NEDAO project (is this a first?)

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Hello Aragon community.

Just wanted to share a quick news here.
The NEDAO project has just officially received support from Neuchâtel’s government and Service of the Economy (NECO) with Switerland’s NPR funding program.

NEDAO will be a public interest projects platform, with a strong educative form, aiming for general public adoption, and acting as a demonstrator for smart contracts technologies / techniques / paradigms, and also for alternatives to currently proposed e-voting systems, that have faced some weakness lately.

Also included in the platform, will be a governance documents management system, and a DID system, following ERC-1056 standard and a on-chain and off-chain claims system. Neuchâtel’s Service of Population will act as a validator, emiting on-chain residency certificates.
My personal goal is to also fight the debated, highly centralized and corporate-run SwissID.

The heart of the DAO will use the Aragon Framework.

As far as I know, this probably is the first time a DAO will be partially funded by a public program, am I right ?

We are currently aiming for a beta program, with a rinkeby DAO, in 2nd quarter, and public launch, with a deployed Mainnet DAO in the second half of 2020.

More informations and full project description document (but in french only, sorry), here : https://nedao.ch

Also interesting fact, even before the project were officially accepted by the authorities, it attracted a lot of attention, and there aleady is a working group that were formed, with academic and institutionals actors, with the aim to study how the law should evolve to eventually include future DAO actors(/ agent) in the legal system.

I’ll post further news here.

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Hey @Fabio,

Awesome, what a great use of AragonOS :smiley:

Interesting to see that NEDAO will be using its own front-end. Looking forward to see how it’s going to look like. Will you use the Aragon Client anywhere in the process?

As I get it NEDAO’s main purposes will be:

  • Education on Web3
  • DID platform
  • Voting solution

Do you know which Aragon Apps you will want to leverage for sure and which ones you plan to build yourself?

Regarding the bots integrations with Twitter, Telegram etc… We’re currently working with MESG which might interest you. Moreover we’ve just approved a grant for an Aragon-Rocket.Chat integration which could reveal interesting to explore as an alternative to Matrix.

Out of curiosity I registered to the testing phase of NEDAO, althoug I’m not a Neutchâtelois… So all good if I don’t make it :wink: In any case, congratulations for putting together this public/academic/private partnerships around the implementation of DAOs and DLT technologies.

Interested to chat more now and during Phase 1 of implementation in order to help make things work even better.

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Hi Louis,
Thanks for your message.
The front-end we will be developing, will mainly be a tentative to “wrap” the whole toolset (web3 provider / metamask / ipfs node / aragon client / etc) into a nice and educative UX, allowing non-techies to onboard seamlessly. We hope.
That will obviously be a great challenge.

The Aragon Client UI will still be accessible, and actually will probably be at first the main UI for NEDAO’s DAO itself, with only one or two custom arapps installed on it to customize the onboarding and act as a help / guide page.

Technically, we will develop 3 components :

  • A DID platform (ERC-1056 + verifiable claims in the form of encrypted JWT’s which hashes will be signed on-chain by the validators)
  • The DAO itself, with its governance model.
  • A documentation platform, which will offer editing (something like this) features, but with automated tags and embedded scripts to link the projects and proposals documents to votes within the DAO, or even automatically create votes according to the document status in the selected governance track.

For sure we will leverage on Aragon apps like voting and vault (maybe agent also). Tokens we are not sure yet, as we are studying how to maybe integrate a DID arapp to interface voting permissions and roles.
My only concern is about the fact that there isn’t any internationalization of the UI yet.

Thanks for your links on MESG and the rocket.chat integration. Seems very interesting.
I also planed to continue my first tests on a decentralized help desk at a later time.

In the meawhile, there is a movement here around this project, like a working group that has been set up by actors like Neuchâtel’s University of Law, HEG (management school) with the IDO (Institut de Digitalisation des Organisations), private legal partners of the project, and also institutionals like Registre du Commerce, to find ways to adapt the existing law system to allow DAOs to operate.

