First Finance proposals under AGP-1: Funding for the Association, Nest, and Aragon teams

📔 Archive 🔆 Community
1

There is an ongoing discussion about how funding should be transitioned from primarily controlled and directed by the Aragon Association to including ANT holders in the decision-making process via AGP-1.

There is so far consensus that the Association and Nest should each have their own Finance track proposals that ANT holders can approve or reject under AGP-1.

However a decision remains to be made over how independent teams such as Aragon One and Aragon DAC will be funded. There are currently two proposed methods for how this could work:

Under the first method, Aragon teams would be funded by a new program called “Aragon Flock”, a program similar to Nest but for larger teams focused full-time on Aragon. Aragon Flock would apply for funding via AGP-1, and then teams would apply to Flock to receive some of this funding.

Under the second method, Aragon teams would each submit a Finance track proposal requesting funding via AGP-1. ANT holders would then have a chance to approve or reject teams’ requests for funding on an individual basis.

There are pros and cons with each method. A non-exhaustive list of these pros and cons would look like:

Method #1
Pros: More flexibility over how and when funds are distributed to teams, since each request for funding does not have to go through the AGP process.
Cons: ANT holders have less direct influence over which teams get funded. Voting becomes an “all or nothing” affair, with either all of the teams getting funding or none of them.

Method #2
Pros: More granularity over decision-making by ANT holders. We get more information about what teams ANT holders want to fund and which ones they do not.
Cons: More information for ANT holders to consider, thus more overhead to decision-making. Less flexibility in determining who gets funded and when since each proposal must be approved by ANT holders on the AGP-1 vote schedule.

Are there other pros and cons not listed here? Other methods for funding teams that weren’t mentioned? Let’s discuss!

2 Likes
2

I’m thinking that there could be a third method: a mix of Method #1 and #2.

Under the third method, there will be a pre-approval for teams. Such pre-approval process will be run through the Flock program. After this pre-approval, teams would move to the AGP-1 process for a definitive approval by the ANT holders

1 Like
3

When would votes be required for each of those methods? Let me know if I’m interpreting these correctly.

Method 1 Regular votes to fund the Aragon Flock, which combines funds for A1/DAC
Method 2 Regular votes for A1/DAC seperately: twice as many votes as Method 1.
Method 3 One vote for each of A1/DAC initially, new votes only when the regular payment changes.

Long term, I think the pre-approval process will be necessary to reduce the amount of needed voting, especially if Aragon grows. There might need to be some development work for it, but that shouldn’t be too hard, and it certainly seems worth it.

4

You have described Method 1 & 2 accurately. Method 3 that Maria suggests looks a lot like Method 2 except that there’s a formal “program” that pre-approves teams before the ANT holder vote. Whereas other types of Finance proposals will be evaluated on an individual basis and won’t have any additional structure for pre-approval by the Association other than what is already defined in AGP-1.