Evaluating the AGP-1 voting results makes me think we need an Aragon Community Token (ACT)

Aragon reached an amazing milestone this past weekend with holding the first official vote on Ethereum’s main network, using the technology stack that has been under development for nearly two years.

But as an avid community member and supporter of the Aragon vision, the statistics of the first vote are a bit worrisome to me.

Let it be known that I have always had a personal bias against token-weighted voting for the majority of decision-making use cases, and maybe this is an example that can lead toward an evolved voting model for the Aragon Network as well…

Statistics

  • ~44 accounts voted out of 20,154 holders ==> If 1 address = 1 person, that is = 0.22% turnout
  • 2.63% of the total ANT supply (1040515.47716 ANT) voted Yay; compared to 0.01% of ANT for Nay.
  • Based on the token holders that voted, 99.97% = Yay; 0.03% = Nay. The proposal was passed, as the minimum approval of 67% was met.

Analysis

  • To flip the vote in the “Does Not Pass” direction (where Yay < 67%), you only need ~$287k USD (1040515.47716 ANT * 0.5 * $0.55). This is not that much for whales or exchanges that get the calling or urge to act like an authoritarian or a troll. [EDITED THIS FOR MATH CORRECTION]
  • Think about the bad publicity when the app itself cannot pass proposals that are valid and wanted by the majority of the Aragon community!
  • The Aragon Association holds $4.2m worth of ANT. I assume this ANT is allowed to vote? I’m curious why it didn’t participate in the AGP-1 vote (because it would have overwhelmed the vote or I guess because it’s on a cold wallet that makes it hard to do so at the moment?)
  • Although if there is a similar voter turn out in the future, the Aragon Network can be controlled by the two board members of the Association: Luis and Jorge :slight_smile: I’m sure we all trust you two, but I think this is the opposite of decentralization, right?

Proposal: Cooperative Model
(This is where my bias begins to shine, as I am part of a Cooperative and also a Nest grantee :slight_smile: )

The community of Aragon contributors is quite large now with Aragon One, the Aragon DAC and all of the teams funded by Nest. Why not create a non-transferable token (Aragon Community Token - ACT) and grant one to each individual that is ACTively building Aragon. Then we can really see what the knowledge-contributing stakeholders of the technology think about AGP-1, and also any future proposals?

As people leave one of the teams, or are not actively contributing to Aragon, their ACT voting token can become burned. So it’s non-transferable, yet burnable by self or via an ACT vote. Similarly, as new teams get added to the Flock or Nest, ACT tokens will be distributed.

The activity status of each ACT holder is evaluated on a 6 month cycle by the ACT Collective, and self-burning of one’s ACT token is recommended after 6 months of inactivity. It will be too much at this early stage to rely on or enforce the use of the Planning Suite to track activity, so this proposal is a more bare bones, lean approach that doesn’t involve changes to development processes.

Even if the Aragon Network decides that token-weighted ANT voting will reign supreme, I think ACT voting signals will be valuable data points, even if they are non-binding votes. And the sooner these signals can be gathered, the better.

Lastly, I know AGP-1 was just approved, but I think 48 hours may be too short a time for proposals, especially if these votes are only occurring on a quarterly basis. I would suggest considering the vote being open for a longer duration, such as two weeks.

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I asked myself the same question: why such low turnout and why clearly, the team (holding quite a bit of ANT) hasn’t voted.

Low turnout:

  • Right now there’s relatively limited activity on the Aragon platform, due to it just having been released on mainnet; I think people are trying to figure this beast out rather than trying to steer its development.
  • There has been essentially no controversy around AGP-1 so I’m assuming a lot of people just thought it would go through, including myself. I’ve voted because I thought it was a nice thing to do, not because I thought it was necessary.

No vote from the team:
Eager to know more here, but I guessed that they wanted to actually see how the Augur users would act without them voting. If they voted with their large stack of tokens it would most definitely pass, but would the users with 0.1% at stake have any incentive to vote considering the needle is already 99.9% in the Yay?

