Dynamic Council Importance/Powers

I am posting here for visibility but it would be great if you could join the discussion directly on PA for purposes of keeping it all in one place: https://kusama.polkassembly.io/post/1321

Dear community,

In my humble opinion one of our main challenges for the near future will be to become a truly decentralised network. With this post I would like to bring forward an idea to move into that direction. I look forward to an open and engaging discussion.

Some very important decisions (that affect the whole network) are currently undertaken by a small group of people: the council. Specifically, the council members currently have full control over motions and tips. Yes, depending on the type of motion, the community will vote next through a referendum but that is not the case for all motions (proposal approvals for example).

The concept of the council was called into being to represent the non-active voters in our community. Under the current system the council actually represents the whole community, going far beyond its original purpose and creating a centralisation of power and decision bottleneck. I would like to bring forward a new approach that limits council vote importance to represent only the non-active community members and at the same time allows active community members to cast their vote directly.

The idea: Dynamically calculate council vote importance

This approach entails opening up motion and tip votes to all KSM holders while simultaneously dynamically adjusting the council vote importance based on recent historic community voter turnout for motions and tips respectively.

Implementation

Concretely, this would entail calculating a moving average of community voter turnout over the last X periods for tips and motions respectively.

The council vote weight/importance for the current tips would then be

100% - community_voter_turnout_moving_average_tips

and

100% - community_voter_turnout_moving_average_motions

for current motions.

There are multiple ways to calculate voter turnout. I will present a few that I can think of right now and leave it up to the community discussion to discuss them (or potentially extend the list).

1. Calculate the percentage of KSM that voted with respect to all KSM in circulation
2. Calculate the percentage of KSM that voted with respect to all available/unlocked KSM
3. Calculate the percentage of KSM that voted with respect to all KSM locked/bonded in governance

Effect on the network

In the case of little community involvement in the form of votes for tips and motions, the council vote weight will remain close to 100% (status quo).

In the case of more community votes, the council powers would be reduced proportionately.

Summary

With this approach, the council powers would be limited to representing only the non-active voters in our community which should make for a more inclusive and democratic network.