I participated for the first time on Nouns Governance, voting on 3 proposals that are emblematic of the sort of stuff that comes up at Nouns.

On a superficial look, there are 3 types of proposals in Nouns:

1. Proposals that directly benefit the Nouns community

2. Proposals to fund public goods or develop public protocols that may or may not be useful to the Nouns community

3. “Spread the meme” kind of proposals: spreading the Nouns brand in events

Proposal 216 aims to fund 3 research teams to implement private voting.

Currently, there’s no solution to vote privately, and this is certainly something that could be desirable for some DAO — not sure if desirable to all DAOs. It would fall in category 2 (or potentially 1 if Nouns decide to ever implement private voting)

Since I want to see if this solution is actually possible, I voted FOR (the majority also voted FOR).

Proposal 217 is super simple (full description below, with implementation). It’s staking 5k ETH from the treasury on Lido, something that passively grows Nouns treasury. I would put it in category (1). I also voted FOR (and the result is clearly going to be FOR)

The third proposal, Proposal 218, is the trickiest to me: “Bring Nouns to 2m+ People over 15 Months at Japan’s Best Ski Resort and Integrate Nouns into the Alpine Subculture”

That one clearly falls under point (3). I get the point that the these “spread the meme” proposals are supposed to create a flywheel where the treasury is spent spreading the meme, and then in turn the meme becomes more valuable, hence our NFTs become more valuable.

The difficulty I have is really assessing a cost/benefit here.

Using $200k to “spread the meme” to a completely un-targeted audience in a ski resort seems kind of pointless. If this was a crypto of NFT or Art event it could make more sense. But I see absolutely no evidence that the people who go ski in Hokkaido even care about crypto or NFTs.

I’m voting no on this one. Since I’m literally the first vote, no idea how that will go. It will be interesting to see.