Birds of a Feather

[lkngtn]

EDIT: Based on some of the reactions this post and subsequent thread I felt it was important to provide additional clarity on my intentions and motivation for this post:

• This is not an attack on any one team or any one proposal, I wrote this as a brainstorming process after starting to see flock proposals come up for this ANV cycle, but the underlying thought process is something that has been on my mind and evolving since the very first ANV.
• This is not suggesting any particular immediate changes to any process. The ideas presented in the original post are just ideas that I think warrant further discussion, I want and hope for each of them to be challenged, picked apart, and alternative ideas or approaches presented.
• This is not a declaration that I think things are totally broken and require immediate intervention, this is a call to examine what we are doing and determine what if any changes are appropriate. It is a call for continuous improvement and self-reflection, as opposed to any one specific change.
• This is not the position/views of any one other than myself. I work for Aragon One, I’m working to nurture and shape the 1Hive DAO, and I have been a member of the Aragon Community since the ICO–but I do not have the authority to represent the opinions of anyone but myself–and I do not want the responsibility that would come with such authority because it would limit my ability to simply speak freely.

— Original Post:

Is flock working well?

Aragon One’s Flock Proposal AGPs/AGP-5.md at master · aragon/AGPs · GitHub – 4M DAI, 1,675,000 ANT

Autark’s Flock Proposal AGPs/AGP-19.md at master · aragon/AGPs · GitHub – 390K DAI, 350K ANT

Aragon Black’s Flock Proposal AGPs/AGP-34.md at master · aragon/AGPs · GitHub – 450K DAI, [125K ANT] (Current proposal would replace/include this amount)

Autark’s Second Flock Proposal AGPs/AGP-73.md at master · aragon/AGPs · GitHub – 1.6M DAI, 487,500 ANT

Aragon Black’s Second Flock Proposal (Draft) https://hackmd.io/ARbpqfBbTV2jbtFARls0hA – 1.5M DAI, 800K ANT

So far 6.3M DAI has been allocated to flock teams, with an additional 1.5M currently proposed. As well as 2,637,500 ANT and 800k ANT proposed.

While some of Aragon One’s allocation is still unspent and Autark’s recent flock proposal should only be ~1/4 spent… This still represents an alarming burn rate for a project which has yet to firmly establish product market fit.

I personally believe that Aragon is a game changer and am incredibly bullish on ANT long-term, but its still early, and it will take a while to realize the vision and fully evaluate the value proposition… In the meantime we need to be careful and efficient with how we allocate resources because there is less margin for error at these very early stages.

I think that the Aragon Community and especially ANT holders need to be far more critical about Flock teams and their proposals. I think we should also carefully consider how the program is structured and what the norms are to ensure that it helps to align teams and ANT holders.

Consider this post to be a challenge to the community, let’s come up with something better. Something that allows individuals and teams to contribute to Aragon and be rewarded for these contributions in a meaningful way–while not resulting in bloated proposals with lots of redundant effort and operational overhead. Let’s try and operate more like a DAO and less like an inefficient government grant processes.

To kick this discussion off here are a few ideas that have been on my mind… let’s discuss and add more ideas and perhaps something compelling will start to emerge…

Let’s be more critical of each other

I have good personal relationships with people on A1, Autark, and Aragon Black. I like these people, I respect them, but it is absolutely essential that we don’t pull our punches when evaluating each others AGP proposal just because we are friends and colleagues.

How can we expect ANT holders to make smart and informed decisions about proposals if the people involved refuse to say anything negative because it might lead to tension or awkward relationships in the future?

The norm should be to provide polite criticism, share doubts, question assumptions, and hopefully work towards proposals that are better thought out and more valuable to Aragon as a whole.

Let’s unbundle flock proposals

Let’s create a norm of unbundling proposals so that the various pieces can be approved separately, and at different times. Why are we funding initiatives that won’t even start until mid next year in August of this year? Why can’t I approve Aragon Black working on Fundraising without approving 300k worth of funding for the Aragon Black Blog?

Let’s encourage flock teams to actually deliver consistently and on-time by unbundling proposals, and approving or rejecting each initiative independently. If a flock team is competent and consistently delivers then they will build a relationship with the community and approving funding for their intiatives should be a no brainer.

Runway certainty should come from consistent delivery and not from large lump sum allocations.

Let’s create a flock and/or AGP wide budget

As a community we should be clear about and come to consensus on what Aragon as a whole’s burn rate should be. From there we can make better and more informed decisions on how to allocate that budget.

One potential way to impose this budget is to shift how we fund projects entirely. If we say our budget is 4M per year, we have 1M per quarter to spend. We could approve projects to be eligible for funding, and use some sort of proportional voting method (eg dot voting) to allocate resources between eligible recipients on a periodic basis. Another option (though perhaps slightly further out) is to use Conviction Voting, which also imposes a budget and forces voters consciously prioritize their support to the highest leverage proposals.

This way proposals actually need to compete with each other, and hopefully we allocate our budget more effectively.

Let’s collaborate more & reduce redundant efforts

The Aragon Black blog is currently marked as 15% percent of a 1.5-2.3M dollar proposal (depending on how you count the ANT). (in a newer version of this proposal it has been clarified that the 15% indicator was not specifically reflective of the budget of the blog) Aragon One operates a blog, autark operates a blog, and the Aragon association operates a blog… Why the redundancy here? Why do we need to fund 4 blogs? By all means each team can run a blog, but it should be a negligible part of the budget as it’s not strategically valuable to the community providing funding.

One of the goals of flock was to ensure that if one team disappeared there would be others to pick up the pieces and continue from there… That does not mean that we need teams to be doing the same stuff in parallel constantly, just that they are people that know the community, know the tech, and have the potential to pick up the slack if need be.

We should be funding specific initiatives like the Aragon.org blog, electing resources to manage those initiatives, and collaborate as a community on one thing, rather than creating parallel, unrelated efforts. It may be totally fine to even have a single party responsible for some of these things–that’s fine if they don’t do a good job we can always replace them.

I think the working group concept could evolve into something that we treat as resource allocation pods, that we delegate a budget to a working group and then rely on working group members to coordinate effective collaboration on specific initiatives like the aragon.org blog, or on things like aragonDS or aragonJS.

Let’s create more value

Proposers should be thinking carefully about exactly how their proposal will create value. Not everything will have a direct financial ROI for the community, but we should always be thinking about the indirect ROI and how we can measure that.

Flock teams should have some sort of business model, ideally one that clearly aligns them with the project. Aragon Black is working on fundraising, and the default templates and onboarding require users to use ANT as part of the bonding curve collateral pool. It is clear to see how the success of this initiative will lead to an increase in demand for ANT, and so it has a direct ROI. Similarly A1’s work on the Court creates additional utility for ANT, the court can be valued as a DCF model and that valuation flows to ANT.

This is also good for the team as it builds their leverage, teams want more stability and consistent funding and one way to achieve that is to make your initiatives clearly valuable to Aragon’s bottom line.

If a proposal is targeted at a specific goal, perhaps some part of the funding should be contingent on hitting performance goals?

Similarly, are there performance goals that we want to formalized on their own like…

Let’s formalized dev incentives

Building Aragon Apps can be really valuable for building a compelling ecosystem, driving adoption, and ultimately creating a bigger market for Aragon Network services like the court.

We could allocate a budget for rewarding application developers or teams which ship applications on mainnet that actually get used. We can based this incentive on actual data (funds in orgs using those apps, interactions with those specific apps, number of orgs with those apps, etc).

This budget would be continuously allocated, and “up for grabs” for devs and teams that ship and provide value. It would be possible for developers to make money supporting the Aragon app ecosystem without ever actually making an AGP proposal.

---

[luis]

Thanks to much Luke for posting this. Flock is still an alpha and there are tons of things to enhance. Particularly I agree with the shipping part. Right now there is just one Flock team that has delivered something to mainnet. We are getting closer to the other two doing so as well, but I think we may need stronger incentives to achieve that.

As a community we should be clear about and come to consensus on what Aragon as a whole’s burn rate should be. From there we can make better and more informed decisions on how to allocate that budget.

Fully support this.

One potential way to impose this budget is to shift how we fund projects entirely. If we say our budget is 4M per year, we have 1M per quarter to spend. We could approve projects to be eligible for funding, and use some sort of proportional voting method (eg dot voting) to allocate resources between eligible recipients on a periodic basis.

I’m concerned about this leading to financial uncertainty for Flock teams. Teams like A1 have full-time teams that rely on monthly payroll.

The Aragon Black blog is currently marked as 15% percent of a 1.5-2.3M dollar proposal

This doesn’t make any sense whatsoever. Talked to @osarrouy about this and he agreed.

We could allocate a budget for rewarding application developers or teams which ship applications on mainnet that actually get used .

Indeed.

[stefanobernardi]

@lkngtn thanks so much for posting this. I believe it is a conversation we all must have as a community.

I very much agree with most of the points you raise, and at the AA we’ve obviously been thinking a lot about the topic.

The following though, are my own personal opinions about this.

One meta-consideration is in recognizing the structural reasons why we are in such a situation. For me one of the main issues is that we’re operating at a breakneck speed, and the frameworks in which we move, and consequently the decisions we have to take, are 10x harder than in a startup.

So we have higher speed and more complex decisions with much longer feedback loops - that translates to: very hard.

More specifically, Flock and maybe even the AGP itself, are alpha-level concepts, for which the feedback loop is longer than the execution timeline of being able to think and implement new frameworks. This means that we risk either getting stuck with low-performing models OR constantly re-invent the wheel and risk spending a lot of time and thought on models we are constantly removing and substituting.

Again, at the core level, I think there is something to recognize: one of the mistakes we might have made, is the conflation of decentralized governance and decentralized development.
I think they actually are independent and you could work with any of the 4 permutations. We’ve decided to go ~fully decentralized on both, which is a really fascinating experience, but obviously introduces the most complexity.

It might help to frame the thinking separately. Therefore: the sooner we have discussions that specifically relate to the decentralized development side, the better.
Because tensions are bound to happen. Hell, we’ve already had such an issue with the first Flock team.

One thing that we need to acknowledge, however hard, is the reality that we can’t expect non-founders to have the same level of execution, detail, care, and frankly - just plain old skin in the game that founders have: financial, but also subconsciously reputational. The ANT grants that are supposed to align incentives, are nowhere near enough to bring the situation on the same level I think.
Founders are tied to their creatures as parents are with their kids, and a very difficult situation to “artificially recreate”.
Without counting the “sunken costs” of having thought about this for years, and having dabbled in code for far longer than any other team that could apply - leading to clearly longer ramp-up cycles for new Flock teams.

This obviously also applies to the current Aragon Association and, in my opinion, any future iteration of it. Which is a good segway to say a few words about what I think the AA’s role is in such situations:

I see the role of the AA as coordinating and executing the offline side of things (agreements, payments, etc.). We can have a role on the monitoring side, but in the end all governance and funding decisions are taken on-chain anyways.
Any fundraisings, challenges, or changes to the model need to be AGPs themselves - so the “power” the association here is fairly limited.
Additionally, the AA is a 2 (soon 3) person operation that has a wide variety of tasks and responsibilities, and I don’t see it as ever being a very efficient global product management / project management function - even aside from the centralization aspect that that would bring.

Now, as per your proposals, they are all very interesting - but again, I would define them as alpha.
Implementing them, would:

• take a lot of time
• cost money, morale, mental space
• introduce other problems (eg. if the total budget is $50, and there are three proposals that are accepted, each for $40/2, how do we decide which one to fund and which to reduce)
• still have super long feedback loops

To avoid just pointing out problems, I will try to list a few of the solutions I can imagine. They cover a somewhat wide spectrum of options, some are admittedly extreme.
Note that I don’t yet have any opinions on them

1. Admit we’ve scaled the development decentralization process too fast. Propose an AGP to reclaim the centralization of the product development to Aragon One AG, while maintaining full decentralization of the assets and the governance.
   This AGP would include a freeze on all new Flock grants, and propose that all other current Flock teams become contractors for Aragon One, which would be the main entity responsible for product development of the project and could therefore assess quality and deal with items on an invoice by invoice basis.

2. Have an AGP to change the Flock process and program with some of your suggestions. But TBH, I don’t see a path to implementation that doesn’t lead to the same problems we have now OR that is implementable without a strong centralized governance (at this point at the AA level I guess, which would have to expand to a full product management organization).

3. Proclamation / Signaling AGP about specific Flock teams that aren’t working out. “Hey, Flock Team X. We think you are not delivering compared to your roadmap - here is some supporting data - or we think your roadmap is now overweighted here and here. We think that if this AGP passes, it should be honest of yourselves to {|not reapply|, |possibly forfeit the remainder of the grant|, |change the roadmap as so|}”

4. AGP to unpack the Flock program to atomic initiatives, but I’d have no idea where to start writing / structuring something like this, let alone deal with the currently funded initiatives.

5. AGP to make roadmaps and development reports staked. It would work as so:

• (On the updates) A team would stake capital on a development report, and people can challenge it if they smell it doesn’t cover the truth. They could bring a case with code and commit data forward and win the stake if they are found to be correct.
• (On the whole roadmap) Get the team or someone else to pool together some funds and stake them behind the whole roadmap. Additionally, x% of the grants wouldn’t be paid out to the team, but go to the stake.
  If the team doesn’t deliver what promised, people can challenge and get the stake.

I would like to stress how hard this problem is, and, sure, incentivize people to come up with out-of-the-box ideas for future iterations of it, but also being mindful of how to address the current and immediately upcoming situation, so as to avoid being stuck with a suboptimal situation now, as well as having another uncertain one in a few months.

[lkngtn]

I’m concerned about this leading to financial uncertainty for Flock teams. Teams like A1 have full-time teams that rely on monthly payroll.

I think this is a valid point, but I also think that there are plenty of examples where successful businesses handle uncertainty and reach stability that do not require large, lump sum, contracts. A team like A1, which has consistently delivered value and shipped things to mainnet seems unlikely to find themselves unable to meet monthly payroll…

If we move to a model where teams work on smaller milestones and deliverables, teams should adopt similar strategies and best practices around quoting and estimating that you see traditional consultancy/service firms operate with. There should be “profit” built into a proposal which can be accumulated and provide an emergency fund for teams to weather unexpected shifts in incoming revenue.

More specifically, Flock and maybe even the AGP itself, are alpha-level concepts, for which the feedback loop is longer than the execution timeline of being able to think and implement new frameworks. This means that we risk either getting stuck with low-performing models OR constantly re-invent the wheel and risk spending a lot of time and thought on models we are constantly removing and substituting.

Absolutely–and I think its important that we treat the AGP process and flock process almost like products. We need to be agile and rapidly iterate to find what works. Ultimately we need to be an example of how to operate using these new tools, we need to be leading the charge and learning as we go–and if the process is not working optimally for us we need to change it ASAP.

I disagree that constantly re-inventing the wheel is a waste of time though, I think that it is core to what we need to be doing… but It may make sense to take a step back and try and compartmentalize some of that experimentation a bit better so that we have some stability in certain core aspects of development but then more value (and variability and insights) generated elsewhere in the process. Perhaps scale back flock, but at the same time scale up more radical experiments… We could have different variations of fund allocation (like the CFDAO, like the proposed CRDAO, like the new NEST, experimenting with different models for capital allocation.

Though ultimately I think the best models will be more bottom up, and provide space for competition among contributors (or service providers).

One thing that we need to acknowledge, however hard, is the reality that we can’t expect non-founders to have the same level of execution, detail, care, and frankly - just plain old skin in the game that founders have: financial, but also subconsciously reputational. The ANT grants that are supposed to align incentives, are nowhere near enough to bring the situation on the same level I think.
Founders are tied to their creatures as parents are with their kids, and a very difficult situation to “artificially recreate”.

I tend to agree with this sentiment, and it’s one of the reasons I have been vocal about flock teams needing independent business models. Its important I think for teams (and their founders) to not just be checking of boxes in proposals deliverables, but really thinking about how they can grow and optimize their business–and the trick to make flock successful is to create structures which allow these business models to emerge AND be aligned with ANT holders.

For example my suggestion of a fixed budget that gets proportionally allocated between projects (based on something like dot voting), or the suggestion to allocate a budget for application developers that gets split based on usage metrics creates a structure where there is “money on the table” that an entrepreneur can claim for themselves by outcompeting other teams/projects. They don’t need to announce a roadmap, and ANT holders don’t need to evaluate it, they get paid by delivering and they are incentivized just like “real” founders to optimize for that outcome.

I see the role of the AA as coordinating and executing the offline side of things (agreements, payments, etc.). We can have a role on the monitoring side, but in the end all governance and funding decisions are taken on-chain anyways.

I agree I think our goal should be to minimize AA involvement. If the solution to this problem is to have more AA oversight then I think we are moving in the wrong direction.

[osarrouy]

Hi everyone,

Thanks a lot for that comprehensive post and its interesting questions @lkngtn.

It happens that today is my first day of [almost] real vacations in two years so i’m already half away. Thus, I will just clarify a couple of things regarding the second [draft] Aragon Black proposal and give some very generic insight. I do intend to reply more extensively when I’m back from vacations [and got some sleep].

Aragon Black Flock proposal

@lkngtn The proposal you linked to is no longer valid. Here is the last one. It’s basically the same excepts that we removed private comments that was not supposed to be public in the first place …

Note that this proposal is still in a draft stage so everything is open to comments. I would like to discuss two specific points related to your post though.

ANT Package

The way you @lkngtn describe our ANT package request is not totally accurate. Actually [as explained in the proposal] the package we request is meant to replace our previous request that would thus be cancelled [to clarify things and stick more accurately to the new ANT packages rationale that has been discussed in the meanwhile]. We would thus end up with a total package of 800k ANT [accounting for our two Flock period]. This request matches the rationale discussed here where ANT packages are basically halved each year. Of course this can be discussed if the rationale be updated.

Black Blog

The question you raised about the Black Blog is fair and we already had updated its weight into our proposal accordingly. It’s always hard when ranking / weighting initiatives to figure out whether should be taken into account the importance we [subjectively] grant them, the number of people they involve or the budget they require. To make it clear the Black Blog is ran by two people each of them working half-time. Their payroll is compliant with the market [so that they are payed way less than any other member of the team]. In the end the Black Blog accounts for less than 4% of our budget. Given the number of articles published and the effort made to introduce people to other thoughts than the one bloating the blockchain space I think it’s fair. We have for instance an interview with James C. Scott to be published soon which is the kind of things which are pretty rare in the space. I personnaly grant a value to this blog which is way higher than the 3% or 4% they take on our budget

General thoughts

I do agree the status of Flock teams should be clarified [and clarified ASAP]: are they standonalone teams ? are they supposed to be dedicated to one specific product ? are they supposed to come up with an economic model for the product they dedicate to ? etc. As stated by @stefanobernardi the Flock program [as the whole Aragon governance’s process] is pretty unique in the space and I believe it’s normal that it goes through some sort of a trial / error process. I do believe though that if we wanna make it work things should be clarified as soon as possible.

1. It makes it very difficult to hire and maintain a team when the horizon is highly blurry [we have hirings in process: should we postpone them, cancel them, etc ?]
2. It’s hard to define what should be the scope of our proposal: should we embrace all the challenges that Aragon as a network is facing [devs of course, but also on-boarding, communication, etc.] ? should we keep our proposal more focused and dedicate our efforts to dev ? should this development effort be kept generic or focused on one product [in our case fundraising or pando] ?

In our situation for instance between 25% and 35% of our budget is dedicated to on-boarding [team members payroll and travel]. I’m not the one leading this initiative but it feels like this is still not enough with respect to how much effort it requires to support people in using Aragon, understanding its apps, etc.

Who should account for this efforts if not Flock teams ? should everyone working on on-boarding join A1 ? should a team dedicated to on-boarding be set up ? but then who will pay for it ? Note that I mention on-boarding cause it’s a particularly intense effort but the same questions could be raised for communication, core stack contributions, etc.

I really have no answers to these questions but the way I see it for now is kind of binary:

1. Either each team is meant to embrace the whole Aragon effort [dev, on-boarding, communication, etc.] but then it requires each team to be large enough [with a consequence on their budgets].
2. Either each team is meant to dedicate to a specific effort [one for on-boarding, one for a specific product such a fundraising, etc.] while being coordinated by A1 / AA. This would lead to smaller teams with smaller budgets and maybe a path to discuss the possibility of team-specific business models.

I think this also raises the strategic issue of what Aragon is meant to be: is Aragon one sole product / effort [the client, the court, etc.], or is Aragon a network of semi-independant initiatives / products aligned with respect to their values, leveraging technical network effects and a common basis [ANT and its derivatives] to support their respective business models [then multiple funding processes should be experimented with].

I can’t see which path is the best but I think we should definitely decide and clarify both this strategic issue and the status of Flock as soon as possible [also because this would highly impact the shape / extension of our own proposal ].

[lkngtn]

Aragon Black Flock proposal

@lkngtn The proposal you linked to is no longer valid. Here is the last one . It’s basically the same excepts that we removed private comments that was not supposed to be public in the first place …

Note that this proposal is still in a draft stage so everything is open to comments. I would like to discuss two specific points related to your post though.

ANT Package

The way you @lkngtn describe our ANT package request is not totally accurate. Actually [as explained in the proposal] the package we request is meant to replace our previous request that would thus be cancelled [to clarify things and stick more accurately to the new ANT packages rationale that has been discussed in the meanwhile]. We would thus end up with a total package of 800k ANT [accounting for our two Flock period]. This request matches the rationale discussed here where ANT packages are basically halved each year. Of course this can be discussed if the rationale be updated.

Thanks for the clarification, I’ve edited the OP to reflect this (and also link to the latest draft proposal)

[Aaron]

I have been thinking about and having conversations about some of these issues quite a bit recently, @lkngtn articulates the problems very well, and it’s not an easy thing because there are many facets to it. I agree with most of the proposed solutions, there is a lot to unpack

This still represents an alarming burn rate for a project which has yet to firmly establish product market fit

This should be at the forefront of all discussions with regards to funding proposals. There has been a lot of discussions about sustainability but the issue with regards to the runway is still opaque. Our community prides its self on openness and transparency, and while this information is available it is not easy to find and is not mentioned much. @anteater broke this down a bit in the last Aragon black proposal. But this is very important information. I would like to see this made much clearer.

I think that the Aragon Community and especially ANT holders need to be far more critical about Flock teams and their proposals

I agree. A big part of the problem which has already been highlighted is the fact that proposals are monolithic. We only have three flock teams all working on essential components of the network which makes it difficult to vote no.

Let’s create a norm of unbundling proposals so that the various pieces can be approved separately, and at different times

And

Let’s encourage flock teams to actually deliver consistently and on-time by unbundling proposals, and approving or rejecting each initiative independently.

Very much support! In addition, it gives ANT holders much more control over the road map and strategy.

For example in Aragon blacks proposal I05 - Onboarding there is a section on a proposed Aragon Academy and in the notes from the last strategy meeting, there is a bullet point ‘Create an ambassador program for Aragon’

For me, this is of vital importance and I want to see this prioritised. But it seems to be the focus is on end-users, this is clearly important as we need to get more traction but a greater focus needs to be in training developers. I have been struggling for months trying to get to grips with the stack, while I am not a developer by trade and thus don’t represent the typical contributor, everyone I have spoken to all says how difficult it is to learn. I know I’m straying slightly of topic for the thread, I will expand more in the AB proposal thread but my point is ANT holders should have more control over what is being built and shouldn’t have to fund things they think provide less value so I’m in agreement with this

however, I echo @luis concerns

I’m concerned about this leading to financial uncertainty for Flock teams. Teams like A1 have full-time teams that rely on monthly payroll

I don’t know much about how A1 operates internally but this is the direction 1hive has been taking. I think It’s the most exciting project on Aragon because of its forward-thinking on how open collaborative organisations could work. In the few months I’ve been active there I’ve seen the rapid evolution of the project and its really inspiring.

However, having all the projects compartmentalised with everything run as a bounty won’t work for all. I don’t see any of the teams building on Aragon working effectively as simply a collection of freelancers. 1hive it’s self is much more radical in this regard but still there are functions that don’t fit neatly into the bounties box.

Even if we require teams to unbound initiatives and present them atomically, flock teams are still organisations and require administration and some none code contribution across all internal projects. There should still be some base level funding for payroll giving stability to core contributors

I highlight 1hive specifically because im most familiar with this DAO and i think it’s the most natural fit for the next team to join Flock

One potential way to impose this budget is to shift how we fund projects entirely. If we say our budget is 4M per year, we have 1M per quarter to spend
…
This way proposals actually need to compete with each other, and hopefully, we allocate our budget more effectively

Totally agree. Firstly because competition is good and healthy. It will force teams to focus on what they think the community values the most. Secondly, it is much easier to reason proposals with respect to the runway.

Building Aragon Apps can be really valuable for building a compelling ecosystem, driving adoption, and ultimately creating a bigger market for Aragon Network services like the court.

I would go further. IMO it’s the Apps that will make or break the project. The iPhone is the perfect analogy here. Apple didn’t invent the smartphone, but it created the market we know today. Yes it was slick and had a great design (all things that Aragon dose very well) but what really made the smartphones take-off was the app store

The fact that anyone could create an app and upload it made the iPhone incremental better and expanded the market for the iPhone it’s self. Sure most of them were absolute shit, but the sheer number of them gave it utility way beyond a phone

This isnt going to happen magically. The funding system should be geared towards making this a reality.

Clearly, this is the intention behind the architecture and I know @jorge was an iOS developer before Aragon, but as @luis mentioned, we have spent millions of dollars and only A1 have delivered apps to mainnet.

This isn’t a strong criticism of Autark of Aragon Black, these are core apps and they take time. Additionally, they have been working on the stack too but my point is, Apple didn’t make hardly any apps. They fostered a community of app builders

I say all that to say i don’t think we should be spending millions on apps at all. As soon fundraising and open enterprise are on mainnet We already have the core built out.

Aragon Network Token

but small community endeavors that cost less than $10,000 each are getting blocked and pushed back on. To get some perspective, we could fund 100 to 150 $10,000 community grants for the same cost as either Aragon Black or Autark’s latest AGP

At the moment there are nowhere near enough developers that understand the stack to do this at the moment (back to my earlier point on Aragon Academy) and the quality of the code will not be up to the same standard, but any changes to the funding system should take these points into account

[burrrata]

This still represents an alarming burn rate for a project which has yet to firmly establish product market fit

This should be at the forefront of all discussions with regards to funding proposals.

Agreed! I approached this from 2 angles in the Aragon Network Token post. First, ANT holders are funding Flock teams so there should be a clear correlation between funding proposals and how that benefits ANT value/price. Second, it’s a lot cheaper and potentially a lot more effective to fund lots of small community projects than one monolithic kitchen sink proposal. This is easier said than done, so the second half of the ANT post explores potential solutions to this problem.

I’m concerned about this leading to financial uncertainty for Flock teams. Teams like A1 have full-time teams that rely on monthly payroll.

To attract top talent, or even any talent, we need to pay competitive rates for grants and give Flock teams the funding they need to pay for salaries. Not everyone can just hop from project to project, and having stability and runway allows people to focus on their work vs being stressed out about financials every few months. You can run a public company on a quarterly basis, or you can run an early stage startup with a runway as you try to find product market fit, but you can’t operate on a quarterly basis while you try to find product market fit.

This is why I think we should give Flock teams the stability they need, but we also need to create more vehicles to fund community projects. This can create an organic “contributor funnel” (like sales funnel, but for Aragon ecosystem onboarding). There can be iterative support for general community contributions, hackers building prototypes, projects that aim to ship a specific thing, and Flock teams who are dedicated to contributing to the Aragon ecosystem long term (6-12 months).

One meta-consideration is in recognizing the structural reasons why we are in such a situation. For me one of the main issues is that we’re operating at a breakneck speed, and the frameworks in which we move, and consequently the decisions we have to take, are 10x harder than in a startup.

So we have higher speed and more complex decisions with much longer feedback loops - that translates to: very hard.

Agreed. I have many proposals on how we can run more experiments, get more feedback, and iterate more quickly in the second half of my Aragon Network Token post. A few early ideas are:

• domain specific DAOs
• investment DAOs
• app mining
• community reward DAOs

One thing that we need to acknowledge, however hard, is the reality that we can’t expect non-founders to have the same level of execution, detail, care, and frankly - just plain old skin in the game that founders have: financial, but also subconsciously reputational.

More people would have skin in the game if more ANT tokens were distributed to the community. As is, I’ve been contributing to the general ecosystem for about 6 months, but received a grand total of 0 ANT for doing so. Something like the CRDAO could help a lot, but more generally we need to be getting more ANT to more people who care about and contribute to Aragon.

your proposals, they are all very interesting - but again, I would define them as alpha.
Implementing them, would:

• take a lot of time
• cost money, morale, mental space
• introduce other problems (eg. if the total budget is $50, and there are three proposals that are accepted, each for $40/2, how do we decide which one to fund and which to reduce)
• still have super long feedback loops

Yup! It’s easy to point out flaws, but it’s really really hard to create systems that work. If it was easy everyone would already be doing it. We are in a new design space that includes a publicly traded token, decentralized governance, and a global talent pool. This is non trivial. Happy that we’re having this discussion, but it seems naive and presumptuous to suggest that we could change the whole thing in one go.

The system is not perfect, and it has a lot of room to improve, but it has also resulted in Aragon being the world leader in DAO development. ANT is one of the only surviving ICO projects that has a pulse. Let’s improve and augment the current system, not radically change the foundation that makes all of this possible.

I would like to stress how hard this problem is, and, sure, incentivize people to come up with out-of-the-box ideas for future iterations of it, but also being mindful of how to address the current and immediately upcoming situation , so as to avoid being stuck with a suboptimal situation now, as well as having another uncertain one in a few months.

The struggle is real. If we put ourselves in a position where we’re radically redesigning the economic incentives of Aragon on an ANV to ANV basis, it’s going to be chaos. There’s already tons of chaos from decentralized governance and trying to find product/market fit. There needs to be a base line of stability somewhere.

having all the projects compartmentalised with everything run as a bounty won’t work for all. I don’t see any of the teams building on Aragon working effectively as simply a collection of freelancers.

Contributing on a project by project or bounty by bounty basis is fun as an experiment to explore the space, but it’s not sustainable long term and it’s not fun long term either. If we want to invest in our community, and if we want to retain talent that has taken time to learn about the culture and tech stack, we need to provide incentives that allow people to commit to contributing for longer than just a few months at a time. Considering the onboarding cost of understanding the community and tech stack, and considering how few people are actually here, I don’t think bounties or freelancing is really even a realistic option at this point.

Even if we require teams to unbound initiatives and present them atomically, flock teams are still organisations and require administration and some none code contribution across all internal projects. There should still be some base level funding for payroll giving stability to core contributors

Yup! Otherwise no one is going to want to do the unsexy and/or emotionally hard labor that keeps an actual team/community functional and contributes to decision making.

IMO it’s the Apps that will make or break the project. The iPhone is the perfect analogy here. Apple didn’t invent the smartphone, but it created the market we know today. Yes it was slick and had a great design (all things that Aragon dose very well) but what really made the smartphones take-off was the app store

Yeah, so we should fund more community driven application projects. As I said in the Aragon Network Token post, for the same cost as 1 Flock proposal we could fund 2 to 3 $10,000 application project per week for a year. Problem is, we don’t have that kind of deal flow, and if we did… we don’t have that talent pool to execute on it. Creating infrastructure to support the Aragon ecosystem (dev UX and financing vehicles) is essential to make the “app store” thesis a reality.

we have spent millions of dollars and only A1 have delivered apps to mainnet.

Building prototypes is easy and fun. Shipping (and maintaining) production ready applications is not. If you look at the broader technology industry (or even the Ethereum space), any of the apps being built by Aragon teams could be their own product that takes millions of dollars of financing and years to perfect before finding product/market fit. It’s a miracle we’ve gotten this far. That being said, we can still improve. We can improve a lot actually. Creating infrastructure that makes it easier for teams to build and ship production ready apps will go a long way to making this possible.

Currently, every team has to reinvent the wheel and is navigating this process more or less on their own. While it’s good to be self sufficient, none of us would be here if we were living off the land hunting and gathering. Communities and trade allow for more efficiency. Having working groups or expert networks could help teams find talent and get feedback without having to manage everything internally. Also, expanding the security review program to include Nest and community projects would be amazing. Having community driven documentation could help a lot too. There’s lots of things that would help, but first we need financing vehicles to support these community ideas.

but small community endeavors that cost less than $10,000 each are getting blocked and pushed back on. To get some perspective, we could fund 100 to 150 $10,000 community grants for the same cost as either Aragon Black or Autark’s latest AGP

At the moment there are nowhere near enough developers that understand the stack to do this at the moment (back to my earlier point on Aragon Academy) and the quality of the code will not be up to the same standard, but any changes to the funding system should take these points into account

As said in the previous two comments here, it takes a village. We need a strong, engaged, and stable ecosystem before any of this stuff is possible. It takes time to onboard contributors, and once people are here we want them to stay. This means better financing vehicles and more stability.

[lkngtn]

Even if we require teams to unbound initiatives and present them atomically, flock teams are still organisations and require administration and some none code contribution across all internal projects. There should still be some base level funding for payroll giving stability to core contributors

I agree, I think payroll is a useful way for teams to organize! But I don’t really think that its necessarily the case that unbundling proposals precludes teams from managing their treasury to create internal stability, or from internally organizing their team how they see fit–whether that is with payroll, performance bonuses, bounties, etc. I don’t think it’s strictly necessary for ANT holders to be directly involved in how a team choses to structure itself.

To attract top talent, or even any talent, we need to pay competitive rates for grants and give Flock teams the funding they need to pay for salaries. Not everyone can just hop from project to project, and having stability and runway allows people to focus on their work vs being stressed out about financials every few months. You can run a public company on a quarterly basis, or you can run an early stage startup with a runway as you try to find product market fit, but you can’t operate on a quarterly basis while you try to find product market fit.

I really want to question this assumption, it is incredibly common for service based organizations to start up and bootstrap without any seed funding and expand their business over time. I don’t think we necessarily should be modeling Aragon Network Service providers (like flock or nest teams) as vc backed startups.

Happy that we’re having this discussion, but it seems naive and presumptuous to suggest that we could change the whole thing in one go.

I think it’s helpful to avoid making judgements like this during ideation. At this point, before there are any formal proposals put forward, it’s not really helpful imo to say something is naive or presumptuous.

I do agree the status of Flock teams should be clarified [and clarified ASAP]: are they standonalone teams ? are they supposed to be dedicated to one specific product ? are they supposed to come up with an economic model for the product they dedicate to ? etc

I’m not sure it matters really, my hope is that flock teams would be diverse. Some may be larger, some may be smaller, some may be laser focused on one thing, others may be more fluid and daolike.

I think more important than what flock teams do or look like is how we ensure that they are well aligned and effective at whatever scope or role they propose to take on.

I think this also raises the strategic issue of what Aragon is meant to be : is Aragon one sole product / effort [the client, the court, etc.], or is Aragon a network of semi-independant initiatives / products aligned with respect to their values, leveraging technical network effects and a common basis [ANT and its derivatives] to support their respective business models [then multiple funding processes should be experimented with].

I think this is a great question and would love to hear lots of different perspectives on this.

Personally I might reframe it slightly and say What does Aragon need to be in order for it realize the project’s core vision, for me that means that we need to find a way for the community to effectively and efficiently (especially before we have established capital inflows) allocate capital and as quickly as possible establish an economy that is both sustainable and growing.

I think ANT needs to be the focal point for that economy and the community, and I care more about maintaining the communities core values and manifesto while growing the community and value of ANT than I do about any specific “product” whether that is the client, aragonOS, or even the Court.

[burrrata]

payroll is a useful way for teams to organize! But I don’t really think that its necessarily the case that unbundling proposals precludes teams from managing their treasury to create internal stability, or from internally organizing their team how they see fit–whether that is with payroll, performance bonuses, bounties, etc.

What would this look like? If proposals are unbundled then ANT holders aren’t voting to support a team, but are voting to support a project. I guess that project could choose to allocate funds via payroll, bounties, or anything else, but then it’s more like a Nest grant than a Flock “team.” If you have a larger team (like 1Hive, Autark, or Aragon Black) then there are lots of different projects being worked on in parallel by the team. There’s lots of cross pollination of ideas, collaboration with other teams, and general Aragon ecosystem contributions that larger teams like that contribute to. How do you measure, manage, and fund all of that as a team if funding proposals are broken down into project specific funding requests?

it is incredibly common for service based organizations to start up and bootstrap without any seed funding and expand their business over time. I don’t think we necessarily should be modeling Aragon Network Service providers (like flock or nest teams) as vc backed startups.

Yeah, but those service based organizations are not trying to change the way the humanity organizes at scale. They’re not trying to create a digital jurisdiction that makes traditoinal governments obsolete. They’re not fighting for freedom. Startups and the VC industry are optimized for exponential growth and innovation. It’s not for lifestyle companies. It’s for organizations that want to change the world.

I think more important than what flock teams do or look like is how we ensure that they are well aligned and effective at whatever scope or role they propose to take on.

Agreed! Lots of ideas on how we might do that

I think ANT needs to be the focal point for that economy and the community, and I care more about maintaining the communities core values and manifesto while growing the community and value of ANT than I do about any specific “product” whether that is the client, aragonOS, or even the Court.

Yes! As mentioned, lots of ideas in the Aragon Network Token post on how we might start to drive more value to ANT

[lkngtn]

What would this look like?

When you engage with a contractor on a project you negotiate a rate for that project, in some cases this is done as a fixed bid, in other cases it is done based on a negotiated rate. In either case the payment that is negotiated doesn’t just cover the contractor’s marginal cost to deliver, because if it did the contractor would never be able to cover operational overhead like rent or support functions like marketing, sales, or HR, let alone make a profit overall.

In the context of unbunding proposals into projects, the expectation is similar. A team would propose a project and an amount, but can and should budget such that they can cover any related operational expenses they feel are warranted. Those operational expenses don’t need to be delineated in the proposed scope of work, much like you wouldn’t expect to have a line item for “marketing” when you hire a consultant. However, if your proposals tend to have high overhead you may find that you end up struggling to compete with leaner competitors.

Yeah, but those service based organizations are not trying to change the way the humanity organizes at scale. They’re not trying to create a digital jurisdiction that makes traditoinal governments obsolete. They’re not fighting for freedom. Startups and the VC industry are optimized for exponential growth and innovation. It’s not for lifestyle companies. It’s for organizations that want to change the world.

I think, it is Aragon that is attempting to change how humanity organizes. Flock/Nest teams are contracted by ANT holders to help accomplish that goal. They may be very aligned in mission and culture, but from a business model perspective my position is that nest and flock teams should (or at the very least could) be operating more like service-based businesses than product-based startups.

[burrrata]

Aragon that is attempting to change how humanity organizes. Flock/Nest teams are contracted by ANT holders to help accomplish that goal.

We are so so so early in the game… Aragon cannot operate like a public company that farms out work to 3rd parties because ANT holders do not vote! Even if they did, there’s no clear way to coordinate or engage with them! What you’re describing is the worst of both worlds, being accountable to a decentralized amorphous group of shareholders while also trying to find product/market fit in a fast growing and new industry. That’s absolutely crazy!

Flock teams are early adopters in Aragon who are tightly aligned with the mission, vision, community, and values of Aragon. We’re all in this together. If the culture shifts to attract contractors and bounty hunters I don’t think Aragon will thrive. First we don’t have the resources or infrastructure to quickly onboard new talent. Second, even if we did, onboarding (and retaining) new talent requires a group of core contributors that can engage with and mentor people. Yes, we need to create more dynamic bottom up funding vehicles to experiment and support community endeavors. We cannot, however, clip the wings of the teams that are the cornerstones of this community. We need to support the teams that are here so that they can spread their wings and learn to fly

In the context of unbunding proposals into projects, the expectation is similar. A team would propose a project and an amount, but can and should budget such that they can cover any related operational expenses they feel are warranted. Those operational expenses don’t need to be delineated in the proposed scope of work, much like you wouldn’t expect to have a line item for “marketing” when you hire a consultant. However, if your proposals tend to have high overhead you may find that you end up struggling to compete with leaner competitors.

I think what you’re describing is the Nest grants program.

[lkngtn]

We are so so so early in the game… Aragon cannot operate like a public company that farms out work to 3rd parties because ANT holders do not vote! Even if they did, there’s no clear way to coordinate or engage with them! What you’re describing is the worst of both worlds, being accountable to a decentralized amorphous group of shareholders while also trying to find product/market fit in a fast growing and new industry. That’s absolutely crazy!

The reality is that what I’m describing isn’t any different than how the flock program works today, flock teams are (or are intended to be) accountable to ANT holders via the AGP process.

Flock teams are early adopters in Aragon who are tightly aligned with the mission, vision, community, and values of Aragon. We’re all in this together. If the culture shifts to attract contractors and bounty hunters I don’t think Aragon will thrive

Flock teams are already contractors, I don’t think this changes significantly if you unbundle large year long proposals with multiple initiatives and a broad scope into smaller more narrowly scoped projects.

Currently, the vested ANT package is intended to provide some long-term alignment, but as @stefanobernardi points out it doesn’t really replicate the same incentives or behaviors of typical founders.

I would definitely be interested in proposals which seek to improve that situation, but I don’t think the current process has necessarily succeeded there, or that the vested ANT mechanism is incompatible with the unbundling approach that I am suggesting.

I think what you’re describing is the Nest grants program .

No, you asked how/what it would look like for a team to work on small well scoped projects and maintain support functions. I just described how that situation is commonly handled.

Yes, we need to create more dynamic bottom up funding vehicles to experiment and support community endeavors. We cannot, however, clip the wings of the teams that are the cornerstones of this community. We need to support the teams that are here so that they can spread their wings and learn to fly

@burrrata it seems your view is that Aragon should fund more of everything, more (& bigger) flock teams, more experiments, etc. What sort of burn rate are you expecting or advocating for? Perhaps starting at the question of “how much should the project be spending (each quarter, each year)” and then determining what is the best way to allocate that budget will help us find common ground on this issue, or atleast more clearly indicate where our difference of opinion lies?

Though it may make sense to divert that discussion to the AGP discussion: Annual budget for the Aragon Network thread.

[burrrata]

Flock teams are already contractors , I don’t think this changes significantly if you unbundle large year long proposals with multiple initiatives and a broad scope into smaller more narrowly scoped projects.

Look, we’re on the same page that throwing a kitchen sink full of stuff at ANT holders in a binary fashion is less than ideal. In my opinion Flock teams should still be Flock teams with a core set of goals/projects to focus on. Then in addition to that there should be bottom up funding vehicles that allow Flock teams (or anyone) to get support for smaller or supplementary projects. This allows Flock teams to focus on their core projects with a reasonable amount of stability, but also leaves the door open for other stuff too.

Currently, the vested ANT package is intended to provide some long-term alignment, but as @stefanobernardi points out it doesn’t really replicate the same incentives or behaviors of typical founders.

I would definitely be interested in proposals which seek to improve that situation, but I don’t think the current process has necessarily succeeded there, or that the vested ANT mechanism is incompatible with the unbundling approach that I am suggesting.

Yeah totally. ANT is the lifeblood of Aragon. If we want to align incentives within the Aragon we need to give contributors more ANT. The budget should be based in ANT, not DAI. This aligns incentives.

it seems your view is that Aragon should fund more of everything, more (& bigger) flock teams, more experiments, etc.

No. I do not want to see bigger Flock teams. At least not in their current incarnation. I want to see Flock teams get support to focus on a few core projects for 6-12 months. 80% of that is executing on the projects, and 20% is general contributions to the Aragon community. This would actually result in a reduction in the “mega” Flock proposals that are currently being proposed. This would be compensated for by creating other funding vehicles to support supplementary endeavors. This would reduce recurring overhead for Flock teams and increasing funding for bottom up community endeavors. The problem is that we’re not there yet. We need to create alternative funding vehicles first before clipping/modifying the Flock budget.

Also, this whole thing implies that it’s the fault of the Flock teams for their bloated proposals. It’s not. It’s the fault of the Aragon community for not supporting bottom up community endeavors and not creating more dynamic funding vehicles to support innovation in the space. Flock teams are just trying to support the community and build cool stuff. They’re using the tools available to them. We need to make those tools better so that incentives are aligned and capital can be allocated more effectively.

[luis]

After getting some feedback from Flock members, I wanted to clarify the following: @lkngtn’s position is his personal position and not A1’s. While I (and many A1 members) agree with a lot (most) points, it’s not the company’s position.

I also agree with most of @stefanobernardi’s points, but also disagree with some presented options such as re-centralizing all development in A1 and dismantling the Flock process. Again, this is my personal position as well.

I unfortunately don’t have the time to present all my thoughts during this week for personal reasons, but I plan on doing so in the upcoming weeks. In the meantime, the only thing that I want to say is that I’m proud of the Aragon family and I’m sure we will find a way to make Flock serve Aragon, and not the other way around.

Best,
Luis

[stellarmagnet]

I just wanted to chime in here. I have been thinking and processing what has been going on in the forum lately. I honestly do feel afraid to express my more deeper thoughts and analysis publicly. Because I don’t know how that will be perceived and then where my future lies in the Network. I’m not sure what to say to build the trust that a team like Autark has severe skin in the game. We might not hold enough ANT as the founders of Aragon, but many Autark members have children and have quit their steady jobs to join this movement – we don’t have the security of knowing our votes will pass, but many of us have still invested 1.5 years of our life on this project, making below market rate pay.

So – what do you do when you feel afraid of talking? When you are worried that something you say – maybe a comment, maybe constructive criticism, maybe frustration in a heated conversation – can halt your life and dreams and turn it upside down? This may be just my own personal problem and I have to figure out how to deal with my mind.

Some thoughts on the budgeting - Is devising a new Network-wide budgeting solution in 2 weeks going to solve the root problem here of how we can improve generally? Why not just directly propose adjustments to a proposal’s budget to begin with vs. passively implement a top-down enforcement? I don’t think 2 weeks is logical to implement this budgeting change to the AGP process that is being discussed in the other thread. I don’t think one more ANV going by without a budget is going to break the network or break the wallet. I think we should spend a few more months talking about what’s going on and discuss the multiple dimensions – dig more deeply. Talk in video calls. Have town halls. Build environments where we can get vulnerable and not be afraid.

Why don’t we admit that there is dysfunction and Flock-team delivery schedule isn’t the only thing that is impacting the success of our collective vision. I know that I want to use Aragon to make my dreams come true. To make a vision I have come to life, a vision and strategy towards human autonomy, towards a future that isn’t dominated and controlled by megacorps or nationstates. My strategy to get there may be different than other people’s strategies. I think part of the power of a DAO is to encourage diversity in thoughts and ideas to accelerate innovation. To accelerate collaboration. I think we can be doing better utilizing the tools we are building for tasks beyond quarterly votes. We are learning that as we go along. We will start evolving and iterating. Working groups are forming. Things are changing.