All in all I’m not worried, but I’m certainly eager to see more people participate. I think it will happen as soon as teams start leveraging the platform and any such vote can affect their use of the platform.

Cooperative Model:
I don’t have enough experience with this approach to really judge, but my first thought is that it is adding a layer of complexity that I am not sure is necessary or beneficial. I think owners of a stake of Aragon are inherently incentivised to vote if:

  • the outcome of the vote could affect the value of the project
  • their vote would have a chance to make a difference.

I am not against this idea however, simply not sure.

Anyhow, thank you for voicing this important observation.

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@stellarmagnet @GustavMarwin thanks for your thorough posts. Just trying to provide some context:

We think implementing an on-chain blacklist for voters is a bad idea as it introduces the meta-governace aspect over the list, but if this blacklist were to exist, the Aragon Association multisig would be in the blacklist. I’m not sure if this was put into writing, but the AA board commits to not using tokens in the AA multisig for voting in AGP decisions. The AA has a very important power in the process, as it has the final decision on what proposals make it to the ballot (required until we have Trust Minimized Governance tokens). Also the AA multisig represents the Aragon Network, so its vote shouldn’t be decided by 3 individuals.

On the team voting, there was no special direction on whether to vote or not, and team members were free to do whatever they felt like. I personally decided to not vote this time with my founder reward tokens, but I do plan on voting in the future as the turnout and legitimateness of the process improves. I think low voter turnout is better than the optics of decisions being made my very few holders.

It is probably not easy to acquire that much ANT on the open market at that price, but absolutely get your point :smiley:. I’m personally more worried about holders selling their voting power directly if it is something they don’t think it is valuable for them.

Interesting proposal, I think it would be interesting running it first as a layer 2 voting system that doesn’t make binding decisions. Similar to the blacklist, I think the meta-governance process for deciding who gets a token and whose token gets burned wouldn’t scale. It would also put pressure to other parts of the project (i.e. Nest grants decision makers) as they would now have to decide whether the team being accepted has the capability and it is value aligned with the project as to receive major governance power.

Just to put some rough numbers, let’s say there are 60 ACT holders right now (actual figure should be close counting core team members, Nest grantees, advisors, etc.), a newly accepted Nest team with 4 full-time members would control ~6.25% (100 * 4 / (60 + 4) ) of the voting power, immediately upon receiving the grant. In order to have that voting power with ANT weighted voting, someone would need to have ~2,475,595 ANT. In regards to the ANT bonus Nest teams get upon successful delivery of the entire project, the governance power gotten with the proposed ACT is 2 orders of magnitude greater.

Also I personally disagree that a newly Aragon Nest grantee team member should get the same decision making power over the project than an individual who has been putting 50h work weeks for a year on the DAC or A1. Also I don’t think that active community members working on the project at one point in time are the stakeholders most incentivized on the long term project success in becoming self-sustaining (i.e. let’s triple everyone’s salary! :tada:).

I think ACT voting could potentially make proposals (as the AA multisig currently can) that get voted on by ANT holders. Adding the ability for holders to delegate their vote, either to a liquid delegate or to a council member will also increase economic support of proposals and will solve some of the issues pointed out here. We were also surprised about the amount of voters that didn’t use the app to vote, but rather the raw tx data that we added to the post. Educating holders on how to vote with their cold storage private keys while minimizing the risks, will increase the turnout of large holders.

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Interesting thoughts here! My 2 cents:

Why that 1.5? I think it should rather be 0.5, and therefore you would only need something less than $300k USD, making your argument stronger actually.
Anyway, although I like the intention of the proposal I also see the meta-governance aspect of it that Jorge explained quite complex and unappealing.

I agree! :smile:

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You’re right… I accidentally shared the value of the denominator in the equation!

