We thought about this for a bit and are willing to support it. In a vacuum, we would be opposed to lowering quorum like this but the DAO is making a lot of big changes in favor of efficiency and we believe it’s better to rip this band-aid off now along with everything else instead of making this a problem that we will have to deal with while trying to keep things streamlined later. In response to one thing that was mentioned:
We’d like to note that this scenario is addressed in the governance docs, and the Security Council could keep the chain running, but it’s obviously a worst case situation and if we can avoid it through social consensus, we should.
Scenario 8: The Arbitrum DAO experiences a season of voter apathy.
Will this prevent work from being done on the chains that the Arbitrum DAO owns?
No, voter apathy won’t prevent work from being done on the chains that the Arbitrum DAO owns. The Constitution allows for non-emergency actions to be taken, which don’t require the approval of token holders. The Security Council has the power to perform emergency actions with a 9-of-12 approval, which can be used to address critical issues that cannot wait for voter approval. While voter participation is important for the proper functioning of the DAO, the Constitution has built-in mechanisms to ensure that work can continue to be done even in the event of low voter turnout.
Note that voter apathy could have an impact on the governance of the DAO, and certain decisions and actions might not be as representative of the community’s collective will if voter turnout is low.
Non-emergency action
Routine actions taken by the Security Council, such as software upgrades and maintenance.
We also remain generally pessimistic about increases in governance participation and we anticipate there will be more ARB coming out of the treasury in the near future further increasing quorum so we think it’s best to get ahead of this now. Lastly, we want to mention that while this is meant to be a short-term change, we’ve seen that technical upgrades to the DAO’s governance systems can take a while to get through the whole pipeline of deliberation, development, and implementation. If we know that a technical way to adjust quorum or increase governance participation isn’t likely to come soon, we might want to define a way now to adjust quorum as needed instead of having this discussion repeatedly. For example allowing the AAEs to monitor delegate voting activity and make changes as they see fit. As mentioned by other delegates, the Security Council can also take Emergency Actions to mitigate any potential harm to the chain.