AGP-73: Flock Funding for Autark

Autark is finally ready to share the draft of our next AGP for Aragon Network Vote #3, and are really excited to continue our work as a Flock team. Looking forward to your questions and feedback!

:arrow_right: Read the proposal now

Lo-fi collage that represents our team :grin:

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Really like the proposal. The rebranding of TPS is spot on.
Overall the features which are outlined can really make a difference in terms of expanding beyond just an on-chain voting/fund management mechanism by coupling them with a variety of new generation coordination tools.

Looking forward to seeing details and next versions of the draft!

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Loving this proposal and the direction Autark is going. Also, +1 on the tps rebrand, I have a couple of questions and comments some are from the research topics linked in the draft.

Do ANT holders think having a semi-centralized fork of Aragon to facilitate revenue generation for the network or ecosystem teams are aligned with the Aragon manifesto?

Can you expand on this a bit? What would that look like

What does the community think is the area that needs more attention: documentation or chat support?

I’d say documentation. I’ve never had a problem with someone not responding to a query, but there is definitely a lack of documentation on how to set up and use all but the core Aragon apps which is totally understandable given where the apps are in their development

Do Aragon users want native chat experience or do they want Aragon integrated with chat platforms?

What would Aragon integrated with chat platforms look like? grant permissions to various rooms based on tokens, allowing users to perform actions on the DAO within the chat interface like voting etc?

Integration would improve Aragon reach especially if you could plug an Aragon org into a discord or rocket chat server and upgrading a community to a DAO was a simple task. This does seem like a big undertaking though

What voting patterns are being requested by the community that Aragon doesn’t support yet?

Definitely Delegative voting as well as quadratic voting the AGP process would greatly benefit from both

We hypothesize that profiles and discussions are two of the most important social features to include in a DAO, as participating in a DAO may feel rigid

Totally agree, right now the Aragon app feels like it’s primarily a DAO management tool, which is cool, but it’s not social at all, I see DAOs as being made up of people primarily in online communities so more effort on this front would be fantastic from an end users perspective

Finding business models that work for open source teams is beneficial to all Flock teams and the entire open source ecosystem.

Building tools are great but an effort in this direction would catalyst the network as a whole. When it comes down to it, the network needs to be an ecosystem of DAOs that actually make money

Community members may request a change to Aragon Network Governance via an AGP, yet it is not always possible to include these proposals in the ballot due to governance features not yet existing within Aragon.

:raised_hands:Totally support this (no surprises there :laughing:) really like the idea of “technical first responders”

On the whole, I think this proposal is fantastic. and I’m sure this will pass with a resounding yes

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Amazing proposal!! :clap::clap:

Looking forward to have a podcast on the community :tada:

A minor feedback about the initiative 08 - Facilitating Smart Contract Based IPFS Pinning.

  • Deployment Documentation : Publish in-depth instructions and documentation for deploying this architecture and integrating it with Aragon DAOs and/or organizations.

I think that finding a way to generalize this process would be really useful. Maybe having a deployment_changelog file for every content make sense :thinking:

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A1 just launched an Aragon podcast can’t wait to hear an Autark’s

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@Aaron thank you for taking time to review our proposal and also diving into the research topics! One thing to note is that these are research topics and I won’t have concrete answers right away, as they need more research :slight_smile: – so it’s a bit brainstorm-y!

One idea is building a system that caters towards companies that would like to pay a subscription fee and don’t need all of the decentralized features right away. Instead of files being hosted on IPFS, they are hosted on centralized servers. Login flows will be more similar to exchanges where you can login with a username/email address and authenticated via an authenticator app.

I haven’t talked about this idea that much with our developers and honestly don’t know how much work this would involve, as it’s kind of like skinning aragon and wrapping it around another beast :slight_smile:

It would still use blockchain and ACL, but it even may be a private blockchain with the organization running their own nodes.

This really goes into “enterprise blockchain” territory. If we do go down this path, I’d prefer that the customers we cater toward and target have aligned values, like nonprofits that want to increase their efficiency and coordination with other nonprofits and have budget to pay for tools.

