Sponsorhip for Aragon at ETHWaterloo

Hi everyone,

@gabi @mcormier and I intend to be present at the EthWaterloo hackathon in November to promote Aragon and DAO-related app development. We’d like to push forward a few badass ideas of things to hack using the Aragon stack.

We are more than open to receiving ideas from the community. I know we have a few mad geniuses in here :man_scientist::woman_scientist: We’d love to demonstrate how one can use Agent, Fundraising and Aragon’s governance features. Maybe we could fork some DeFi protocol on Rinkeby and show how to boostrap and govern it using Aragon :shushing_face:

Any ideas are welcome.

We’re also going to submit a sponsorship demand to the CFDAO for around $2K in order to cover flights to Toronto and accomodation. We’ll drop the link here soon :smiley:

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I’ve heard that the devx is still quite rough for getting up and running building stuff with Aragon. Do you think now is a good time to try and make a push for hackathons, vs waiting for a more polished experience?

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Hi John thanks for the feedback, as we discussed the other day I agree that the current dev experience is not ideal. We the mantainers of the aragonCLI are the main responsables. In hope to improve the dev flow we endup adding an extra layer of complexity and was not intended. Also we understood that is crucial to aim for the stability of the CLI asap.

Nevertheless in my opinion Louis, Mathew and me can add value for Aragon and keep momentum about Aragon Chain and Foundraising on the ETH community.

On the other hand I think you are right that we are not ready yet to engage with a new community as we been discussed on previous all dev (e.g. University Students through Major League Hacking)

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I’m not a dev myself so I only go off of what I have heard from others. So I would like some additional input from folks who have experience using the dev stack recently, what do you think? Are we ready to make a push for new developers?

(I won’t call anyone out specifically, but if this describes you, would appreciate your input here!)

This would be great. One of the biggest problems (feature or bug, you decide) in the DeFi space is that most of the contracts are controlled by a dApp’s dev team. This allows them to upgrade the contracts to stay current with EIPs and/or improve UX, but it also means that they can often freeze contracts and/or steal funds if they so desired. Essentially, they have centralized governance, but open code that runs on a decentralized blockchain. This is more “Open Finance” than “Decentralized Finance.” Demonstrating an upgrade path from OpenFi to Defi using Aragon would be awesome.

While the dev UX on Aragon is rough, it’s not impossible. Furthermore, just showing that this is possible and engaging with devs and community members would be a great way to determine if this segment of the market (DeFi) is a good product/market fit for Aragon. This is especially relevant because DeFi applications, as the name points out, have funds to actually pay for Aragon related services. This solves half of the product/market fit problem. The other half is figuring out if this is something people want. Considering the 2k ask to run the experiment, I say go for it! :slight_smile:

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I think we are.

Hackathons last year were critical to see where the tooling was and what things were confusing or lacking.

IMO we should approach this more from a ‘user research’ angle and less from a ‘dev community growth’ one for the time being. Getting a few people down to Waterloo, teach some devs how to use the tooling and see where they struggle will be super important inputs for the SDK team.

And once we feel ready for doing a major push next year, let’s then go all-in.

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I like this framing. I encourage the SDK team @gabi to run with it. Let’s do it!

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From my own experience, the dev experience right now is much much better that 1.5 years ago that was when i joined the community. I think that has improved a lot we have hack.aragon , documentation , a tutorial . It’s totally possible to create something in a hackaton with the available resources from aragon

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Thanks a lot for the feedback everyone, this is very much appreciated. We have created a vote for a funding proposal of 1800 DAI here: https://mainnet.aragon.org/#/agp10/0xdbe4a3cc1eca108c1215d974b9bab8863f522b75

The amount should cover transportation and accommodation for @gabi and I, based on an average price of 110$ per night for a two-bedroom apartment on Airbnb.

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Very excited this is happening!

As @jorge mentioned, I agree with approaching this from a UX perspective. We should sit down and commit to helping 1-2 teams, watching them go from not knowing much to initially playing with the CLI and bootstrapping their application.

We should also try to find groups that are doing “onlyOwners” for their demo deployment, and show them that they can attach an Aragon org + Agent on top of it in ~15 min.

The protocol governance angle suggested by @LouisGrx is interesting, but it would really depend on help from the team working on the protocol to be productive. Usually deploying the entire protocol (along with its frontend) is not particularly easy, and we could easily spend the entire weekend figuring out how to do so.

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@sohkai can you explain a bit more what you mean by this:

We should also try to find groups that are doing “onlyOwners” for their demo deployment

Other hackers who may be working on an application or protocol, that set themselves up as the onlyOwners of their application or protocol, for lack of a better governance mechanism.

An example is an app that contains configuration settings, that a developer might set to an address they directly control.

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The follow up of this post can be found here.

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Hi,

We would like to share with you a small summary of our experience at ETHWaterloo and the feedback we have gathered during the event.

Our strategy was twofold:

  • Propose various project ideas based on Aragon and DAOs in general on ETHWaterloo’s forum and the Discord channel, then help the teams who choose to work on those ideas, if any.
  • Sit down with teams during the hackathon and show them a quick demo on how they could create their dapp using Aragon and the benefits of doing so.

Overall, one team built their app with Aragon and we discussed and demoed our tools with several others.

Key takeaways:

There was confusion regarding what the teams could modify (i.e. the app itself) and what they couldn’t (i.e. the general menus, side panels, etc.). A surprisingly high number of people wanted to fork the Aragon client to have more control over the whole experience.

Another regular comment we received was that people wanted their own app domain name and not be restricted to an Aragon subdomain. One team also experienced technical difficulties with the create-aragon-app and aragon-cli tools. The installation process was taking too long for them.

As for the positive feedback, developers unanimously loved the Aragon UI. They said it was intuitive, easy to use and beautifully built. There was also a universally positive response regarding the various aragonOS components and the benefits they provide, like built-in app upgradability and the powerful control logic of the ACL. Great interest was also expressed for some of the apps as well, like the voting and fundraising apps.

Almost all the teams would have been more than enthusiastic about integrating some of those components or apps into their project if it were possible to select them individually. Ideas in this discussion are very much in line with requests we have seen during the hackathon.

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Thanks a lot @mcormier and @gabi for the amazing work and feedback!! :metal:

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Thanks for the event report!! Very cool to stay in the loop

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