AGP discussion: Community Funding DAO

Discussion thread for AGP: https://github.com/aragon/AGPs/pull/10

Update March 25, 2019

The AGP-10 Community Funding DAO is now live!

Learn how you can submit proposals to this DAO here.

6 Likes

Worth mentioning this was cut from the DAC’s Flock proposal… but here are our thoughts:

In our opinion, the approach currently being taken by most teams in the Ethereum space around bounties is inefficient in time and impact. We hope to lower the bandwidth required on the core development team by cultivating a culture of contribution from the Aragon interested developer community as opposed to the general pool of gitcoin contributors. To do this we will maintain a whitelist of github users that are allowed to receive bounties. Only users that know the code base well (excluding Flock team’s core members) will be added to the whitelist. The best way to get on this list is to receive a Nest grant or to proactively solve issues in Aragon repos. We will reward contributors that resolve issues with ANT (like tipping), and add them to the whitelist. We will actively promote this effort in Aragon channels and give special mention to it in our devX out reach programs.

1 Like

I’ve been thinking about a Bounty DAO for some months too, but I didn’t think of letting all ANT holders vote on it.

However, I don’t think it’s a bad idea. I thought that it’d be better for a small group of people (like @GriffGreen mentioned) to own a separate token that has voting power. Those people could be selected by ANT holders and could be core devs.

But having ANT holders directly vote makes sense as well. Since we are talking about small amounts, the only doable attack I can think of is that someone starts a vote a week in which no one else notices it, and therefore the funds are sent without true consent. However, there could be a group of ANT holders (likely core devs) that check it weekly and weigh in. We would need that anyway with the first model I was talking about, so not a big difference. Therefore, I like this model and I think that it makes sense to let all ANT holders vote on the Bounty DAO.

3 Likes

I think this is a great idea and would love to see it happen. I have some technical concerns about it though. Until Frame is main net ready with Aragon DAO integration, it will be difficult for anyone outside of the core development team to start the votes to create, modify, or approve a bounty. Even once votes are started, it will be difficult to see what the result of the vote is until the Radspec Registry is completed - everything will show Actor: No Description whether it starts a new bounty, cancels an existing bounty, or pays out the bounty.
image

I think this might be best to introduce in Q2 or Q3 depending on how many proposals that plan to solve these problems pass, and how careful you want to be about audits. It also might be possible to create a dedicated app as a shortcut, but I don’t know of anyone planning to work on that and get it audited.

1 Like

What is this “Actor: No description” referring to? Per OP’s specs, wouldn’t bounties under this AGP just be a Finance proposal -> Voting app transaction that works as expected today?

1 Like

The purpose of the Bounty DAO is to fund low-cost, low-risk bounties that are proposed and voted on by ANT holders. Transfers can be proposed by any ANT holder at any time.

This is what it looks like to propose a bounty or resolve a bounty in Gitcoin right now. Going through Finance → Voting could work, though it wouldn’t be possible to commit to a bounty for someone to work on before they start.

I can see it’s not made explicit in this proposal but I do not intend for Bounty DAO proposals to go through another app like Gitcoin. The workflow I have in mind for this is that someone either does some work or proposes to do some work (in which case it looks more like a grant than a bounty) and then they make a Finance proposal to pay themselves for the work.

They can discuss the proposal here in the forum to make sure there’s support for it before actually doing the work or making the Finance proposal. But this DAO is intended to be kind of like Nest, just for much lower amounts of money, lower risk, ANT holder governed.

Proposals that would be good for this DAO:

  • Someone has an idea for an infographic, it will cost 400 DAI to produce.
  • Someone wants to add a feature to an Aragon App. They will do it for 2000 DAI.
  • Someone wants to translate the user guide into another language. They will charge 1200 DAI to do it.

Then they start a thread to discuss, and if people are generally supportive, they create a Finance proposal to either pre-fund the work or they do the work on the assumption it will be approved and then they create the Finance proposal after the work is complete. (Or maybe they do half work, create the proposal, then finish the work after getting paid.)