Even if there isn’t a profit model behind this, I think there are some of these ideas that can help with onboarding in general (not needing any cryptocurrency to start interacting with Aragon).

Cent.co has made it so you can start participating in the platform without having a wallet, where you can sign up with an email address, and you only need a wallet when you want to withdraw crypto you have earned.

Thank you for this feedback! It is definitely on our list to have the Open Enterprise documents as soon as possible, and we will have it out for our Mainnet release. This research question had more to do with general questions that come up in aragon.chat in #dev-help

Yes, the ideas you mention would be closely aligned. I still don’t think chat has been fully solved. And I personally lean toward trying to integrate with Status or utilizing their technology as opposed to centralized tools or building something new from the ground up. The reason we are thinking about this has to do with reducing friction for people participating in an organization (or even starting one up).

Right now many in the Aragon community are using Keybase, which is awesome for encryption, their features allow cross-team collaboration better than discord, rocket chat and slack in ways due to the way they manage teams (which is closer to riot), the UI is pretty clean and it’s fast too (compared to riot).

But there are no favoriting capabilities (like riot) or ways to have custom privacy for channels within a team (like slack allows) or easy ways to archive channels. It also doesn’t have Slack-like capabilities with webhooks, threading.

We know those features are important, so which platform should be built up to support blockchain-hooks for Aragon, webhooks, and enhance the general UX so it satisfies a team of 2020s needs?

Basically the (close to) perfect chat platform still doesn’t exist, even though we know technology supports what that looks like. There is also no clear indication if anyone is going to ever make it work. It sucks because everyone spends the most time on chat whether it’s with teams or private messages.

Chat is definitely a big undertaking. We don’t think we will have time for developing any complex chat tools in this cycle, but are interested in doing user research to see what communities are ultimately looking for in the next 4 years. I personally would love to eventually deliver an awesome, decentralized chat solution or collaborate with an organization to bring that to life. I feel like after using Discord, Keybase, Riot, Slack, RocketChat we all must have a pretty good idea of what this looks like.

:raised_hands: We wouldn’t be able to contribute to bringing delegate voting to life until September, but want to help with the cause! I wonder if Aragon One will need any of our frontend or design help by then? cc @luis


Thank you for all of the feedback and support Aaron!

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Podcasts all around, to spread the Aragon gospel! :slight_smile:

This idea came up organically from our newest addition @jayalaves, and he didn’t know Aragon One had a podcast.

I think I saw a Tweet recently that was like “Who even are you if you don’t have a podcast in 2019?” :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:

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More help is always welcome! We are still in the ideation phase, but I think design reviews (as Paty and you are doing lately) would always be helpful

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I really appreciate that this proposal has come (relatively) early, and that it has a lot of detail! The rebranding of TPS to OE is a huge highlight and a great move :smile:!


However, I’m a bit conflicted with the general direction this draft proposal has gone in.

I really like I01 to I05 and I08; they are aligned with what Autark has been working on and feel like natural progressions. We have a few similar items in A1’s roadmap in the coming months related to I03 and I05, either published (that may not have been obvious) or are top-of-mind, and I’m interested to see how our underlying motivations might be similar and different.

I also like I06 a lot: the more experimentation the better, and although A1 has a number of governance approaches we’d like to research and implement, there’s no way we’ll be able to give them all justice (and it’s very likely we’ll have different sets of key users compelling us to create different mechanisms).

I07 is a great initiative to bring up, but it may not make immediate sense to include yet as most of the technical details are downhill and simply need some dedicated time to implement across the board. The biggest work involves the Aragon client (for now), and is something A1 would likely be able to do much more efficiently (for now). I also don’t think introducing a DAO to help translate text is a necessary step yet, but hosting the information in a decentralized way (e.g. metadata DAO) is important. Research into right-to-left layouts may also be premature for now.

I sum I01 to I08 to:

  • Maintaining and improving the core experience of OE
  • Adding baseline infrastructure to the Aragon client and its app developers, all of which align with an underlying thesis for attracting more users to the platform and letting them use its products more effectively

Again, these fit well and seem like natural progressions from the current Flock period. I would’ve liked to see the current I01 make an re-entrance, as there is still a lot of work to be done in this regard.


