I like the idea of accountability. The chart you've drawn is pretty much that - a tool for accountability. It's why we doctors are tied to licenses - for accountability. If there is abuse or malpractice, the license can be stripped off, and we lose our ability to work as doctors.
Skills of a topic owner and supervisor board member
Whether subject matter expertise is required
I see these two points as the base criteria to become topic owner and part of sup board. If the learned people of the topic aren't playing the active roles, why are they there? Surely not for their beautiful smiles.
In a decentralized community setting, 50%+1 or any other ratio doesn't sit right with me. Instead, a cut-off system would work more fairly. Say, active members of the community may or may not vote on a control/test owner, valid for a selected amount of time. The votes received mark the threshold. TO then elected in if they have received enough votes to surpass the threshold on the control/test owner. This leads to my next point:
Now I'm going to play devil's advocate and say that the SB is an overkill. It can also be the point of weakness. SB can be totally eliminated if there is transparency from the TO's side. If and when TO are not upto par, or not transparenct, or proven to be incompitent, they can be unvoted by the community members until below the threshold and voila, a new TO needs to be put in place.
Concerning time until new elections, as long as its not permanent. Well, with the threshold system, it can never be permanent. However, one of my favourite changes in HIVE governance was when witness votes were changed so that they could expire. I think a year is good enough.
vote per user with each user vote having the same power.
This is only possible with KYC. Only then one vote can be counted as one singular vote. Otherwise, proxying and multi-accounting can always change the tides. This is why POS is still the most popular choice in many decentralized communities. It has shortcomings, but until a better option, this is what exists, right?
Thank you for sharing your thoughts, ideas and opinions.
50%+1 or something in that order: True this shouldn't be on the whole community as in all those who have powers to vote, since as you suggest: Plenty aren't active. However still, a ratio can apply based on those who voted. I'm not fond of the 50%+1 too much since the yes/no voting is equally in size when it is that close. That is why I usually like a system of 60/40, or what we do in Dutch Ltds, for important foundational changes (constitution and all), the ratio is 66%/33%... but ok we don't do that for selecting peeps. In our political system we have the measure that when constitution changes are proposed, re-elections need to be held to allow the public to vote yes/no to such proposed changes.
Supervisor Board: I get you regarding the transparency. However, we have seen in our HIVE ecosystem/community (and I've seen similar in other communities) that transparency isn't there and it can take months to years before someone decides to play detective on someone to uncover wrongdoing. That's why I think an additional elected body, or multiple thereof, is very beneficial, perhaps even required. This doesn't take away the community's powers though. I mean, the community can send not only the topic owners home, but also the supervisor board(s) members. Essentially the SB gives an additional safety measure against abusive elected peeps. But I agree with you, it shouldn't have to be, the community should understand that in a decentralised world, the community also have obligations to make sure those in power with whatever authorities are using them wisely instead of abusively. However, the reality is different though.
POS vs Individual Vote: As for chain management, a POS system works well. But not everything can be captured by code, especially not when we replace more than the existing financial system, which is where I am coming from. Let us imagine a world where we don't have country borders anymore, no central institutes and authorities, and perhaps not even a law book, I don't like to see that money/wealth is the foundation of community rulings. Therefore we must find solutions to make sure we can create a voting system based on individuals. Am not sure how far those who researching such topics are, but I can imagine we gonna end up with Smart Contract-based KYC. Nobody will be involved in the KYC other than one or a set of Smart Contracts. Such a system can create a single and unique profile for every individual, with the individual given the sole power of permission management of your profile. KYC can then be done by whatever dApp by simply querying the individual's profile with a question or set of questions to which the response is either 'yes' or 'no', without factually giving out more information. Needless to say for different types of votes, we can use different types of voting systems.