Governance is at the heart of Aragon. Unlike solidified layer 1 protocols like Bitcoin, Aragon is a growing network. Decisions need to be made. It’s essential that the process of decision making is smooth and that the results of decision making are transparent.
Problems
Hardly anyone engages in Aragon governance proposals or discussions.
Very few ANT holders vote.
AGP UX is unfortunately high friction. Even after the emergency vote, I spent more time just trying to understand and comply with the AGP process than I did actually drafting and editing the AGPs themselves.
Potential Solutions
Knowledge Graphs
Knowledge graphs could help make the AGP process more clear to all parties involved.
Currently we use Discourse and GitHub to manage Aragon Network Votes. An ANV DAO would allow us to dogfood our own software, creating an example of a transparent and trust-less governance process. Then the Aragon Network would be a real DAO leading by example.
This could be accomplished with a modified Aragon Democracy DAO template and the P2P Models Wiki app. Permissions can be set on the Wiki app so that only some token holders (AGP editors and/or the AA) have the ability to edit and/or add proposals. Then once a proposal is in the DAO ANT holders could vote to approve or deny it.
Totally agree. We need iterate on the AGP process. Knowledge graphs are very cool but seem like that would be quite away in the future. An integrated experience where you didn’t have to frequent the forum, Wade through GitHub and then navigate to the DAO would clearly improve the UX.
I also think we should be dogfooding where ever possible. The relevant nest proposal is interesting in this regard. P2P model’s app fell off my radar before I had a chance to check it out but it looks cool too
the only concerns I would have are
In lew of a caching solution, having to use the client as a forum could make the UX worse and cause even more friction and 2. I’m not sure if the P2P model’s wiki requires onchain transactions but if it does that would rule it out as a possibility IMO
One option would be for stage III and IV (drafting proposals) to happen on the forum. Then when a proposal is ready to move to stage V it could be submitted to the DAO. The AA would have the ability to approve or reject adding the proposals. Then, once proposals have been added ANT holders could vote on which proposals to approve or reject. Then the ANV DAO would have a verifiable and immutable list of all approved and rejected AGPs.
Note: this is not a perfect solution, but seems like it’s a step in the right direction: dogfooding Aragon DAOs and reducing UX complexity.
In the future, if Relevant integration with Aragon DAOs works out and is preferred by the community, we might even be able to use signalling on that platform as part of the stage IV => V => VI process. This could compliment and/or inform the AAs decisions, and maybe even eventually replace them.
Again, just an idea, but we should really look into how to optimize this process.
Reading through the various AGP threads has been very insightful. Overall, I think a dedicated ANV DAO connected to Relevant could definitely be a powerful tool.
It does seem like the wiki-like functionality in an important element - this is something most forum software lacks. We are actually planning on adding wiki functionality to Relevant, but it’s a little further down the road.
I think the general challenge is that an out-of-box product that doesn’t have governance and communication as its core feature will never be a perfect fit. On the flip side existing solutions do have a lot of useful features - ex wiki & taging on Github - and a rich feature set takes time to develop. I think in this case in particular its important to think about how improvements this could be made incrementally and how multiple platforms can be leverage for their specific functionality.
For example, maybe it’s about pulling in conversations + interactions from Github and the forum on to Relevant and experimenting with signalling there? If we can do that part well then we can focus on engagement - timely & contextual notifications for participants etc.