# Polkadot-Guild Meeting Notes: 8/19/21

## What do you know about Polkadot governance and secure account management?

### PROPOSALS

**4 types of proposals:**
1. public
2. council unanimous vote
3. council majority vote
4. emergency proposals (tech committee)

**2 Councils:**
1. standard
2. technical committee
^ the council votes on items that normal ecosystem is not able to vote on.

**Proposals happen one at a time unless there is an emergency proposal!**

### VOTING THRESHOLDS

**Voting thresholds vary..**
1. based on number of partipating DOT versus DOT in circulation
a. e.g. the amount staked and the amount of participants voting
2. depending on the type of proposal

##### Voting Threshold Notes

100% voting turnout: simple majority

A public proposal has a positive bias, so the less people that show up to vote, the higher the threshold to approve.

As more people show up the threshold decreases until you get to 100% participation in which case it is a simple majority.

If it is a unanimous council proposal, it has a negative bias so that with a low turnout, the threshold is lower but as more people turn up it increases to a simple majority.

With a normal council proposal it is just a simple majority.

### VOTING
- token holders can decide to lock up tokens for longer amount of time in order to add further weight to their vote
- 100 tokens locked for 1 DAY = 100 votes
- 100 tokens locked for 1 WEEK = 1k votes
* ^numbers are example only

* on Polkadot/Kusama there currently exist ==ZERO incentives== for voting which is a bit problematic thus resulting in a lesser turnount; this is something that other chains have also experienced extensively

### FROM THE ATTENDEES
**Jimmy:**
- spoke a little about polkadot governance
- anyone can submit a proposal to network
^ [Polkassembly](https://polkadot.polkassembly.io/post/478)
- this proposal is within the format of a runtime upgrade

**Tim:**
- has participated in governance! (admittedly has no idea what he is doing, but loves it)

**Thibaut:**
- (spoken for by Tim) believes polkadot voting is over-engineered

**Andrew:**
- has participated in governance!
- voted in Karura governance (is rumored to be the whale who stalled the kUSD stablecoin upgrade)

**Eclesio:**
- asked how voting exists within the Substrate framework: is voting a pallet or is it native to the relay chain?
**Answer:** [Democracy Pallet](https://substrate.dev/rustdocs/latest/pallet_democracy/index.html)

### OPEN QUESTIONS
- if a governance proposal is denied one day then resubmitted the next day and passed...does this really defeat the purpose then?
^ [blacklisting](https://wiki.polkadot.network/docs/learn-governance#blacklisting)
- how do you encourage more participation in voting?

###### tags: `polkadot-guild`