I've been reading the Eos governance chat on telegram. It's a great channel! The discussion recently turned to voter participation and how to incentivize it. For background on that see Dan's article
https://steemit.com/eos/@dan/reponse-to-vitalik-s-written-remarks
Anyway here is an idea that I thought I'd copy across to steemit to keep a record of it and add a bit more detail.
Firstly Eos could publish an agreed measure for the health of the platform. This measure could be derived from things like voter participation, network capacity, latency, ipfs storage, utilisation. Eos's vital statistics. This measure should be fairly easy to agree upon and could evolve if needed.
Then based off this measure an Eos community contract receives rewards. As the network's health increases so does the value awarded to the community contract. So by participating in voting you are also fund raising for the community contract. By voting out a poor block producer you not only improve the health of the network but also increase the value awarded to the community contract.
So now we just have to work out what this community contract might do that would not be for personal gain but still be something that everyone could get excited about. While improving the system's vital statistics you are also fund raising for something that could have a more direct moral purpose. When the system's health degrades you might even try to convince others to help improve it again because you really care about that community contract. Does it just relocate the problem or is the fund raising aspect something that could appeal to human nature?
The contract represents the common values that the community on the platform share, that the community coalesces around. It's not just a platform, the platform is the substrate, the enabler, the body of the community and it needs to be healthy for the community contract to be healthy.
Because the reward to the community contract is tied to platform health you need to cast your vote wisely.
If you don't know what a community contract is from my understanding it is a contract that can receive block rewards and distribute those rewards according to the preferences of the Eos token holders.
What do you think? Could it help?