I fully agree with the need to decentralize further and I feel like that is the core driver of every idea I advocate. In my mind, that needs to happen mechanically based on NNS code and tokenomic incentives.
Believe it or not, I’m extremely uncomfortable about the fact that the Synapse vote triggers 10% voting power due to liquid democracy. It’s the reason I have always wanted to be transparent about who we are and how we vote (synapse.vote) and I want to make it easy for the community to easily know the individual votes cast by each voting member (CrowdGov.org). However, I can’t do anything about our liquid democracy other than try to drive further change. I have lead the proposal for Manual Voting Throughout the Voting Period as well as Periodic Confirmation of Neuron Followees, both of which have the potential to significantly change the mechanics of how much liquid democracy the Synapse neuron casts. They are also both “tokenomics changes” that would be counter to your proposed ethos. Regardless, neither have been implemented because they have not made it to the roadmap for DFINITY. Perhaps they think there are security issues. More likely they are just too busy with higher priorities. I’m left with feeling like the right answer is for the community to step up and drive some of these changes (funding required). It doesn’t have to be on the DFINITY roadmap if it can be on the roadmap of some other organizations with the skills and credibility to collaborate with DFINITY. That ultimately leads us to the decentralization we all want.
You have a brilliant mind for governance. Respectfully, I encourage you to consider the mechanics of how decentralization can be achieved through code. I don’t believe it can be achieved without tokenomic incentives. An ethos is nice to have, but it’s not the solution. I don’t think we want an ethos that stifles progress toward decentralization, so it’s important to give deep consideration of what that means.