The other initiatives, I09 to I13, seem unnecessary to define for a Flock team.

For example, I10, I12, and I13 sound like tasks a Flock team should be making efforts towards anyway. They’re important to the general success of a Flock team itself, irrespective of their ties to the Aragon project. To me, these are things that should just be done, rather than proposed or included in a roadmap (unless the entire point of the proposal is to do a series of AMAs).

I09 sounds like a great experiment, but may either be too early or, again, could just be done and reported during normal operations.

I11 is also great to bring up, but its language is incredibly constrained. If there is something that would greatly improve the AGP process such that a team would re-arrange its own internal priorities (as A1 does on a semi-rare basis based on feedback), it sounds like a Pretty Big Deal and acceptable that a Flock team decided to shift efforts to support rather than requiring an explicit up-front budget.

Personally, I’m primarily interested in seeing what direction a Flock team wants to head in based on its product deliverables. I think I09 to I13 distract from that, as things that would happen anyway in Flock teams. Another point of interest is that I09 to I13 make up almost 50% of the projected capacity, but honestly A1 likely operates at a similar make up of output.

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Incredible feedback Brett! All of us really appreciate you taking the time to read through our long document and to evaluate the initiatives we want to work on for the next year. We know you’re really busy - please let us know if you’d rather discuss any of this over an AMA that we are targeting for the end of the week.

I would’ve liked to see the current I01 make an re-entrance, as there is still a lot of work to be done in this regard.

We totally agree that there is a lot of work to be done here, and it’s something we don’t plan on abandoning! Do you think it’s important to call this out as its own initiative again?

We figured working on other initiatives would cause this work to happen anyways, but if you feel there are specific deliverables you’d like to see us working on and identifying in our proposal, we’re open to adjusting.

I07 is a great initiative to bring up, but it may not make immediate sense to include yet as most of the technical details are downhill and simply need some dedicated time to implement across the board. The biggest work involves the Aragon client (for now), and is something A1 would likely be able to do much more efficiently (for now).

We’re really excited to work on internationalizing Aragon because it’s something Aragon promotes and users have asked for. When do you think the client enhancements would make it to Aragon One’s roadmap? Is there any way we can help without getting in the way?

I also don’t think introducing a DAO to help translate text is a necessary step yet, but hosting the information in a decentralized way (e.g. metadata DAO) is important. Research into right-to-left layouts may also be premature for now.

Could you shed more light on a metadata DAO and its differences from a “translation” DAO? I checked out the URL for the metadata DAO, but would love some more info.

I feel that at least having some infrastructure in place is a good first step towards enabling Aragon translations. From my experience working on global products at Oracle, internationalization is both an ongoing and long-term process, so in my opinion - the sooner we start, the better!

The other initiatives, I09 to I13, seem unnecessary to define for a Flock team.
For example, I10, I12, and I13 sound like tasks a Flock team should be making efforts towards anyway. They’re important to the general success of a Flock team itself, irrespective of their ties to the Aragon project.

It’s great to hear you think I10, I12, and I13 are tasks Flock teams should be working on. Do you think we should take them out of the proposal? Originally we included them to illustrate how we plan to use real data to make decisions and adjust our roadmap. We are curious to hear other people’s thoughts on this as well.

We were inspired by how the Aragon One Flock proposal included focus points like “Maintain developer documentation”, “Aragon Community”, and a few others.

Alternatively, maybe there is a better way to outline our initiatives since they definitely differ from I01-I08.

I09 sounds like a great experiment, but may either be too early or, again, could just be done and reported during normal operations.

Good points. However, we’d like to know for sure if it’s too early to pull something like this off - and if so, why? Do you have ideas about why it’s too early?

We prefer to keep this explicitly stated (as an initiative or maybe something else?) because we foresee this taking a substantial amount of time, and think it’s important in informing us of current system restrictions and potential business models to sustain us in the future. In an ideal outcome, we could use these learnings and strategies to self sustain Autark, build features for Aragon without using the treasury, and add value to the network.

