AN DAO Governance Mining

Summary

Create a bounty reward for proposers of AN DAO proposals that are implemented.

Background

The AN DAO is an experiment to decentralize Aragon to the community. To do this effectively it must do 2 things:

  • Implement the mechanisms that allow decentralized governance to operate effectively

  • Find valuable contributions from within the community to support Aragon in nascent but meaningful ways

As this journey begins we need to test both of these elements within AN DAO.

Motivation

Within the wider DAO ecosystem is it a known challenge that expressing ideas and opinions is far easier than building and delivering results. I want Aragon to be known for both - valuable creative contributions from our community and an ability to turn these into reality through the AN DAO and core contributing teams.

This idea of ā€œgovernance miningā€ referenced here provides some ideas for how we might explore the challenges expressed above. Currently Yearn and Synthetix (and possibly others) have a similar bounty model where the proposer of implemented proposals is rewarded for their valuable contribution, but only when it is implemented. This incentivises valuable input from the community AND to follow through and do the work necessary to bring about their realisation.

I propose we do the same.

Specification

This proposal mechanism is specified such that a reward bounty is provided to:

  1. Value: $500USDC (or equivalent value in ANT or ETH) is provided as a bounty reward
  2. Record criteria: The Community Member who creates a proposal and wants the bounty reward should provide a wallet address at time of making the proposal (within the body of the proposal)
  3. Success criteria:
  • Proposal is approved via Aragon voice vote
  • Proposal is implemented through AN DAO (unique definitions of what ā€œimplementedā€ means will need to be determined for each unique proposal)

Illustrative example:

This proposal here would be the first possible recipient of the bounty reward. It will be considered implemented via achievement of 3 unique milestones:

1. This proposal is recorded with a relevant wallet address - which is provided here: (0xdb4CAC94698BC2EbA185628Aced45923A590402e)
2. The proposal is approved via an Aragon Voice vote
3. This proposal is enacted such that any future proposal provided with a wallet address and is subsequently implemented by AN DAO will receive this same reward

3 Likes

I love this idea and thank you for the link. I think the Mirror proposal from Jacob Phillips is pretty spot on. He states some of the current issues with DAO governance in comparison to the liquidity rewards. I donā€™t believe ANT has LP Rewards, but I think that there is huge potential here.

The key difference here is that governance mining will preemptively commit to distribute significant quantities of tokens to contributors ā€” creating clear incentives that canā€™t be ignored.

He talks about a couple of other major DAO protocols that have tried to implement this and some lessons to learn from.

Weā€™ve seen some form of governance mining introduced in protocols like Balancer, Index Coop, MakerDAO, Friends with Benefits

  1. The incentives have been too small
  2. The heuristics have been weak
  3. There hasnā€™t been enough iteration and experimentation in this category

He provides a V1 for ā€œGovernance Miningā€ and think we could build on it.

V1 Governance Mining

  1. Organize a group of 3-5 people from the community to manage the governance mining distributions (perhaps with a larger advisory board). Have this team articulate priorities and heuristics for token distribution.

This could be the formation of a new Sub-DAO, or add responsibility to existing sub-DAO

  1. Set aside some small, but meaningful percent of token supply to be mined over some period of time (6 months, for example). Be sure to make it large enough to attract the best people/groups (those with high opportunity costs) and set the right tone for the value of governance in this network. Create an upper and lower bound for the amount of tokens that will be distributed depending on how much is accomplished in that time period, offering potential contributors some baseline assurances and sufficient upside if their actions have significant impact.

Since this is is all an experiment, our proposal should be clear and a defined. So, instead of just a flat $500 per approved proposal, there could be tiers that are developed by the Sub-DAO. SourceCred who has been refining a PageRank-like algorithm for contributor rewards since 2018 is something that the Ambassador Program is getting started on that could also help create / automate this process, rank rewards, decide on the impact / contributors (i.e. Not all proposals are whole on the first attempt. It often takes several different inputs. Who would receive the reward? All participants or just the proposer? I think something could be developed that incentivizes collaboration.)

Or, if a flat $500 per approved proposal is the idea, it could get this program started and spread the word to attract more contributors as soon as possible, but some kind of ending date or re-evaluation point should be stated.

  1. At some recurring increment (maybe 1 month), review governance contributions and distribute tokens according to the value contributed (possibly with some vesting period). Incentivize long-term involvement by boosting rewards for recurring contributors. Keep a well documented tally of historical governance contributions to be able to update their value retroactively.
  1. After the period is up, assess the results, revamp priorities and distribution logic, and relaunch the program. This will have to be an iterative process.

So in this process it could be required from the Sub-DAO that every month the whole program be evaluated and reported to the rest of the AN DAO. Some sort of review period should also be in place. I believe the rewards should be only in ANT as well.

Again though, I think this has massive potential in governance participation.

1 Like

i was thinking about gamifing this process with the Guardian Network so by doing task you earn XP and level up. so not only governance mining but proof of work :wink: ( based on your XP earned you get ANT)

2 Likes

There are many excellent points here, thankyou Sonny.

For those not aware, I am working with Aragon in a Head of Talent capacity. I agree almost completely with Sonnyā€™s recommendations. Let me expand on my reasoning for why the proposal was framed this way:

  • The AN DAO has been established to experiment and prove effective at decentralising Aragon. I made this proposal incentive early in the experiment to stimulate a healthy backlog of proposals to be discussed, debated, and (hopefully) implemented by core contributors and the community to prove AN DAOā€™s viability. But, to move quickly and support rapid implementation it has been designed for simplicity. In future, the more sophisticated solutions modelled by Sonny seem preferable

  • The $ amount is also a simplification to stimulate the discussion happening here, as well as rapid implementation. Sonnyā€™s recommendation to explicitly state this is an experiment is good enhancement, as is the recommendation to reward in ANT. Additionally, we should anticipate the amount may be too low/high/rigid and design for it be set at the discretion of the executive sub-DAO, reviewed on a monthly basis, and based on feedback and recommendations from a small working group working with me on exploring governance mining and incentive reward topics.

Regarding the establishment of a sub-DAO to govern this:

  • This is an excellent idea to be investigated and designed. The same working group from above could be tasked to research the optimal governance mechanism. We could also try to attract other talents with expertise in this area to participate from across the ecosystem. This does not need to be exhaustive but we should take a little time to reach good conclusions

  • However, I see a backlog of value creation by ambassadors and others that needs to be rewarded already, and incentives or rewards for new contributors or other short term needs will likely need to be deployed. While the working group is establishing and working on a design, a potential recommendation would be for the Executive Sub-DAO to create a ā€œgovernance mining experimentation budgetā€ proposal to cover the next three months, and to make allocations from it based on recommendations from the working group or in consultation with them as needed. Again this should all be transparent to the community and evaluated on a monthly basis

  • At the end of three months (or sooner) the proposed design for an ongoing committee or sub-DAO should be voted on

1 Like

Iā€™m generally in favour of this proposal. $500 seems like a fair reward on time for crafting a proposal, assuming that only the best proposals will actually make it through the gauntlet.

There is however risk of double-earning here with SourceCred. Iā€™d be interested in @daniel-ospinaā€™s view here, particularly with regard to double earning.

If we thought it was highly likely the proposal creator would be double-rewarded via SourceCred, then perhaps we should consider reducing the flat fee element of the bounty to something more fair. Nonetheless, I like the stability element of the flat fee bounty approach. Makes it easier for people to decide whether or not itā€™s worth their time and effort to write great proposals.

1 Like

I think its much more fun for users if this is more like a game. What about if every contributor has a brightID and connects a wallet to it. Now this person has a profile and can receives XP points for every 1$ earned. For a proposal he gets 500XP. The XP gets distributed via Polygon by the sub-DAO. Each time someone does something good the sub-DAO thinks about how much it is worth and distribute XP to the person. at the end of the month you can calculate the earned XP of this month together and distribute ANT to the users worth the $ s/he earned. Then you can build on this system like you can implement different Levels based on XP a user received from x address or automate some processes, integrate sourcecred etc.

what we need:

  • creating a polygon XP-DAO with an XP governance-Token
  • selecting users who controls the XP-DAO at the beginning
  • AN-DAO funds the XP-DAO with ANT
  • Users get rewarded with XP tokens by the XP-DAO and can decide and help how to distribute XP and the funds to users
  • Only users who have received XP from the XP-DAO are eligible for rewards
  • brightID so users can have multiple accounts and bind them together under one profile
  • users who received XP from this DAO can level up and get nfts/boosters/tickets etc. (future)

We can also just start with a google spreadsheet where we document all contribution and their $ value which gets backed up to ipfs by pinning the file and updating it

A node can pin content in order to keep (and provide) it forever, or discard content it hasnā€™t used in a while to save space. This means each node in the network stores only content it is interested in , plus some indexing information that helps figure out which node is storing what.

If you add a new version of your file to IPFS, its cryptographic hash is different, and so it gets a new CID. This means files stored on IPFS are resistant to tampering and censorship ā€” any changes to a file donā€™t overwrite the original, and common chunks across files can be reused in order to minimize storage costs.

We already have most of this functionality in the SourceCred implementation.
When someone creates a proposal they can simply share the link in the appropriate channel (I created the #proposals channel recently)) and as people react to it, the proposer gets rewarded. Even better, itā€™s collaborative as SourceCred maps the value stream through the interactions that the same person had across the Forum, Github, and Discord, and matches it to a wallet address (this process is somewhat manual now but weā€™re hoping to increasingly automate it). So the SourceCred approach avoids the issue of giving all the rewards to the person who posts something, as opposed to the team that evolved the idea (already commenting on the forum is tracked and as proposals have to be posted on the forum first itā€™s already working). It also avoids the issue of rewarding all proposing equally as some proposals have had months of work and others could be just gibberish.

We could further enhance our current setup by creating a custom plug-in for SourceCred so it takes data directly from the Aragon Stack about who proposed and who voted.

Here is a document I wrote about this a couple of months ago:

Iā€™ve discussed this with some of the SourceCred community and they quite like the concept. There are some technical modifications they need to do to their core contract and theyā€™re already working on it and some trust issues between the communities that Iā€™m also working on.

If youā€™d like to help me accelerate this, just let me know in discord :slight_smile:

1 Like