AragonCoop - Two weeks of Operations: What has been done?

After getting AGP-40 approved last April 27th , @Julian and myself has started working on it operations and there are some advancements we have to share now.

Context:

It all started back in November/December with this post Community Initiative: Aragon Cooperative :raised_hands: consequense of the obvious lack of engagement from token holders in ANVs.
After that, lots of posts and discussions happened (including a face-to-face meeting during Aracon this january). As a result of all of this, I did post an Aragon Coop DAO - A Minimum Viable Manifesto (MVM) with the intention to route the Coop community to a single direction.
Proposals and discussions did continue (specially aboy incentive to promote engagement) ended up in the AGP-40 and its approval.
At the time, the assets we had in the AragonCoop were:

Special thanks of course to @lkngtn @stellarmagnet @jjperezaguinaga for leading these first steps (and others that I have been missing now EDIT: like @GriffGreen who lead and reported the first and only face-to-face meeting we had :smile: ).

The Aragon Governance Proposal 40 States:

We propose to organise, manage, and drive forward the Aragon Cooperative DAO. Committed to work for the benefit of Aragon and serving our members, we aim to support the cohesion of the Aragon community overall. While leading by example to consider, produce, and promote emergent Cooperative DAO principles, we are equally engaged in the overall Aragon ethos (including exploring the work and outputs taking place herein) and sharing such products with the wider blockchain global ecosystem at large.

Since the main leaders of the AragonCoop were clearly engaged with fullTime product development work, and have no possibility to dedicate all the time the AragonCoop constitution deserves, this AGP was aimend to ask some funds to allocate a dedicated resource for moving forward its operation.
We asked for 15,600 DAI & 6000 ANT for hiring resources to cpver 5 Man Working Days (MWD) per week. AGP-40 got approved (yeeeeiii!!) and here we are:

AragonCoop after AGP-40 approval

We had our first meeting just two days after its approval, aimed to look for agreements on how to set and agree the first steps and tasks to performā€¦It was kind of a mess as the objectives were not reached and a significant part of the meeting went on how the different individuals had different opinions and ideas about how to allocate the found (Governance isnā€™t easy, thatā€™s why we are all here in this space, donā€™t we?).
In any case, four working groups were set in order to kick-off works on Coop Governance Frameworks / Workflow Design (how to allocate resources with our DAO) Documentation / AGP/ANV Proposals for Engagement Participation.
The sustainability of all this four working groups is in doubt at the momment as three of them depends on individuals engagement and we still lack of a framework that allign incentice to assure the completion of kind of work. Letā€™s see how this evolve in the next weeks!

During that first week, we focused on understanding the different visions and opinions from the community, and ended up in setting a preliminary AragonCoop Governance Process framework that would serve us to gathere some insights from the whole community in order to ratify that (what I call) the Delegated Resources (those who will get paid out from the AGP funds) are on the right path and their actions as regards the community would be validated.

The vote was done on our Rinkeby TPS DAO and here the results:

So today we have clear that we have a clear values statement in which we should be basing our decisions and the AragonCoop community is accepting in using the gathered funds for paying dedicated Delegated Resources (btw, I came out with this rol name recently, but I donā€™t like it, any ideas about how we should call this hired people?)

WIP and next steps

  • Membership Onboarding: in this week call we have agreed the willing to be members should follow the current on-boarding process, with the plus that we will ask aspirants to participate in one of our weekly calls.
  • Workflow & Resource allocation: there are currently a couple of proposals in discussion, looking to implement the Payroll app (which should be ready in 2/3 weeks time AFAIK) in our mainnet DAO. We might need to ask the community to pay for our work directly with the Finance App, or maybe using the Giveth App for having a validation of the performed work/deliverables from a trusted member from our community e.g. AragonCoop members that are also employees of the Aragon Ecosystem (Flock teams/AA or even people from the Aragon Community Multisig).
    It has been notice that the current permissions on the Mainnet DAO for the Finance App resides on the Merit Token, this merit is not following the 1 member : 1 token premise, so we might be soon changing that permission to the MBR Token.
  • Delegate Resource Tracing process: as anyone who wants to be a DR (again! any ideas for this naming) should have a possibility to do it, we will work on a proposal to set up a proper process and requirements for this. We would also work on a reporting system so anyone can have a look on what we are doing.
  • Documentation: we will continue to document all related to the AragonCoop and will have some thoughts about how to help the different Aragon Flock teams in helping with the documentation in a noob oriented way, so we start attracting not technical profiles to use Aragon apps!
  • AGP-10 CFDAO: in order to prevents attacks to this funding DAO, the Coop will be working on a proposal to curate submissions and will probably submitt a new AGP for the next ANV.
  • Landing page: we will start on deciding (all together of course) the message that we want to expose to the public, and the different services that we would be able to offer. BTW! We need a logo! if anyone has a proposal, here a issue in which you are invited to participate.

