This post was co-authored by myself and @stellarmagnet as a result of a discussion which started in the AGP1 post-vote analysis thread. The intention is to create a Community Cooperative running on Aragon. The following post outlines our current thinking about why this is a good idea for the community, how it could work initially, and the types of actions and community interactions that it would facilitate. This post is intended to introduce the idea more broadly and hopefully gather feedback and gauge interest in participating.
Purpose
The community of people contributing to building the Aragon vision is quite large with the Aragon Association, Aragon One, the Aragon DAC and the Nest teams. Also users of Aragon should have a platform to be effectively heard within the community, irrespective of how much ANT they hold. While final authority on the project and its direction will always rest in the hands of ANT holders, ensuring that active contributors have a strong influence in the direction of the project is healthy for the ecosystem, and encourages more people to get involved more actively. For this reason, an Aragon Cooperative will be established, where verified community members can take action on (and promote) shared initiatives in a more cooperative manner.
Activities
We envision the cooperative will focus on activities such as:
- Using the Voting and Survey apps to gather collective input that can lead toward the creation of AGPs and AIPs
- Creating funding proposals that are outside of the scope of work of the existing teams, yet are beneficial for the Cooperative at large
- If delegative voting is introduced, ANT holders can decide to delegate their authority to the Cooperative.
Membership Requirements
Active members of the community can apply for membership:
An individual would apply through a forum thread pointing to their github or other social accounts (Aragon Chat, Twitter, etc) with proof that they are a unique and active member of the community. Members of the Aragon Association, Aragon One, Aragon DAC, or Aragon nest teams can also use that association as a proof of active contribution. Users of Aragon can point to their Organization and explain its activity and purpose.
The exact definition of what an āactiveā community member is has not been explicitly defined, but we feel that so long as the application process is transparent we can rely on the good judgement of initial Aragon Cooperative participants, and over time establish a clear precedent as to what the requirements are for participation as a member.
Once accepted each member will be assigned a single, non-transferable voting share.
Cause for Removal
- Violating code of conduct
- No longer actively participating in the community (Forum, Aragon Chat, Github, etc)
Organization Permissions
Initially the organization will be configured to allow existing members to add and remove new members via a voting process, elect a Membership Committee responsible for processing applications and adding new members, manage the Cooperativeās treasury, and add and revoke permissions. The following chart shows how the initial permissions will be configured.
Committees
Overtime the Cooperative may determine that it makes sense to add additional committees to manage specific types of operations. Committees can be established by members of the Cooperative voting to add a new instance of the Token Manager app to the organization, per committee, and assigning permissions appropriately. The following are possible examples of committees that might make sense to add in the near term.
- Membership Committee: Process applications for adding new members to the Cooperative.
- Technical Committee: Create and participate in surveys related to technical considerations, standards, and priotization. Define high level technical specifications and determine whether an AIP or EIP is needed to implement the specification.
- Product Committee: Define and create surveys that will effectively prioritize feature requests from members of the Cooperative, taking user requirements into consideration. Based on surveys and user research, define product roadmaps that help make Aragon more usable, including enhancements to existing apps, or suggestions for new applications. Provide suggestions to Technical Committee on technical considerations to optimize the user experience for both Aragon App Developers and Aragon organizations.
- Bounty Committee: Create and manage bounties for Aragon-related tasks, based on the Technical and Product Committeeās research and recommendations, subject to a monthly budget.
- APM Committee: Curate an APM repository where Aragon App Developers can submit their Aragon App to be considered by commitee members for addition. This cooperative.aragonpm.eth repository may be considered more trustworthy than the open.aragonpm.eth repository which does not have a curation process for admission into the repository.
- User Committee: This committee will contain up to one representative per Aragon DAO (organization using Aragon). They will participate in surveys that will allow the Cooperative to understand a DAOās needs more clearly.
Call to Action
If you consider yourself an active community member (or would like to become more involved), please provide feedback on this process. Do you think the Aragon Cooperative is a good idea? Would you participate? If so what aspects of the Cooperative are you interested in contributing to? Post below.
If there is sufficient interest I expect we can get an initial version of the Cooperative organization deployed in the next few weeks. If we act quickly, we can have things set up and initial members onboarded so that the organization can be used for signalling ahead of the AGP1 vote.