I know that ideologically, that last idea will seem counter-intuitive to some people. But from my point of view, coming from the industry and having been employed by multinational companies, I think DAOs could solve many of the problems of our badly globalized economic world ! And so, adapting the laws to allow DAOs and the real-world economy to interact is very important.

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Thanks for these answers :slight_smile: this will be a great experiment.

I think this is perfectly receivable and quite logical given the use case you are tackling. Aragon can be used embedded in the legal system or not. Its up to the user to choose.

Let’s keep in touch and please don’t hesistate to share advances on this thread!

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So like /r/ethtrader and Galt, you want to create your own front-end, but then have the Aragon contracts on the back end?

What exactly do you mean by this? What would be needed to address your concern?

Yes! :slight_smile:

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Ultimately, yes.

Same need as in the discussion here : Internationalization

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@Fabio Since you’re interested in creating a custom front-end for NEDAO, have you explored the new Aragon Connect library? It’s a toolkit that makes it way easier to integrate DAO functionality into apps and websites. That way users can engage with the DAO through a native experience rather than having to go to another platform (the Aragon Client).

If you have questions or want help getting started the best thing to do is to drop into the Aragon #dev-hangout chat and/or Spectrum Connect chat!

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Hey @burrrata, thanks for the hint, and sorry for the delay of my reply…

We are currently finishing the decentralized identity platform that will be used by NEDAO to grant permissions.
In parallel, a team has started to develop a document management platform that will allow users to submit proposals (it will have the form of an online editor, publishing on IPFS and with automatic link to new votes on the DAO).

In the coming weeks, we will release a first beta version of the DID platform and Documentation platform, along with a Rinkeby DAO using the native UI (there will initially only be an arapp linking the DID smart contracts and granting permissions to votes, etc.)

We will then start studying, mainly if the remaining budgets allow it, how to implement custom voting front-end. For sure I’ll have a look at Aragon Connect.

Ideally we also want a per-project vault system, but I doubt we will be able to implement it at first.

COVID-19 changed a lot our plans during the year, especially in our communication (we initially planned a lot of conferences and workshops around the canton, but now we will re-organize, probably regular webinars starting september), and one of the main evolution is to now put more efforts on the decentralized identity and to demonstrate how such systems can protect privacy, etc.

We also are discussing a partnership with the Swiss Digital Days in November, and we hope to make it coincide with the public launch of the DAO.
The DAO will initially fund user submited project up to 30kCHF, and for the next years we are discussing various funding programs with institutional and academic partners.

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Cool! Are you guys looking at Ceramic for the DID or are you using another solution? Also, where can one learn more about how the doc creation and publishing works?

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We will deploy our own registry contract (ERC-1056 compatible) that will also allow users to emit “proclamations” and validators to assign “certificates”.
The platform will be used for “official” certificates, but also for “badges”, for gamification, proof of attendance, etc.
Identity data will be stored on IPFS (encrypted of course) and an IPNS identifier will be stored as an ERC-1056 attribute for the ethereum account/identity.

We are currently working on a private Gitlab instance, but as soon as the beta will be open, the repo will be mirrored on github.

Also one of our academic partner should publish a paper about governance models in the coming months.

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For those interested to “see” something about the NEDAO project, last tuesday we had a little presentation of the DID (Decentralized Identity) platform that will be used to grant voting access to the DAO itself.
This happened in the context of the “2020 Swiss Digital Days”, and unfortunately it’s in french. But starting at the 30 minute mark, you can have a glimpse and a live demonstration of the creation of a D :id: and certificate request and validation :

In the other news about the NEDAO project, COVID changed a few things, and the Canton of Neuchâtel now would like to study the possibility to add a stablecoin in the project, that would be allowed to be spent / sent only to other Neuchatel citizen (to favorize the regional economy)…
The smart region projects have been postoned but should resume in 2021.

I still hope that we’ll be able to publish a first beta version of the NEDAO platform in the coming months.