I would like also to remember that the ultimate scope of the work of the following 3 months will be to ask for a coherent NEST grant, in order to build a proper Product that will adjust to the Cooperative needing and hopefully to whatever community that will find value on it. (Or whatever the ultimate scope will pivote to! Thatā€™s the beauty of descentralized organizations, you never know where the community will lead you!)

Please! Share your views, comments, vetos, whatever :slight_smile:ā€¦

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Whatā€™s the emojiā€™s for laughing/crying, head-shaking and face-palming all at the same time?

Oh yeahā€¦

:joy: :astonished::woman_facepalming::raised_hands:

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Really nice to see this report coming up! I can already see this practice perfected over time as a great tool to increase involvement by keeping Coop members up to date.

Regarding ā€œdocumentationā€ and ā€œlanding pageā€:
Youā€™re not mentioning this website The Coop šŸ”šŸ„š Ā· A place for everything related to the Aragon Cooperative in the report. Is it part of the discussions or do you think it shouldnā€™t be used any further?

I think it would be cool to structure this section further, as its where people are going to look for actionable information. For each topic maybe you could frame it as follows:

  • what happened up until now
  • where weā€™re at now
  • what actions need to be taken from now
  • who we think needs to be involved or who could undertake the job. Maybe also give concrete next steps, deadlines, meetingsā€¦

What do you think?

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thanks for your kind words! thatā€™s the idea, perfecting practices over the time! :smile_cat:

you are right, Iā€™ve missed that! I was unsure abut including it basically because it embeds a message about ā€œWhat is The Coopā€ (among other details) that hasnā€™t been discussed nor agreed by our members and thought it would be misleading.

On other side (and here Iā€™m talking on my own behalf, not sure about the community feeling yet), Iā€™m not personally a fan of the Docusaurus templates (fb etc), itā€™d be better if we already have information and documentation itself and we urge to show it to the world, which is not yet the case.

I would love in any case to see the Education WorkingGroup (WG) to propose ACGPs about the key messages to show in the web page (and about what platform to use).

Absolutely agree, and thanks theyā€™re really good headings. I just need to have some thoughts about that! But be sure Iā€™ll definitely consider this way for the next one, structure makes much senseā€¦ BTW, can I ask you what recurrency would you like to see in this kind of reports? If you ask me, Iā€™d say that each two weeks would be fine enoughā€¦ happy to do it everyweek if there are good motivations for it :slight_smile:

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Regarding the current vote in the Aragon Cooperative to determine if the current activities are in line with the scope outlined in AGP-40.

Reading through AGP-40 it says:

Examples of the Aragon Cooperative DAOā€™s overall purpose includes: methods for community members to gain meaningful involvement within Aragon beyond forum/chat contributions - e.g. Community Fund DAO proposal curation; knowledgeable signalling procedures for ANT holders through engagement and research regarding proposals, including voting on AGPā€™s; simplified and ongoing rewarding procedures for community contributions (in ANT); participation in meaningful governance, cutting-edge research, radical experimentation and valuable procedural contribution.

  • CFDAO curation proposals: so far this has included various fee structures, but no actual work has been done or examples provided of what value curation might look like beyond rejecting potential spam proposals. Maybe this is ok, but personally I feel like the Cooperative could do more to support grass roots community efforts
  • knowledgeable signalling procedures for ANT holders through engagement and research regarding proposals: I have not seen any progress in this direction
  • simplified and ongoing rewarding procedures for community contributions (in ANT): I have not seen any progress in this direction beyond the Cooperative Workflow Proposal created by @lkngtn
  • participation in meaningful governance: this is so vague that Iā€™m not even sure what this means
  • cutting-edge research: I have not seen any progress in this direction
  • radical experimentation and valuable procedural contribution: I have not seen any progress in this direction

More widely, the Aragon Cooperative DAO will provide templates and examples of a functional Cooperative DAO, with documented processes and procedures, founding principles and bylaws, examples for onboarding/offboarding and day to day operations - all built upon the Aragon ethos and toolsets.

