Experimenting with bounties using the Projects app

Introduction

About a month ago I start looking for ways to reward new contributors to help @danielconstantin and me with the aragonCLI repo. At the same time, I began experiment with Autark’s Planning Suite on Rinkeby. It was clear the potencial of this new set of apps and in specific the Projects app seemed like the perfect tool for our purpose.

After some tests and thinking about the use case we would like to address I went ahead and create an organization with democracy using the on boarding site, install the Projects app in my new organization with the aragonCLI and deployed a new ERC20 token to emulate DAI on Rinkeby. Then I minted and deposited 5000 of this tokens on the Finance app (this is the budget we ask as our nest grant for bounties). You can check the deployed dao here.

Now that I had all setup I linked the relevant GitHub repos and funded some issues under development in aragen (#8, #39), aragonCLI (#451) and hack (#160). After that I asked both @yslcrypto and @fabrivigevani if they could help me test this new use case. They were helpful and was a great experience, thanks both.

Lessons learned

First of all the reaction of both Sacha and Fabri was amazing. They were really exited to participate of this kind of workflow and amaze to be rewarded using the very same tools to which they are contributing.

The user experience was more smooth than I expected taking in consideration that TPS was release just a month ago. The Autark team have done an excellent job so far and they are already working to make it even better :rocket:

Each new app build using Aragon SDK exponentially grow the number of organization models.

A big downside that I’m worried is scalability, as soon as TPS hit mainnet I think the on boarding of new organizations might be an uphill battle because of network fees.

The integration with GitHub would benefit of automation some of the tasks (likely a GitHub bot). This functionality is already on the roadmap of TPS but not a top priority so if someone is willing to help that would be awesome :raised_hands:. Right now we are using the funded 💰 label and manually write the amount granted to the issue in the description as well as the mainnet transaction once the bounty was granted. Also we ask the user in the issue thread their mainnet address for transparency.

Future steps (open to discussion)

This model could be generalized and used across different repos of the Aragon GitHub organization.

To create a template to ease the deployment of new organizations with this structure.

To include Dot Voting app in the organization structure to curate issues.

To build a sidechain on xDai to improve mainnet scalability on the short/middle term.

A website to explore bounties across all repos.

Was a fun experiment. Looking forward for feedback on how to improve this first trial and discuss the future steps


Organization structure

Democracy with 50% support, 25% min. quorum, 72hs vote duration.

New Apps

Projects
I followed Autark’s documentation to install the Projects app with the aragonCLI.

Bounty Base Rate: DAI
Bounty Deadline: 2 weeks
Experience Level:

  • Beginner: 1.5x
  • Intermediate: 3.0x
  • Advanced: 5.0x

New Permissions

App Role Grantee Manager
Vault TRANSFER Projects Voting
Projects CHANGE_SETTINGS_ROLE Voting Voting
Projects FUND_ISSUES_ROLE Voting Voting
Projects REVIEW_APPLICATION_ROLE Tokens Voting
Projects WORK_REVIEW_ROLE Tokens Voting
Projects ADD_REPO_ROLE Tokens Voting
Projects REMOVE_REPO_ROLE Tokens Voting
9 Likes

Don’t have much to say other than congratulations to you both and to the contributors for leading this initiative. That’s also amazing to have a glimpse of the power of TPS tools. Looking forward to seeing how Dot voting could be used here. Curious to hear from Autark what they think of the use of TPS here!

Contributor’s experience and involvement could play an important role in Aragon’s future, so amazing to see this use case arise organically (in competition with the CFDAO model?:upside_down_face:).

Maybe the CFDAO can fund some of the ideas you are proposing as future steps.

Edit: just ended up on this website: https://buidl.guide where you can browse for Aragon’s repos to start contributing which is quite cool. The initiator of this actually submitted a Nest proposal recently. I’m wondering if we could link bounty DAOs or display bounties straight on there or something like that. Haven’t checked if the website fits our ethos and requirements yet. Open to advices and feedback.

3 Likes

Totally agree with @LouisGrx – love this, brilliant work.

Had spotted in the weekly dev-notes meeting that you’ve got this going, think it’s great.
Had always been the plan to set this up with the Coop, there’s much for us to absorb and learn from.
If we could discuss this with you both sometime be very grateful…

Hats off! :smile:

1 Like

Strongly strongly support this initiative!

3 Likes

Yeah, getting the feedback about the github bot is super helpful and that feedback will definitely influence our prioritization going forward. Our next major push is around preparing for the security audits which includes upgrading our Projects contract to use the upgraded Standard Bounties but I would expect more work into the bot after that.

Maybe the CFDAO can fund some of the ideas you are proposing as future steps.

We’d be in favor of moving forward with some CFDAO funded issues, we know there are people in our community interested in filling bounties. We don’t have excess budget in our treasury for bounties on this work right now but think the experimentation would be worth the time investment. If we can get a greenlight from others in this thread about utilizing the CFDAO for this, we can prioritize product and design time to spec the bounties. Some examples of issues would be any expanded features the community wants, such as displaying closed issues, displaying pull requests, or creating a github bot. We need to finish our work with deep linking for the bot to be fully fledged, but think that should be available sometime around the end of June or early July.

We think the idea of an xDai sidechain as a potential solution to the high costs of using a lot of TPS apps. Do people think this effort would also be something covered under the CFDAO or addressed as a separate Nest grant or a future Flock roadmap item? This is something we haven’t researched and don’t have time in the next 2 months to look at. In terms of scaling though, do you see scaling limitations beyond the high gas costs? It would be interesting to get insight into that. Long term this is an initiative we could support, but not take on fully.

The team really appreciates the time you’ve taken to test out these apps and everybody is extremely excited to see our tools in action.

2 Likes

If we can push projects to mainnet, then we could just deploy a bounty dao, and have the CFDAO fund that. Happy to help set up and deploy that if Autark is up for deploying the projects app to mainnet (perhaps deploy it as alpha-projects.open.aragonpm.eth to make it clear that its an alpha non-audited release)?

If we can get a greenlight from others in this thread about utilizing the CFDAO for this, we can prioritize product and design time to spec the bounties.

I support this :raised_hands:

Do people think this effort would also be something covered under the CFDAO or addressed as a separate Nest grant or a future Flock roadmap item?

I believe this make more sense as team initiative under a Nest/Flock. Having a team as the main responsible to push forward the necessary research and implementation seems important in this case.

At 1hive I’m confident we can spend some time doing the necessary research in the next couple of month. And then we might join with some of you for the development after you free from you current priorities. Does make sense for you @Quazia?

In terms of scaling though, do you see scaling limitations beyond the high gas costs?

I would have to think more about it. Trying to make the workflow as intuitive as possible for users will help :smile:

1 Like