I11 is also great to bring up, but its language is incredibly constrained. If there is something that would greatly improve the AGP process such that a team would re-arrange its own internal priorities (as A1 does on a semi-rare basis based on feedback), it sounds like a Pretty Big Deal and acceptable that a Flock team decided to shift efforts to support rather than requiring an explicit up-front budget.

We completely agree. From our perspective (and why the proposal might feel more “fluid”), we want to find a balance between having a clearly defined roadmap and being able to adjust to the incoming (and sometimes unexpected) needs of the community. There are certainly many other tasks we could work on instead of I11, but how do you think the community would respond if we suddenly adjusted the roadmap to build something different? Would that give a bad impression or would we lose people’s trust (especially as a newer Flock team)? How can we find the right balance?

Additionally, there aren’t any clearly defined steps to how a Flock team can alter a roadmap to respond to community requests. If there is a norm to adopt on how to handle roadmap adjustments, then maybe it’s something we can talk more about in a separate forum post?

I also totally understand what you mean about it sounding constrained. We were giving minimums and also the freedom to evaluate on a “case by case basis” if more than that is needed. We think the minimum is pretty low cost. Is there a better way you think we can frame this section if we kept it? Do you think it’s dedicating too many hours?

Personally, I’m primarily interested in seeing what direction a Flock team wants to head in based on its product deliverables. I think I09 to I13 distract from that, as things that would happen anyway in Flock teams.

Do you think the way I09-I13 is written is a distraction in how the proposal is written? Do you feel like we haven’t outlined a sufficient roadmap in I01 - I08?

Another point of interest is that I09 to I13 make up almost 50% of the projected capacity, but honestly A1 likely operates at a similar make up of output.

Haha true this is where our percentage process breaks down. The work budgeted for these initiatives also includes the full-time capacity of three non-technical team members. It is close to 50% of the projected capacity of the team, but not of the developers. Do you think this is confusing and we should just remove this breakdown from our proposal? We were having second thoughts on if it may lead to confusion.

i agree, they are things teams should be doing but i like the fact Autark have stated what they will be doing in this regard, especially

10 - Driving Ecosystem Development
Research, identify, and onboard worker-owned and mission driven organizations.

its not clear that this has been a priority for any flock team, which is understandable as it may have been a bit premature up to this point,

Other than hack.aragon.org (which is an excellent resource) there is limited documentation for aragon apps and how to wire them together to support different use cases. Also #dev-help is great, there is always someone around to help with specific questions but AMA sessions would really compliment this.

I would like to see something like proof of impact added to the DAICO fundraising app. So linking the fundraising App with the Bounty App. https://blog.wetrust.io/cryptounlocked-oracle-upgrade-5c8b22e3375b
This could also create another usecase for the ANT token https://realit.io/

it would be nice to have an auction like voting system to figure out a market value for a certain bounty task so projects can compare their bounties to others to set a correct market value for their bounties.

It would be nice to have a modula chat app like lego where you can add and remove features (apps) to it so every community can create and adapt their chat like it fit best

It would be nice to have to option to create DAO alliances / DAO Working Groups / DAO Hub where DAOs can agree on certain values, rules and principles.

It would be nice to be able to create more then one token and also choose whether it is a token / coin / reward point / security / NFTs etc. So I can add for example a karma system like reddit into my DAO.

It would be nice to have a Milestone App within Aragon so I can follow the progress easy of a DAO and those Milestones are then linked to the Bounties so I can check the progress on github or other sites.

It would be nice to add services like 0x, uniswap , kyber or other dezentrailised exchanges directly into the finance app

It would be nice to link DAO Roles to an ethereum address / social profile

It would be nice to have the option of anonymous voting not only pseudo anonymous.

It would be nice to have Pro / Contra arguments which can be up and downvoted under polls.

It would be nice to have the option for old people and kids to klick on a button to make the interface much easier to handle more icons bigger font etc (easy interface).

https://storj.io/partners/ Introducing Economic Empowerment for the Open Source Community ( Finding business models that work for open source teams). Perhaps also working with swarm.city to build a decentralized carsharing app where swarm.city is offering the marketplace and aragon for the swarm/DAO management where some % of the revenue will flow into the DAO.

would be nice to have a app like https://www.instabug.com/ which is implemented into aragon so users can make easy contribution to get user feedback.

are you going to create an bounty campaing where i see all the task of the flok proposal and also the option to contribute to them and see who contributed already to them ?