  • @lkngtn created a DAO demo for what the Cooperative might look like
  • I created the Coop DAO Docs to explain how that model might works. I have not seen any other progress in this direction by the Cooperative
  • The Cooperative has documented processes and procedures, founding principles and bylaws, examples for onboarding/offboarding and day to day operations. This is good and I support this work.

Deliverables

  • (Julian/Gus) Cooperative DAO bylaws
  • (Julian/Gus) Membership on-boarding and off-boarding process
  • (Coop DAO Docs) Token(s) (definition and) allocation.
  • ~ Governance procedures
  • (TBD) Formulating Coop Projects and Grants Proposals
  • ~ Management of Community Fund DAO applications
  • (TBD) Further Coop AGP application construction
  • (Coop DAO Docs) Documentation of practice (education & knowledge sharing)
  • (Coop DAO Docs) Dogfooding and documentation of Aragon tooling and workflow
  • (TBD) Further suitable community-led, signaled and proposed opportunities

Overall, it seems like the Cooperative as a whole is generally on track with the deliverables outlined in AGP-40.


That being said, engaging with the Cooperative and following work being done has been tenuous. I support the Cooperativeā€™s ongoing work, but I would like to see more effort put into clearly communicating the following points (perhaps in a compact weekly forum post?)

  • What has been done this week and how many hours/days did that take?
  • How does that related to the deliverables outlined in AGP-40?
  • What are the open problems for the coming week that community members can contribute to?
    A multi-hour weekly meeting for this is overkill and excludes many people who have other commitments in other time zones. This information needs to be communicated in a clear, succinct, written post. This way Aragon Cooperative members could easily see whatā€™s been done and how they can help out in the following week if they have time/energy to spare.

AGP-40 also specifies that the Aragon Cooperative will receive funds to provide support for one (1) Human Working Day, five (5) days per week, for three (3) months (May ā€“ July 2019) at three hundred (300) DAI per day. Currently Julian is asking to be reimbursed for 6 working days, but itā€™s been ~ 3 weeks since AGP-40 was approved. This leaves 9 working days of capital that have not been allocated. There needs to be a standard process to allocate these resources to other community members that are creating value. One option is creating a vote requesting funds as Julian has, but frankly this feels clunky. The Allocations or Projects apps in TPS seem like much better way to handle this. There is a (WIP) demo of how that might look in the Coop DAO Docs.

Considering that the Coop DAO Docs and the Coop DAO Demo moves the Cooperative towards their deliverables, and that this work was done as part of the Workflow Proposal and OWL Documentation working groups, it only makes sense that this would also be compensated. Open to discussions as to how to make this happen, but more importantly I want to ensure that future community members are compensated for their work as well. @stellarmagnet has some excellent thoughts on that here that I agree with and support.

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Great post burrrata! Thanks a lotā€¦

Went for a run and thought about it, and it doesnā€™t make sense for a Cooperative member to request funds for multiple weeks of work all at once and without the context of work done by others. This puts a large burden on Cooperative members. This involves assessing the work submitted, the budget for that work, and how that fits into the overall budget for all the AGP-40 deliverables. This process would have to be repeated by every Cooperative member every time someone wants to get paid. Thatā€™s too much overhead and too much variability. There needs to be a structured process for this. I think the most simple thing would be regular checkpoints where Cooperative members show the work theyā€™ve done, how that related to AGP-40 deliverables, and the compensation theyā€™d like for the work done. Then Cooperative members weigh the contributions from all members and make a decision with full information.

Frankly I think this is still too much overhead and we should just break the AGP-40 deliverables into concrete milestones, then put bounties on the those milestones using the Projects app from TPS, and then Cooperative members can vote to release bounties if/when work is done. This creates a spec to assess work against, it removes the overhead of budget planning from every individual decision, and it makes work fully accountable and verifiable for Cooperative members and ANT holders. This would give us the opportunity to lead by example using Aragon apps to reduce overhead and improve efficiency in our organization.

Also open to other ideas if anyone has any suggestions?

