, to maximise my (very limited) voting power, I’d have to vote down all except the ones I really want – at least the ones that are promising. Not voting on some proposals that might kick out my favourites is not rational.

We can, of course, not forbid people to vote if they did not provide an education certificate. I meant that I want more information from the projects that want to have a ton of money from us.

Exactly ONE project was presented here in the forums. I should vote down all the others, because they obviously don’t want my vote, do they?

Or as @FL13S said:

Yes, the feeling was that they don’t even want me to know what I’m doing there.

That is definitely not enough. It is a horrrible user experience. These are quite elaborate proposals that are best read on the big screen. And then I have no way to annotate them in this Ideascale thingy and shall take an effing spreadsheet for that? And put that by hand from the spreadsheet into the voting app? And if I had more than one wallet then the same again by hand for each wallet?

Not really an excuse, since decentralised community decisions are not there, yet, are they? Did the community decide to use this strange Ideascale thingy? And then lock the proposals away, so you have to create an account to read them? And then need to transfer the account to your phone, because someone (the community?) decided that voting should not be possible on the desktop? Did the community decide to pay IOHK for this subpar voting app?

Of course! The “Seriously?!?” meant the fact that the documented process for voting with multiple wallets was deinstalling the app and installing it again. How could that even go to production? At least, now there seems to be a logout button.

I know Eternl pretty well. Thank you.