Tentatively planning on voting Abstain, tho this could change (in either direction!) as the proposal’s particulars get finalized (as per the last snapshot).
I am reluctant to vote in favor of the proposal given the uncertainty of how to evaluate the risks it could introduce, both in the case of low delegation and high delegation. A decreased quorum threshold in the scenario where total delegation is low runs the obvious risk of governance capture. An unexpectedly high total delegation, on the other hand, could risk a governance standstill due to a quorum threshold being too high to reach (in, e.g., a scenario where a staking proposal incentivizes high delegation but not active participation). Given the novelty of the proposal, I would feel more comfortable voting in favor if these possibilities were more thoroughly modeled and analyzed.
I would prefer, as others have discussed, delegating funds (from the treasury, and/or the AF’s ARB, etc) to an “abstain-only” wallet controlled by a trusted entity like the AF. This is similar to simply lowering the threshold, but not identical; it is functionality allowing a trusted entity to decide when the threshold should be “lowered” on a per-proposal basis. Assuming we trust an entity like the AF to only use this for uncontentious proposals that are near quorum anyway, this avoids both the “low delegation” and “high delegation” risk vectors above (with the added benefit of being generally simpler).
…all that having been said, I recognize that given how close recent proposals have been to fail to hit quorum, some solution is urgent. And since this is the one most readily available (and I don’t see the risks mentioned as decisive deal-breakers), I wouldn’t want to prevent it from passing, providing that a plurality of other delegate are in support of it. Thus, I lean toward “abstain” to help the plurality reach quorum (the irony of which is not lost on me).
Some other miscellaneous important points that came up in the discussion that I wanted to give me thoughts on and/or reiterate:
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Having a fully specced out and audited proposal is not and should not be a requirement for simply suggesting a proposal on this forum for discussion; one of the purposes of discussing things in a public forum is to suss whether it has enough support (and in turn likelihood of passing) to justify putting in the development, audit etc. resources required for implementation.
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This proposal (if it passes) should not be seen as a replacement for initiatives to increase delegation and voter participation; I would suggest that there should still be active work to prevent delegation from approaching the (new) lower end of the quorum, even if that threshold is technically allowed for a passing vote.
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Echoing @krst , active work should be done to coordinate with DAO tooling parties; I believe a number of indexing/ analytics services compute the relevant info from event log data (and not by querying the contract’s getters), so I would guess it likely that this proposal will be a breaking change for them.