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again! great post! now I have some time for replying, so:

what kind of work do you have in mind? For me, the approach there is very easy, write down the different proposals, submitt them to Coop vote, write down an AGP submission for next AN3. If you think it worth to simulate somehow the different scenarios to make a try in identifying the best option in some objective way, thatā€™s cool! Would you lead that forward?

eeehhhā€¦ this is referring to ANVs presignalling on votes, we did that before you joining, we would still aim to do a new one whe the time is come.

ehh time to time my friendā€¦ you wonā€™t see that much in only tree weeks :blush:

You have that here

thatā€™s the WIP part, to be improved as per louisGrx suggestion.

of course! and there you have this very same postā€¦ were you having a different thing in mind?

wait for mine! Iā€™ll be asking for 5 days, but you are right, there is still money to be allocated, we havenā€™t seem anyone willing to request some allocation though.

DRTracer and [ACGP]GitHub - aragoncoop/ACGP: AragonCoop Governance Proposals are there for this! They are still in its minimal viable version, but itā€™s a working procedure that can be used by any member of the community for the scope you are mentioning.

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Re CFDAO curation: In addition to spam prevention, Iā€™d like to see the Cooperative actively engage with the community to support and promote grass roots initiatives.

  • One way to do this might be the Allocations app where on a weekly basis Cooperative members could nominate ideas from the community to be explored and worked on. For example, if thereā€™s a conversation in the forum talking about how there are lots of new people interested in DAOs, but they donā€™t really understand that tokens can measure/manage arbitrary data beyond speculative currencies. This guide could talk about tokens as reputation, membership, etcā€¦ all the things relevant to DAOs. A Cooperative member could see this thread/discussion, then nominate the idea to be explored. Cooperative members could then vote to allocate some small amount of funds (maybe 1/2 a working day: 150DAI) in the next week to sketching out what that might look like and creating a proposal for the CFDAO. Then the CFDAO could provide more support to create more thorough onboarding resources/docs for people coming from background in traditional cooperatives or private equities. This is just an example as Iā€™m not sure if this would qualify for a CFDAO proposal, but itā€™s an idea that I think is important and could be helpful so it might be worth exploring. Iā€™m sure thereā€™s lots of other ideas from other community members too. The Cooperative could help explore and support these to make them a reality.
  • Another thing that would help is creating a guide/template to help community members create winning CFDAO proposals. This would involve creating a template/guide for the process as well as reviewing current proposals and providing feedback/advice to improve the proposal before putting it to a vote. This would help get more ideas off the ground and provide higher quality proposals to the CFDAO.
  • Another thing that might be great is creating a ā€œblack listā€ of things that are definitely not viable for the CFDAO (not sure if this exists yet or not). This way itā€™s easier for people to pre-screen their own ideas as to not waste their time or anyone elses.

If we can get the Aragon Cooperative to a more functional place Iā€™d be happy to lead this effort :slight_smile:


Regarding the other stuff, I just went through AGP-40 and compared that to my current understanding of the Cooperative. This does not imply that we should be working on everything all at once. It was an exercise to better understand whatā€™s going on, and what will be happening.

Also I should mention that I appreciate you starting this thread. Itā€™s honestly been a headache trying to figure out whatā€™s going on with the Cooperative. Writing it all out really makes it easier to get an objective view of everything going on. As I mentioned here I think thereā€™s a lot we can do to improve that process moving forward.

One of the things that will people understand whatā€™s going on with the Cooperative is the DRTracer. From browsing the GitHub README and reading a few of the reports Iā€™m honestly still not quite sure how the whole thing works (or why itā€™s called DRTracer). That being said, I think itā€™s a strong step in the right direction. If youā€™re open to it Iā€™d like to help refine that into something that the entire Cooperative can use (without Google Docs) to track progress on the Deliverables outlined in AGP-40. To make this an official process though, of course the Cooperative would have to vote to adopt it. Again though, I really appreciate you taking the initiative on this :slight_smile:


Itā€™s already been almost a month since AGP-40 was voted in, and thereā€™s only 3 more months left before the next AGP vote. This means weā€™ve spent ~25% of our time merely trying to manage ourselves internally, but have yet to define a formal process for decision making beyond ad-hoc voting. This is sad and long overdue. Thereā€™s enough feedback, ideas, and proposals on the table that it should only take a few hours to combine them into a workable package. Iā€™d like to put something together for the Cooperative to discuss and vote on this week. @sepu85 If youā€™re open to it Iā€™d be happy to work with you to incorporate the DRTracer, ACGP, and a few other things into this proposal to create a standard process the Cooperative to use to make decisions on a weekly basis.