I would love to see next to the podcast video documentations of the progress where you present your finished updates or perhaps also present future possible updates.

It would be perhaps nice to have the option in DAOs to select them as “only voting DAOs” so that functions like deposit funds get deactivated automatically.

Would be nice to be able to search for DAOs:

would be nice if in the aragon governance the AGPs are marked as Finance/Association/Proclamation/Meta and weather it is in progress or has ended

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Hello @Mouyou you have a lot of great ideas, and seems you keep editing your post to add more! We wrote our proposal in a way that focuses on higher level deliverables, meaning it gives us room to hone in on specific features during a discovery phase where we plan to perform user research to determine how we prioritize different features.

If you create a separate issue for each of your ideas in our repo here, then we can curate with more people in the community once we launch the DAO for that. I think some of these ideas will also be useful for other teams as well, as it touches a variety of products and applications.

To answer your specific questions:

are you going to create an bounty campaing where i see all the task of the flok proposal and also the option to contribute to them and see who contributed already to them ?

We will have bounties for people to help with different aspects of our Flock proposal, but we want to launch our Projects app to mainnet before this happens. It also takes significant product development work to ensure that we have a large enough backlog with the features fully specified and designed. The way that bounties work is that contributors don’t always complete the tickets on time inline with what a team’s sprint deadline is, so our strategy is to have a few lower priority tickets defined, and the number of these tickets we try to have in the pipeline will be based on how our open source community grows (e.g. how large the demand for bounties is, and how the quality of work is).

I would love to see next to the podcast video documentations of the progress where you present your finished updates or perhaps also present future possible updates.

Have you reviewed our monthly updates on our blog? Here is the link: https://blog.autark.xyz/

We share progress there, including videos. But doing this on a regular video podcast also sounds like a good idea as well! If we have low turnout in our AMA today, I’ll try to see if I have enough time to build the various repos locally for our newer work, but can also do a demo of Open Enterprise that’s on Rinkeby now too.

Thank you so much for sharing all of these ideas – we will definitely add them to our research list as well!

Few announcements!

1. We recently shared a June 2019 update on our AGP-19 progress.

2. We made a visual summary of our proposal

It will be tweaked and enhanced soon so it’s more mobile-friendly.

3. Join us at our AMA on YouTube today at 4:30pm CEST / 10:30am EDT / 7:30am PDT.

I am having trouble with scheduling the livestream, so we will share the link here when we go live. If there’s low turnout we will do some video demos (thanks for the idea @Mouyou!) and talk about some of the different initiatives.

If you can’t make it, use the #AutarkAMA hashtag on Twitter, or submit questions through this form!

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Our #AutarkAMA + live product demo session has just started on Jitsi. Feel free to join and share the stream! We’re ready for your burning questions on Autark’s vision and new ANV proposal :wave:

Will this be recorded?

Yes, it’s currently being recorded and will be published right after.

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Just following up on this, we’ve just published the AMA on YouTube :arrow_forward: https://twitter.com/autarklabs/status/1148135059297361920

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While listening to your AMA I was thinking about the request users commit and I post my idea on github request

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I started contributing to Autark one month ago and I’m in love with it. I just wanted to point out very quickly two thoughts that I got after re-reading the proposal:

  1. I think Autark has the potential to become a pioneer in bounty incentives research. Gitcoin, currently the biggest bounty platform, uses the OpenBounties contracts, which lack critical features like counterparty risk mitigation. In order to address this, Gitcoin uses centralized techniques like limiting the amount of bounties people can apply to. Autark, on the other hand, can develop decentralized ways to mitigate counterparty risk such as deposits, delay penalties and dispute resolution.

  2. I came across the perfect people to do ecosystem development with: platform.coop. These people provide tools for worker-owned organizations. They don’t seem aware that blockchains exist, yet they talk a lot about decentralization.

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