SIP-278: Enable nominations during voting period

Simple Summary

Implement a change in the governance module allowing users to nominate thenselves during the voting period.

Motivation

Community members have expressed a concern that legitimate candidates may miss the nomination period for a given council election and, as a result, be unable to run.

This has the potential to negatively impact the candidate pool and result in high quality participants missing governance epochs. This would be a issue felt increasingly during periods of low governance participation and could adversely effect the functioning of vital aspects of the protocol such as Treasury Council activities and meta-governance votes conducted by the Spartan Council.

While nomination and voting periods were initially created as separate periods due to a concern the electioning could be negatively impacted by spamming through creation of additional nominees, this no longer presents as a major concern given such impediments as the gas fee paid for nominating. As yet, no spamming incidents have occurred during any of the previous nomination periods, thus supporting the position advocated within this proposal.

Overview

The governance module will be updated to allow users running for council seats to nominate themselves during both the nomination and voting periods.

Specification

A single line update to the election module would be incoporated, which opens up the ability to call the nominate function during an ElectionPeriod, as shown in this commit.

Test cases

When a new election gets called, an initial nomination period starts as usual, during which where it is possible to nominate an account but not possible to vote. After the initial nomination period, the voting period begins and users will be able to vote and nominate their accounts concurrently.

Copyright

Copyright and related rights waived via CC0.