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thatā€™s all true, stillā€¦ we are not in a race, dealing with Cooperatives is not easy, finding a purpose nor finding the best people to lead this forward is something that takes its time, and we have no hurry nor commitment to deliver something for next AGP (we will surely do something about CFDAO I suppose AND asking for a Nest is not in that timeframe) . I DO appreciate thought your enthusiasm and energy thought :hugs:, and if there if something we might deliver for next AGP I would certainly support you leading that forward.

25% and more I have to say!!! We are talking about Human Organizations, and guess what, Aragon builds organizational tools :wink: All we are doing, are things that we will use, evolve and build a good product!

Let me tell you somethingā€¦ The thing that really inspired me to join this Cooperative is that I didnā€™t have any idea about this could be, I mean, of course I had my idea, but tens of others would have also their own. This is not like @Luis and @Jorge having a fucking amazing idea and made the direct steps to build a network around their designed concept, the AragonCoop is the other way around, this is about getting an amazing network of people, and challenging them to design a fucking amazing concept. But Human consensus is complicated man, so letā€™s continue exploring the processes and methods that will enable decentralized consensus and autonomous operations in the future human organizations.

awesome! letā€™s have a talk on jitsi next week!

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Hard things are hard. Thatā€™s not an excuse. In our case however, we canā€™t even complain that our problem is hard. Literally every organization since the beginning of time has had to figure out how to make decisions. There are many examples of how to do this throughout history, and many resources to help make it happen. This is not new or unique to the Cooperative. We have no excuse for failing to do the one thing we are supposed to do, cooperate.

AGP-40 says that weā€™re going to lead by example. Weā€™re doing a terrible job of that.

AGP-40 also specifies the items that we have the responsiblity to deliver. Weā€™re doing ok at that.

As is I can either step up and do my best to contribute, or I can leave. Iā€™m choosing to help. It sounds like youā€™re also taking steps to improve the organization and accountability of the Cooperative, so I think we can and should work together. That being said I donā€™t know what Jitsu is and I donā€™t want to wait until next week. Drafting a simple governance proposal should take 1-2 hours max. Itā€™s honestly very simple: we need a regular and recurring process to approve work, verify that work, and release funds to compensate that work. Thatā€™s it. If we canā€™t approve, execute, and compensate work then we canā€™t do anything. Itā€™s the foundation. Until that foundation has been built, everything else is a distraction.

Edit: Just submitted a temporary Cooperative workflow proposal for discussion. It only has 1 goal: to create a way for us to approve, execute, and compensate work. Things like DRTracer and ACGP could be incorporated in the future to improve that process, but it sounds like you want to take some time to figure that out so I submitted a proposal that would work now. Iā€™m still open to collaborating to improve the Cooperative workflow process in the future :slight_smile:

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I came up with a possible solution that Iā€™ve been half-researching half-implementing (then revising and repeating) for the startup I work at. Currently it consists of (see https://github.com/disclosure-exchange/whitepaper/wiki/R&D):

Funding must come
i. directly from the DAO product/service offered
ii. directly to the workers (any member of a smart contract who has committed to delivering a specific result)
iii. based on merit

Merit is
i. measured by all the members of a smart contract/project rating/reviewing each other at any time
(for example by a comment in a GitHub repository containing the project/smart contract)
ii. the basis for determining a workerā€™s share of earnings from future smart contracts/projects they are a member of
(for example, workerā€™s current average rating Ć· sum of all member workersā€™ average ratings = workerā€™s share of next smart contract/projectā€™s earnings)
iii. prominently displayed in the form of all project/smart contract/rating/review history of that member

Voting
must not involve voting, or else it will be manipulable according to Gibbardā€™s Impossibility Theorem (plus the merit system combined with project creation/pull requesting/forking takes care of it)

The key thing is everything must be transparent and not involve middlemen (other than smart contracts).

I took a look at your https://github.com/aragoncoop/temp and YES that is exactly the DAO implementation!

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Interesting. Well if you want to jam on ideas for DAO mechanisms/architectures always happy to talk. The best way to do that currently would be through Keybase @burrrata.

More concretely, in the future we might be proposing a model somewhat similar to what youā€™re describing for the Aragon Cooperative. A rough draft of that can be found here. It wonā€™t be ready to be proposed for a while, but again, happy to brainstorm and jam on ideas anytime :slight_smile:

Also, as that discussion would kind of be off-topic in the context of the overall thread, itā€™s probably best to move the conversation to another place (ideally Keybase). If you donā€™t use Keybase just shoot me a DM here on the forum and weā€™ll figure something out :+1:

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