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Considering the work that is funded is open source, I think it will be quite easy for a self-regulatory body to form and perform analysis on Github (or Pando) twice a year. Additionally, aren’t Nest teams funded on a milestone basis? Is there a plan to phase out Nest because it won’t scale?

I think it will be quite easy to track who is active or who isn’t. An alternative to one person, one token can be that a full-time contributor gets 4 tokens, half-time 2 tokens, quarter-time 1 token. This same methodology can also be applied to Aragon DAC which has part-time contributors, compared to Aragon One who seems to be all full-time (and would get 4 tokens each person).

Also, since Nest grants are budgeted and planned quite specifically, the project manager of the grant can decide the “weight” per team member. If the other worry is that it will be difficult to track who remains active after the grant period, is that the teams need to publish quarterly updates of their progress to be able to hold onto their ACT token. This also provides a valuable data point for the ACT SRO to create proposals to burn ACT tokens for team members who don’t share transparency reports. Also another option is that the ACT tokens for non-Flock members all automatically burn after 6 months and that the Giveth platform has to be used to request ACT tokens again. (So for example Nest team starts January 2019, they get their first ACT tokens in June 2019, these ACT tokens burn in December 2019. In January 2020 they have to request the ACT tokens again and share proof for what they did from June-December 2019)

This provides the transparency paper trail and makes the user have to go through a hoop to retain voting power, which they should make the effort to report their contributions for the past 6 months. I think once you are putting stuff up in Giveth, one will feel a lot of guilt if they are lying and it will be hard to do that as they need to share proof of work etc. :slight_smile:

And if the worry is that they shouldn’t be granted it right away, perhaps it happens after 6 months of activity or after the completion of the work in the grant. As mentioned above, they would be able to maintain these ACT tokens assuming they continue the work post-Grant and publish transparency reports.

But a very wealthy person who has only purchased ANT for speculative purposes, and it took them 5 minutes of time, should have the same decision making power as an individual who has been putting 50h work weeks and acquired the same amount of ANT via 2 years of work? This means more trust is placed in large bag holders than active community members. Also, aren’t the Aragon Network assets belonging to an Association, with a nonprofit nature, where voting is actually closer to one person, one vote traditionally? I know that is a bit opposite of DAOs, but I guess I don’t really know how one intends to classify ANT. Is it more equivalent to a “security” token or is it something so different that there is no way to classify, as it is a governance token of a DAO and regulation just hasn’t caught up?

How does one new Nest team with 6.25% voting power tip the dial in such a way, that you think it would be worse than a whale who may be trying to perform votes that can maybe result in the value of ANT going down because they have some short position on some exchange and access to journalists who will spread ANT FUD? For example, they acquire ANT and mess with all of the votes in the next cycle.Then they sell the ANT and hit up their dishonest journalist friends or FUDsters to spread stuff on reddit that “Aragon is broken”. I think some potential adversaries can be other DAO platforms, whether they exist today, or they are future ones… The competition exists both for user acquisition and for providing value in the token (as they both go hand in hand). I don’t think it’s going to be all kumbaya toward the DAO heavens.

The ACT proposal I have is actually somewhat similar to Z Cash’s Community Governance Panel, where people who weren’t even that active contributors of the community participated in voting in a one person, one vote manner. Maybe @light can share his experience.

I am personally fine with this starting off as a non-binding vote exercise. Once everyone else has the data, it will become more apparent if it can be a “trusted” model. If one starts now with attempting the system, it can be fine tuned, it can be made more lean. And it can be a weapon ready to deploy if plutocracy fails :slight_smile:

Well just like AGP-1 outlines different types of voting privileges per class, perhaps there can be certain things ACT members have the privilege of voting on. Yeah if Nest team members outnumber non-Nest team members, they probably shouldn’t be able to just increase the budget of the Nest program for example. One will want to do what they can to design the governance in such a way to mitigate conflicts of interest across the entire spectrum.

I think any movement in the way in experimenting with ACT can be interesting to see! I think it should be pretty easy to just get it going and see what the voting results or proposals are like.

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Well considering only 2% of tokens voted, perhaps the majority of stakeholders don’t care about their token-weighted voting power but still see value in the technology / people / vision / community and want to remain a holder in that capacity.

As an aside, maybe to have an ACT token, you have to stake a minimum amount of ANT, something achievable over a year for the average person - like $2000 worth. I prefer this model, as it has a blended “skin in the game” of money and time. This also provides incentives for Nest team members or other community members (working for bounties for the DAC etc) to not sell all of their ANT they may be earning (although some may need to to pay the bills). And now there is a customer for ANT tokens who feels they will have a real voice even if they can only afford $2k worth.

But of course, there are other reasons to retain and acquire ANT … for the Aragon Court or other staking mechanisms within Aragon. I have a feeling that will be the primary use case. I don’t think token-weighted voting should be thrown out all together, I think there just may be a specific class of proposals where it makes sense.

But returning to your original quote, I think the same argument you provide can be spun around for ANT holders that have small holdings. If they feel their voting power doesn’t have much voice due to large bag holder driving decisions, they may sell too or just not participate in the votes.

I’m actually surprised that this wasn’t specified in AGP-1? (Thanks for shedding the light, and I like this decision!)

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Plutocracy or centralized identity Oracle’s are the only options… soooooo… I’m not so worried about drawing too many conclusions off one vote… but if thats what we have to work with there are a lot of improvements that can be made to the voting module to worry about edge cases…

Like if someone bough $300k USD worth of tokens, it would bring a lot of awareness to the vote (with the price bump) and then if they voted against a popular decision then it would be even more alarming… but if they vote at the last second then there is no time to react… this is why plutocratic voting in an open market would benefit from having a “wait for quiet” mechanism… I actually like calling it a “race to quiet” it sounds more fun but i didn’t come up with the idea :wink:

The general idea is that there is no hard line when a vote ends, but every vote that has a marginal effect on the end result extends the amount of time that people have to react, come out of their apathy and vote :wink:
The idea for this was Dom Williams’ from back in The DAO days… and I am convinced we would have gone that way…

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Super interesting thread!

I don’t think we should look at voter turnout and make the assumption that because people didn’t vote they don’t care how decisions are made. Particularly, because the primary utility for ANT has always been communicated as governance authority.

As pointed out elsewhere in the thread, there are many other factors including education, ease of use, and whether the vote was controversial that could have a huge impact in whether people choose to participate.

I do think that its absolutely the case that many ANT holders would prefer to delegate their voting authority rather than actively participate, and perhaps many would want to delegate their authority to an organization that is run as a cooperative of active community members–but I think its important that that decision is explicitly made by ANT holders.

I think exploring a model like this is a great idea! I think 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.

I would be very much opposed to shifting root-level authority from ANT holders to ACT holders, but I could see the ACT organization having significant influence in the community, and if delegative voting is introduced I could see a large portion of ANT holders delegating their authority to such an organization.

I also think the idea of replacing some of the associations responsibilities in the current process with such an organization could be a reasonable short term improvement and further decentralize the projects governance, as jorge suggested.

We have the tools to create the ACT (Aragon Cooperative) organization today–though they may not be ideal. Creating the organization does not require any approval from anyone. Once it is established it can be used for signaling within the community, and can have an internal governance process that is completely independent from AGPs (so votes can happen much more frequently if necessary). If this experiment goes well, then a proposal can be made via the AGP process to expand the role of the cooperatives role in governance – eg by replacing the association multi-sig in the process, or by requesting funding for an independent cooperative budget, or by updating the AGP voting app to allow for delegation, etc.

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@lkngtn your response totally aligns! But would ANT approval be needed to grant the usage of the “Aragon” trademark to the cooperative? I guess I can see the trademark standing in the way of approval (“Creating the organization does not require any approval from anyone”), unless another name was chosen.

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There is an AGP1 track for proposals related to association owned assets including trademarks. The example being to make trademarks public domain… but currently since the association holds the trademark it would be at their discretion whether to pursue any enforcement.

So while I’m not an authority on the matter, I suspect that this is a situation where proceeding with creating the organization under the assumption that is an acceptable use would be okay, and the worst case scenario would be that the association disagrees, and the cooperative would need to stop using the trademark (and potentially respond by preparing an AGP proposal to request permission to use the trademark for that purpose).

You could certainly make the case that the appropriate course of action is to not use the trademark for the cooperative until there has been explicit permission granted from the Association, or through the AGP process. I would expect the Association would be accommodating given the situation.

In either case I think the use of the trademark for such a purposes is unlikely to be a significant blocker to this initiative!

After the rather dismal results we saw from the AGP-1 vote, I think that if we ever try to implement a quorum requirement, this will be the only way to do it. Quorum requirements are important for allowing emergency decisions to happen without anyone being left out of the decision, but a 2% quorum requirement isn’t going to do anything.

What I would like to see eventually would to be able to grow from our current flow:

association finance meta proclamations
1/2 quarterly x x x
2/3 quarterly x

To a flow capable of making decisions at a much more rapid clip:

association finance meta proclamations nest flock
1/2 ANT quarterly x x x x
2/3 ANT quarterly x x
1/2 ANT&ACT, 1/2 ACT quorum x x
2/3 ANT&ACT, 2/3 ACT quorum x x x x
0 dissent, 2/3 ACT quorum x x x x x x
1/2 ANT+Quadratic x

If we aren’t willing to give them a say in what they are working on, why would we be giving them any funding at all? Scaling decisionmaking requires the ability to make more than 4 decisions per year, and there needs to be some sort of quorum requirement for that to happen.

Even with the same voting power, new members will not have the same decision making power as established members. Your recommendations and the recommendations of other established members will always carry far more weight than that of new members. Also, new members will have no say over norms and procedures established before they started - your decision making power will depend on the amount of time you have worked on Aragon even with this.

Worker control of the means of production is not plutocracy, and relying on people not being able to work multiple jobs full time does not rely on a centralized identity oracle.

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Okay I have a little bit more of time to reply now…

You make good arguments here. Additionally, I had also not considered the option of ANT holders actually delegating to such a body like ACT. When those features are released, it will be interesting to see how the ecosystem evolves, as this is such an interesting idea!

Whenever I first made this thread, I was under the impression that of course any changes to the voting would have to go through an AGP process, and I also wasn’t expecting ACT voting to just take over right away.

As a community member, product developer, and future power user of Aragon, the decisions that I’d be most concerned with are those pertaining to the roadmap. But I guess this would be more of an AIP decision as opposed to AGP.

But additionally, I think it would also be interesting to have a better signal from other people helping build Aragon outside of the “Flock” to see what the general “community pulse” was on decision-making processes and structures. One future enhancement I can see to the Voting app to make this process smoother, is removing the need to recreate the same vote on multiple apps, but for a vote to be more global, open to multiple token holders, but the binding nature of it is mapped to a specific token. This removes administrative burden and makes it easier to gather multiple signals into a single platform (such as having a combination of an ANT + ACT signal).

Lastly, I hope that these ideas presented in this thread do not come off as contentious (in a negative way), but instead part of governance discourse and brainstorming, as that is the purpose of building such a forum, tool, AGP processes and the like!

As mentioned in my previous post, I really like the ideas put forth by @lkngtn regarding the cooperative. I guess if there are two others (active contributors) that feel aligned with creating such an organization today, let me know and let’s figure it out! (the only part I’m not sure Aragon supports yet is the burning?)

I think that something like this would be beneficial, or even better, limiting super important votes for ANT stakers – you know, the people who are really in this for the long run and are willing to “lock” that in.

:100::100::100:

It is fantastic to see this sort of discussion starting within the community, and I feel like the AGP1 vote is already a huge success because it has provided a framework to have these discussions productively.

I wouldn’t say the result was dismal, it was only slightly lower than I had expected (4-5%). Its difficult to estimate how active holders will be particularly since there really is no baseline but I feel reasonably happy with the result and expect that to improve over time.

However, the point you raise about quorum and responsiveness to emergencies is important to consider. The reason to have only a few and periodic votes is so that they participants have lots of time to become aware of the next vote, the issues which are being discussed, and generally have plenty of time to prepare. In the event of an emergency you do not have those advantages, and you run the risk of a decision being seen as illegitimate because it was “slipped through” without adequate time for discussion or preparation. A sufficiently large quorum can help, but as you point out it seems unrealistic for a large scale vote.

I think improved delegation helps with that a lot, as voters are able to pre-select a delegate to represent their interests, and that delegate can be more engaged and responsive than individual voters. There is some discussion on possible short-term approaches to improving delegation here: Exploring alternatives to Liquid Democracy - #4 by lkngtn – and the council voting approach in particular would I think be similar to what you are proposing.

I’m a bit unsure about using an unelected cooperative in place of an elected council, but ultimately if that were to be approved through the AGP process then it would certainly be worth trying.

The other important discussion here is what we consider emergencies–because depending on the situation the response could be very different. EG if a critical bug is found in the kernel, or in the network, what needs to happen? If a team that has been funded through flock/nest runs out of funds between one of the quarterly updates and waiting to the next AGP vote would be problematic does that fall into the emergency process?

Depending on the the specific issues the response could be quite different. For example, it might be a good idea to allocate a budget from the association via AGP to a pool of funds which can be governed by something like the ACT, that teams could request funding from more frequently and through a different process then the AGP process. In effect, this would allow the slow process of AGP funding to delegate the decision to provide short-fall funding to a different organization, and that organization would be able to be much more agile with its processes.

In the case of an emergency bug, it may make sense to delegate some specific privileges to an elected council or community multi-sig – as response time in some cases is so important that any sort of vote would be potentially damaging. Again that is something that can happen through the framework of AGP1 without needing new tracks per se.

I don’t think the issue is with giving nest teams/flock teams/contributors a say in the direction, or even a greater say then they have currently with ANT holdings, but rather that with AGP 1 ANT holders get final authority, but they can approve additional more agile processes that grant substantial authority to other groups. It does not have to be all or nothing (All decisions are made by ANT holders or all decisions are made by ACT holders). Saying it is a layer 2 system that is non-binding is I think not quite accurate, I think its more accurate to say that such a system probably doesn’t make sense to supersede the base layer governance (AGP1) at this point, but could certainly be used for signaling about layer 1 decisions, and making binding decisions for any authority which has been granted to it (whether that is specific contract based permissions, or decisions based on a budget that gets allocated to that organization).

As a side note, Its really frustrating when people equate token voting with plutocracy. Communities governed by tokens do not restrict participation (coming or going) like a government does, and systems which on the surface seem less “plutocratic” are often just as influenced by the wealthy – traditional one-person-one-vote democracies are still highly plutocratic…

I honestly think the results were great – 2.63% tokens voted, which is not that bad. It means someone cared! I think we could have made much better communication around this too – almost no one outside the Aragon ecosystem noticed.

Apart from that, I think having something like a community coop that people can delegate their ANT to, would be great. I wouldn’t make it official at all, so there are multiple ones with different structures that can emerge.

I think this first voting was a landmark event, not because of its results, but because it’s making us dream about Aragon’s governance. We wouldn’t be having this conversation without it, and I’m very happy about this thread and the different ideas being thought of here :eagle:

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I think the problem regarding communication is that social media and blogs won’t be enough, so it’s going to take another layer of integrations and the like to make it easier for holders to remember or to know about it in general…

Here are some ideas on how to make the January vote popping! Although many will probably be difficult to accomplish in such a short time.

Encourage media outlets to create a voting bulletin
Perhaps Coindesk, Bitcoin Magazine, Cointelegraph, etc can do DAOs a service and help broadcast votes? Considering how important governance is for the blockchain ecosystem, and the emergence of DAOs, I can eventually see voting bulletins posted on these sites.

Web/browser notifications
Another idea is to enable people to subscribe to push notifications after visiting https://aragon.org/ – and that the only notifications that you will intrude folks with is about votes (like one notification 2 weeks before the polls open, then one right when the poll opens, and a final one one hour before it closes, or you can customize to your preference)

Another interesting feature can be from Metamask - you get a notification in your Metamask-enabled browser when one of the tokens you hold is having a vote. Or you can potentially “subscribe” to different tokens within Metamask, and get a notification from the tokens you specify.

Wallet Integrations
Approach mobile wallet providers like Status or Coinbase Wallet to add this “voting notification” support (then making Aragon web app mobile-friendly should then also become a priority).

Portfolio or coin metric website partnerships / integrations
I think identifying the market leaders for coin portfolio apps, and working with them to create a voting bulletin / notification feed would be cool.

There’s Blockfolio’s Signal too, where you can communicate with token holders, but I haven’t tried that.

Aragon Mobile App
Probable the longer term strategy that will increase turn out is the Aragon Mobile app. It’s all about those notifications and making sure people know its time to vote, and making it easy to do so on any kind of device…


The general theme for most of the above ideas has to do with notifications and an integration into a “voting feed” of sorts.

:raised_hands: :raised_hands:

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Just chiming in to say that it was put into writing:

You’re right @stellarmagnet it was an oversight on my part that this wasn’t either put into AGP-1 or at least mentioned in the AGP-1 vote blog post.

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Thanks for starting this thread @stellarmagnet and thanks everyone else for great contributions so far.

I agree with Luke here, although as noted elsewhere calling it “Aragon Cooperative” would itself fall under the Aragon Trademark Policy:

No permission is required to self-organize with other Nest teams and contributors to start this cooperative, but permission would be required to use Aragon in the name (if we don’t want to draw the ire of the Association). There is a path to becoming a trademark licensee, if Aragon Cooperative is a desirable name. (And maybe in the future, via Association track AGP this trademark use could be made more permissive.)

It does! See “Remove token” here (before tokens can be burned, the permission to do so must be initialized via Token Manager in the Permissions app).

Regarding communication, this was one of the top issues I was thinking about leading up to the vote and since it ended. For this vote I mainly prioritized communicating via our own channels - multiple tweet reminders, @-all announcements in Aragon Chat, a video Q&A, the thread on this forum, threads on r/AragonProject, two emails to our mailing list, etc etc. And I made sure the vote was after Prague Blockchain Week so that it would reduce the odds of scheduling conflict. I’d like to think that everyone who wanted to participate should have heard about it.

That said… of all those channels, only Twitter includes more “followers” than we have token holders. The next largest channel (either our email list or Aragon Chat) has less than half the number of addresses there are that hold ANT. (Disclaimer: addresses do not correlate to unique individuals.)

So all that said, the communication situation could improve and I’ve been thinking a lot about how to do it. The ideas you mention are good ideas. In the short term I would like to focus specifically on improving direct lines of communication between DAOs and their token holders. Having third parties like Blockfolio Signal or CoinDesk alert people about DAO votes is a nice to have, but giving people the ability to receive alerts directly from a DAO (or its designated agent) about important announcements such as upcoming votes is a must.

The best resources our project has right now for important notifications are Aragon Chat and our newsletter. So I will take the opportunity to plug both and say to readers if you are not yet signed up for Aragon Chat with email notifications turned on for mentions and/or subscribed to the Aragon project newsletter, now’s a good time to do that :wink:

I / we will continue working on this and while I can’t promise anything by the next vote, we can certainly expect communication around votes to improve over time.

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