Aragon Working Groups - applications are now open

Aragon Working Groups were first brought up by @light from Aragon One approximately a year ago and detailed here.

The purpose of this post is to:

  1. Officialize Aragon Working Groups as a collaboration tool in the Aragon community
  2. Provide guidelines on how to officialize an Aragon Working Group
     

Context

The Aragon Network DAO, encompassing the Aragon community, Nest, and Flock, has been expanding quickly. Specifically, the Flock program went from 1 to 3 teams in only 6 months and the number of active contributors to Aragon has been increasing. As a result, cooperation around different key matters has been emerging organically across teams, in chat rooms and on the Aragon forum. Working Groups are a way to formalize collaborative initiatives in order to make them accessible and visible to all, ultimately making it easier to collaborate across the ecosystem.

Examples of working groups

  • Product working group: builds products to support the mission of the Aragon Network.

    • (Initial suggestion for members - Brett, Luis, Pierre, Daniel, Gorka, Delfi, Adri, Paty, Olivier, Xavier, Deam, Billy, Yalda, Arthur, Kevin, Otto, Radek, Chad, Javier, Jordan, Luke, Gabi…)
    • 1st facilitator role ensured by @luis and @jayalaves
    • https://aragon.chat/channel/wg-product
  • Documentation: documents the history and the products produced by the Aragon Network.

    • (Initial suggestion for members - John, Gabi, Daniel, Brett…)
    • 1st facilitator role ensured by @light
  • Communications: raises awareness about the activities and mission of the Aragon Network within strategic audiences

    • (Initial suggestion for members - John, Nolwenn, Thibault…)
    • 1st facilitator role ensured by @light
  • Community: supports the community of Aragon Network contributors, including facilitation of the Aragon Network governance process.

    • (Initial suggestion for members - John, Luke, Daniel, Daniel Constantin…)
    • 1st facilitator role ensured by @light
  • Strategy: works on strategic initiatives to sustain and grow the Aragon Network, such as organization onboarding assistance, the Flock and Nest programs, and treasury management.

    • (Initial suggestion for members - Luke, Maria, Alejandro, Louis, Stefano, Cem, Alexandre, Ola, Yalda, Brett, Luis, Olivier, Daniel Constantin…)
    • 1st facilitator role ensured by @louisgrx
    • https://aragon.chat/channel/wg-strategy
    • First call happening on Aug 2, 1pm UTC
  • Research: works on experimental mechanisms and technologies that support the mission of the Aragon Network; this work may or may not be productized.

    • (Initial suggestion for members - Jorge, Bingen, Facu, Alexandre…)
    • 1st facilitator role still open
  • “Your working group” : “the purpose of your working group”

    • “The first facilitator(s) who will implement your Working Group in its first few days”

 

Formalizing an Aragon Working Group

The formalization of Working Groups consists in making public their existence and bylaws.

A Working Group registry with key information on each of them will be made available on the Aragon Wiki. The purpose of this registry is to legitimize a given Working Group and give it more visibility to all Aragon contributors.

Definition of an Aragon Working group

Below are elements one may want to consider when creating an Aragon Working Group.

Foundations

  • Purpose - What is the working group about?
  • Membership - How to join?

Structure and operation suggestions

The following are suggestions for your Aragon Working Group structure:

  • Calls - weekly or biweekly call with notes publicly published in the dedicated WG Wiki section
  • Facilitators - Choose 2 facilitators who are rotating every week/ couple of weeks/meeting cycle. Facilitators are in charge of preparing the agenda for the call, asking people to take notes, and publishing the notes. They are also in charge of moderating the Working group chat.
  • Decision making can be fluid, participatory, a do-ocracy like model
  • Working groups can collaborate using focused discussion channels on Aragon Chat as well as a Github repository.
  • Working groups can also adopt tags in the Aragon Forum to categorize threads around their specific projects.
  • Working groups with multiple projects can have sub-groups with a subset of its members that are collaborating on more specific projects. These sub-groups can have their own processes for joining and participating, which should also be documented in the Working Group’s Aragon Wiki section.

Tooling suggestions

  • Aragon DAO - votes/surveys, membership, funds, project/bounties management.
  • Forum - Formalized working groups can be attributed a sub-section on the Aragon forum to have threads related to work in WGs.
  • Chat channels - WGs can have a dedicated chat room on the Aragon chat. If necessary it can be subdivided in teams.
  • GitHub repository to organize work. We are also proposing to adopt Taiga as a public task management tool for the Working Groups to coordinate and organize their work.

 
Anyone can create and join a working group. If you want to officialize a Working Group, feel free to comment on this post or submit a PR to add it to the dedicated section of the Aragon Wiki. It will be reviewed and merged by the Aragon Association provided it addresses an unaddressed area and meets transparency standards.

9 Likes

I would like to suggest using an extra tool: baseball cards for each member of the Aragon Network.

This idea came from Ray Dalio’s book Principles and I think is really powerful and could eventually even become a key part of every DAO.

Quoting Ray Dalio:

Imagine if you had baseball cards that showed all the performance stats for your people: batting averages, home runs, errors, ERAs, win/loss records. You could see what they did well and poorly and call on the right people to play the right positions in a very transparent way. These would also simplify discussions about compensation, incentives, moving players up to first string, or cutting them from the team.


Additional references:

6 Likes

I suggest we make a split between high level product and development working groups (irrespective of how Flock teams may be internally organized).

We already have the alldevs, which is essentially the development working group’s biweekly coordination session. This call usually does not include product-level decisions, such as discussing the merits of large scale product initiatives. It also does not usually have all product personnel from all teams, and is comprised primarily of developers. I would like to keep it this way.

The product working group should instead focus on high-level coordination of which existing / new product initiatives should be prioritized and their scopes. These discussions will hopefully happen before any design or implementation work is started (outside of feasibility studies, which would be important to inform this working group’s decisions).

For the product working group I would initially invite just the product leads throughout Flock and Nest teams to join.

7 Likes

Curious to know if these Working Groups will be open to anyone.

Makes a lot of sense @sohkai. Adding @luis and @jayalaves here as they will be kickstarting the product WG soon!

While you can target specific people with your WG, we highly recommend Working Groups to be open to anyone.

Each WG has a clearly defined goal and each participation should add value to the effort.

Just updated the post you can check them out now :slight_smile:

1 Like

This is my initial proposal to kickstart the Product Working Group https://www.notion.so/aragon/Product-Working-Group-e93697ee84724adda73f3029074c3d84

I’d like to propose @jayalaves to take the facilitator role, while I’d like to take the chair role myself!

4 Likes

Hey everyone, just to let you know that a working group section on the Aragon Wiki is being created. If you want to add a specification page for your working group as well as its meeting notes, feel free to create a PR or ping me so I can add it for you.

1 Like

@aaron and I are launching a User Feedback WG!

It’s very simple, we will get together each week to discuss all the cool new apps/products that the Aragon community (CFDAO, Nest, Flock, independent) is developing. We will then create a list of things to try out. Throughout the week we will discuss in the User Feedback WG chat (TBD). Then the next week we will compile our experiences into a doc that the community (product teams) can use to guide product development and bug fixes.

Everyone is welcome, so please comment here if you want to get involved :slight_smile: