Birds of a Feather

[burrrata]

@Aaron

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.

@luis

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).

@stefanobernardi

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

@stefanobernardi

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.

@stefanobernardi

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.

@stefanobernardi

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.

@Aaron

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.

@Aaron

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.

@Aaron

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.

@Aaron

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.

@Aaron

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.