This forum post has been great to spark the conversation. I’ll start to share more as I begin to feel more comfortable digging into other layers. The last thing I want is an AGP to reclaim Autark’s funds in ANV-4. What a nightmare.

I think this article and this pyramid is something we should think about more. It can be zoomed out to “5 dysfunctions of a network”. Is there an absence of trust here?

Lencioni’s 5 Dysfunctions of a Team

[LouisGrx]

A perspective on resource efficiency in Aragon and the Flock program

Consider this post to be a challenge to the community

Thanks @lkngtn for making room for interesting discussions. Sorry in advance for the (too) long post. It can be moved here or a standalone thread if you wish.

It looks this thread, as well as these (1,2,3) are all related in that they express a rising fear within the community that Aragon is on the path to burning all of its resources before it can meet its market.

Before I start disussing concrete strategies (budgeting, unbundling, reporting…) that would address this primary concern, I would like to take a step back and try to frame the underlying need each of us have in Aragon: Becoming more resource efficient while sticking to the principles of the Manifesto

Main actionable areas for Aragon/Flock to become resource efficient

I assume that being resource efficient is a big worry for all organizations. When it comes to Aragon I feel (as @lkngtn pointed out) there are several important areas to consider:

1. A culture of oppenness and criticism
2. Clear and transparent accountability
3. Efficient collaboration
4. Governance practices that fit the above, and not the opposit
5. Policies and processes implementing the above

Note: Because Flock burns most of Aragon’s resources I will go through these with the Flock program in mind. I will try my best to share some knowledge I’ve acquired, working relatively close to Flock teams.

A culture of oppenness and criticism

Wether on calls or on the forum, most (not all, as pointed out by @stellarmagnet) community members feel confident to debate and participate in shaping up ideas. I think that preserving a safe space for everyone to speak -especially in times of crisis- will be mendatory if the community wants to be able to point out inefficiences.

In order for everyone to feel confortable and participate, providing context is crucial. I feel that we often forget that, and haven’t worked enough on implementing tools and practices that make up for asymetries of information. When it comes to this conversation, even some close community members may lack context to participate. Here I’ll try to be inclusive and provide some context to everyone.

This feels especially crucial in the current state of Aragon, where most of the information and context lies in the Flock program, which is in turn pretty siloed in teams.

Debating openly is something the Aragon community is pretty good at doing. But my experience and discussions with Flock teams showed me that it is increasingly challenging to create a common ground for discussions as we grow.

This first point may seem abstract, but in a very generic way, the culture of communicating freely is imho the best way to debunk inefficies and create new value. By creating a safe space for discussion and data about context, only great insights can output.

Clear accountability through transparency

It can be tricky to create accountability in most organizations, but I feel that things are much easier in our space where the code we ship and things we write are just a few clicks away. And I couldn’t think of anything more powerful than transparency to generate accountability.

Information is available in repositories or forum posts, it is just matter of shaping it up, and delivering it in the right place to the right audience.

Currently in the Flock program, each team issues transparency reports (1,2,3) as they see fit. It seems easy for the network and ANT holders to ask for a specific kind of report and frequency it wants to feel that teams are accountable.

We also have roadmaps that are approved by ANT holders, and updated over time by some mechanism (for now still the AA approving). We can agree on some process that seems legit to all. We have the tools to implement complex governance schemes using Agent.

I feel we’re one step away of being able to properly leverage things to generate accountability. The main problem I see is that we don’t have the habit or resources to pay attention what other teams are doing.

In the end, this ends up creating costly frictions for the organization. I personally believe that solving this attention problem by changing our habits and enhancing the way information is presented would help a lot.

Efficient collaboration

Flock in its current state is a several months old program. And it is still quite conter-intuitive for teams to include what other teams are doing or may do as part of their plan. This is a demanding process and requires a special state of mind.

I feel that we have to agree on what we can expect from each other at different levels so this becomes a certitude in a very uncertain space.

My personal conviction is that there are two paths forward:

• One is to create a cryptoeconomic system of individual teams contributing to the project as standalone units and sorted through competition.
• Another is create a single complex organization where collaboration has a cost but teams work altogether.

Each approach has pros and cons and some mix of both approaches is probably optimal. But we’ll have to adapt our culture, accountability tools, collaboration practices and governance to support this approach.

To illustrate: in the curent state of things, would Flock teams feel confortable having network level coordinators and repo maintainers? would they feel confortable delegating part of their workforce to Working Groups? Whether it is the case or not would be higly influenced by how teams are incentivized, how they are made accountable and under what conditions they are elected.

Governance that take all these into account

The governance rules we adopt are the tip of the iceberg and a reflection of the our assumptions and values.

If we believe that ANT holders are prone to making good decisions, let’s:

• Foster a debate culture to create actionnable information for ANVs, around topics such as budget for example.
• Have teams provide clear and concise reports
• Let ANT holders decide on roadmaps so collaboration can happen frictionlessly

But reality seems to be less obvious. As pointed out in some other threads, ANT holders do not always make great decisions. Aslo, very few people pay attention to reports and track team’s progresses. Roadmaps have to be changed multiple times a year so teams can keep working.

I don’t know the portion of ANT holders who vote and are not contributors to Aragon. However it seems very hard for anyone not actively involved in Aragon to make an advised decision on resource allocation.

So in the end, the current governance setting is either the wrong one, or has a long way to go before it becomes efficient in allocating resources. How and where do we account for this?

Policies and processes to implement all the above

Finally, policies and processes are very useful to implement an intention. The Flock program has a bunch of policies and arbitrary budget limits or timelines. My experience with these is that they can be tricky to deal with because you always have exceptional situations in this space.

In our case implementing a budget is a valid option to act as safeguards for spendings. Moreover, it is also possible to unbundle proposals and monitor team deliverables more granularly through some network entity. But in our context and pushing my interpretation to the extreme, here is what it would mean to me:

• We are not able to generate the right information and communicate it
• The community cannot debate and come to the right conclusions
• We think giving freedom to teams lowers their ability to deliver
• ANT holders cannot make the right choices allocating resources

This is a very personal vision and a weakly held, strong opinion. I just feel that we have so much room for improvement withing all the dimensions above, using very concrete strategies. Lessening freedom and flexibility bears a risk of rushing us into a suboptimal situation. I’d rather try other solutions first.

Final thoughts and short term emergency

From my personal experience all Flock teams are working at maximum capacity all the time. We’re still in an early stage and most contributors are so passionate about Aragon that they give their absolute best. I doubt any long term improvement would really come out of solely implementing hard policies.

In the short and medium term a quick overview of what I’d like to push:

• keep taking risks to create the future of DAOs (CRDAO, CFDAO 2.0, Nest…)
• do better working as a network of teams (for example using coordinators and catalysts)
• improve information flows in the whole organization and fight information asymmetry (reporting, auditing, fact checking…)
• be careful with spendings, the current burn is high and it cannot keep growing that quickly (transparency.aragon.org, budget forecasts…)
• But if we have to budget and control, let’s do it with great care and evaluate the implications it has on culture, accountability and collaboration

In Aragon’s history lots of resources and efforts were spent on the product, but probably much fewer on the organization itself. Building an org is already hard in a traditional setting (say a startup). It probably deserves ten times as much attention and resources in our decentralized setting.

[Aaron]

I just wanted to chime in here. I have been thinking and processing what has been going on in the forum lately. I honestly do feel afraid to express my more deeper thoughts and analysis publicly. Because I don’t know how that will be perceived and then where my future lies in the Network. I’m not sure what to say to build the trust that a team like Autark has severe skin in the game. We might not hold enough ANT as the founders of Aragon, but many Autark members have children and have quit their steady jobs to join this movement – we don’t have the security of knowing our votes will pass, but many of us have still invested 1.5 years of our life on this project, making below market rate pay.