Does this clarify how it would work? I intentionally left it open-ended whether the work gets done before or after the proposal because it will probably depend on a case by case basis which model works best for a given project / worker.

Edit: I don’t think Gitcoin would change much either, as someone still has to approve the release of funds once a bounty is completed. So if the proposal goes Finance -> Gitcoin, who approves the release of funds from Gitcoin? Another ANT vote? I don’t see why not, just pointing out that we don’t have to wait for the Actor app or Frame to be ready for this Bounty DAO to starting funding projects.

4 Likes

I think that makes a lot of sense, and reduces tool fatigue

1 Like

The workflow I have in mind for this is that someone either does some work or proposes to do some work (in which case it looks more like a grant than a bounty) and then they make a Finance proposal to pay themselves for the work.

They can discuss the proposal here in the forum to make sure there’s support for it before actually doing the work or making the Finance proposal. But this DAO is intended to be kind of like Nest, just for much lower amounts of money, lower risk, ANT holder governed.

This sounds really similar to Decred’s Politeia, especially for the smaller things (although I’ve heard those are often resolved without on-chain votes in Politeia but I may be wrong). I think it’d be really cool to have something like this, as a way for community members to propose work they’d like to do, rather than the other way around (how bounties are typically set up).

Perhaps it’d be clearer as the “Community Proposal DAO”?

2 Likes

In some ways it would be a bit like a mini AGP process, with a smaller budget but much more fluid process/continous process for voting.

1 Like

Would be interesting to set a periodic budget (weekly/monthly), this can be done via the finance app on a per-token basis (though there is no UI for this). Would allow the budget to be approved via the Quarterly AGP process, but ensure that all the funds are not exhausted in the first week.

2 Likes

Thank you everyone for the feedback. I changed the name to “Community Funding DAO” to prevent confusion about what it does or how it works. I left the $12,500 quarterly budget in place because a weekly budget might be limiting. If fund exhaustion ends up being a problem we can adjust with another AGP later.

5 Likes

Would love to see some discussion of the types of things we would want to bounty out through this organization?

Maybe Internationalization ? Maybe some simple app(s)? Documentation update (I know most recent CLI update adds a ton of functionality that is not yet documented on hack.aragon.org)

3 Likes

Where do you submit proposals for the bounty DAO? This is not specified in the AGP.

Also ༼ つ ◕_◕ ༽ つ gib bounty dao ༼ つ ◕_◕ ༽ つ

1 Like

I think the organization just needs to be deployed. Should be pretty simple to do with the CLI. I’m not sure if that task has been explicitly assigned to anyone, but happy to do it sometime this week if nobody else has already done it.

1 Like

Sure. But I imagine the votes just being calls to the finance app, since no one is able to transfer funds out of the DAO directly. So we still need somewhere to submit human readable proposals to provide context :slight_smile:

1 Like

@onbjerg, in the AGP it states:

It is up to the authors of each proposal to argue the merits of their proposal and convince ANT holders to approve it. The designated venue for discussing proposals is the Aragon community forum.

2 Likes

I would imagine you can actually start a thread for your proposal now, even before the org is created. (it will probably help accelerate things tbh).

:slight_smile:

3 Likes

I propose funding-dao as the tag to coordinate around proposals for this DAO. Also @anteater let’s change the title of this thread to “Community Funding DAO” since the name was changed.

3 Likes

Done. And yes I intended for proposals to be made and discussed here in the forum. Comparing this to the AGP process we might want to agree on some additional means of ensuring the integrity of proposals. For example hashing the plaintext of the final proposal and putting the hash in the vote text on the Aragon Voting app, similar to what is done for the AGP votes. We don’t have to change AGP-10 to adopt this we just have to agree on it as an informal convention. Whatever we decide, let’s keep it lightweight compared to AGP-1 so we can advance proposals at a more rapid pace and keep the barrier to participation low.

2 Likes