It really saddens me you feel this way. Personally, I have nothing but the utmost respect and admiration for the people and work done by Autark Aragon one and Aragon Black. I totally understand the stakes are so much higher for Autark and Aragon Black. Both Autark and AB bring something unique to the network and its culture. There is no doubt in my mind the commitment Autark has to Aragon. Further to this, if this is how we are making some of our core contributors feel, we are doing something very wrong. How many others are feeling like this is silence?

Also, this whole thing implies that it’s the fault of the Flock teams for their bloated proposals. It’s not. It’s the fault of the Aragon community for not supporting bottom-up community endeavors and not creating more dynamic funding vehicles to support innovation in the space

+1 to this

That being said, The burn rate is too high. it has been mentioned elsewhere that ANT holders have not been prone to making good decisions with regards to being fiscally responsible. I disagree this is the case, The fact that these proposals are monolithic makes it difficult to vote no. The core work the flock teams are doing is very important, however, there may be elements and initiatives within these proposals ANT holders may think should be deprioritised. breaking up proposals makes a lot of sense to me, it also means more control over the roadmap.

In our case implementing a budget is a valid option to act as safeguards for spendings. Moreover, it is also possible to unbundle proposals and monitor team deliverables more granularly through some network entity. But in our context and pushing my interpretation to the extreme, here is what it would mean to me:

• We are not able to generate the right information and communicate it
• The community cannot debate and come to the right conclusions
• We think giving freedom to teams lowers their ability to deliver
• ANT holders cannot make the right choices allocating resources

I agree with “We are not able to generate the right information and communicate it”. I really disagree “ANT holders cannot make the right choices allocating resources”. when given a binary choice of approving a monolithic budget, the right choice is in my mind is to approve. however given more granular choice somethings would no be approved, or at least the relative strength of conviction in specific items can be ascertained. It is a function of a system that isn’t working well rather than.

That being said, we talk a lot about ANT holders and voting which is understandable. But it worth remembering ANT is not well distributed. when it comes to actual participation it is usually one, at most two token holders deciding the fate of any particular AGP. You can see the distribution for all the votes here.

So far as the results are mapping to community sentiment (which thankfully it has so far), we dont have an immediate problem. this is separate discussion its self but I thought it is worth mentioning

My personal conviction is that there are two paths forward:

• One is to create a cryptoeconomic system of individual teams contributing to the project as standalone units and sorted through competition.
• Another is create a single complex organization where collaboration has a cost but teams work altogether.

This is an important observation. In either path, the burn rate needs to be controlled. However we move forward will have a big impact on the culture of the network going forward, This is something we as a community need to discuss and think about.

[lkngtn]

It’s been really interesting to see the reactions and discussions (both on here and on other channels) that this post has sparked. While not everyone is in total agreement, and there is not necessarily a clear path forward, I think opening this discussion and working through it is healthy.

With that said I wanted to to clarify some of my intentions behind this post, as some of the reactions have surprised me a bit and I think some of my intentions may have not come across as clearly as I would have hoped.

First I want to be clear what this post is NOT:

• This is not an attack on any one team or any one proposal, I wrote this as a brainstorming process after starting to see flock proposals come up for this ANV cycle, but the underlying thought process is something that has been on my mind and evolving since the very first ANV.
• This is not suggesting any particular immediate changes to any process. The ideas presented in the original post are just ideas that I think warrant further discussion, I want and hope for each of them to be challenged, picked apart, and alternative ideas or approaches presented.
• This is not a declaration that I think things are totally broken and require immediate intervention, this is a call to examine what we are doing and determine what if any changes are appropriate. It is a call for continuous improvement and self-reflection, as opposed to any one specific change.
• This is not the position/views of any one other than myself. I work for Aragon One, I’m working to nurture and shape the 1Hive DAO, and I have been a member of the Aragon Community since the ICO–but I do not have the authority to represent the opinions of anyone but myself–and I do not want the responsibility that would come with such authority because it would limit my ability to simply speak freely.

I also want to provide some additional context, as these issues are not new and not triggered specifically by recent proposals, they are issues that have been brought up and discussed over the history of the AGP process.

The creation of an AGP wide budget was included in the initial “wishlist” for AGP proposals. And has come up on a various occasions, including AGP Idea: Formalizing an AGP Budget - Community - Aragon Forum and more recently AGP discussion: Annual budget for the Aragon Network.

The desire to unbundle large monolithic proposals is also something that has come up over the history of the AGP process. Myself as well as other people have expressed on multiple occasions concern that they feel they need to approve proposals because it’s really important that one part of the proposal passes, despite not wanting to approve of the entire thing. Perhaps the most obvious example of this is in Aragon One’s initial flock proposal where the most of the budget was based on a desire to double the team size, and imo should have been separated into two proposals so that the community could weigh in on that strategic decision independently of the rest of the proposal.

From my position on Aragon One’s first flock proposal:

Aragon Network Vote #1 Megathread

Justification: While I’m a bit apprehensive about the amount of funding and would have preferred the proposal be broken into two parts, one with modest team expansion, and one with additional funding to double the team size over the next year so that the community could make a more granular decision in the AGP process.

With regard to the call to be more critical of one another, I’ve had multiple conversations, over the history of the AGP process with people related to their engagement in the AGP process and a common sentiment echoed in this thread by Yalda, but also by many others who I won’t name out of respect for their privacy is a fear that being critical will have negative repercussions and so they have avoided being overtly critical.

I don’t think that this is an easy problem to solve and I don’t think there is a simple solution, but my call to be more critical (and even the fact that I am openly critical of multiple aspects of the AGP and Flock process in this thread) is an attempt start to shift the culture to make critical discourse a more common and acceptable norm within the community. I think it is really important that we create that culture so that we can have important conversations and course correct without feeling like we are personally attacking one another. I personally feel that expressing criticism is one of the most important aspects of productive collaboration, and I would really like to see the Aragon community and especially Flock be a more collaborative process.

So please, anyone who reads anything that I write please understand that my criticisms are meant to be constructive and collaborative, and by being critical my hope is to help find collaborative solutions and not simply point out flaws. It’s also possible that my criticisms are misguided, I will not be offended or get defensive if you engage with me in discourse–I will actually appreciate it because I think discussing complex issues is how we can all evolve our thinking and reach better solutions.

Ultimately, I would like to see Aragon grow into a thriving ecosystem with multiple teams working together on shared goals. I believe that the best way for that to happen is to continuously evaluate where we are and move closer to that ideal. I want individuals and teams to be diverse (in size, culture, and organizational structure) to all be able to succeed as contributors and service providers. And I want the process to provide stable and sustainable opportunities, so that teams can build independent businesses that align with the goals of Aragon long-term.

[stefanobernardi]

I’m not sure what to say to build the trust that a team like Autark has severe skin in the game. We might not hold enough ANT as the founders of Aragon, but many Autark members have children and have quit their steady jobs to join this movement – we don’t have the security of knowing our votes will pass, but many of us have still invested 1.5 years of our life on this project, making below market rate pay.

Thanks for noting this @stellarmagnet.

I want to make a few clarifications regarding my post, and specifically address this topic.

My earlier post was not intended to be an attack on non-founding Flock teams, but was rather published to defend them.

As I said above, I see Flock as a very, very alpha iteration of what a decentralized development process should look like, and so it’s not fair to penalize, attack or otherwise not acknowledge the contributions of the teams that participate in it - taking on massive risk both professionally and personally (there is a nuance for me as to what constitutes general risk and specific skin in the game though).

With that being said, the reason I added as an option (after stating I didn’t have opinions on them) a more centralized (only on the development obviously and not the governance) path forward, is because this stuff is hard, and anyone that has seen organizations scale in people from 0 to 3, 3 to 15, 15 to 40, 40 to 100 etc. knows that the coordination costs are massive.

Currently we are operating without a “Network CEO” figure (the AA cannot and should not take on that role), and I feel that is a bit the root cause of all the issues. So that option was an easy one to institute that sort of role, but I don’t really think it’s the best one at all.