Nest DAO Ideas & Issues

Going through all my notes tagged #aragon. When I first started contributing I had no idea what Nest, Flock, AA, or anything meant. This is because information was kind of hard to find and all the terms were new. Since then the documentation has been improved and Iā€™m deeply engaged with the community. This is great, but it also means that I am no longer qualified to give feedback on user onboarding. As @joeycharlesworth mentioned, it would be great to have more user interviews and surveys to help us understand how to improve the Aragon contributor experience. This would help greatly with NestDAO dealflow.

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Digging through the archives and found this post about creating a valuation models for AGPs. Essentially, itā€™s really hard for ANT voters, most of whom are not experienced investors, to evaluate financial proposals to fund teams. Even if the ideas presented contribute to the Aragon mission or roadmap, how do ANT holders know if they ask is in line with market rates for that kind of work? How do ANT voters know if a proposal is going to drive value to ANT? Itā€™s often hard to tell!

It would be great if in addition to directly screening and supporting NestDAO grant projects, the team could also do some due diligence on AGPs. Currently (I think) the AA does this. Weā€™re trying to decentralize, and NestDAO members have diverse expertise and are deeply engaged in the Aragon community, so maybe it would be good for them to do some valuation or due diligence on AGPs too?

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Even if the ideas presented contribute to the Aragon mission or roadmap, how do ANT holders know if they ask is in line with market rates for that kind of work? How do ANT voters know if a proposal is going to drive value to ANT? Itā€™s often hard to tell!

True. Worth adding this as a standalone question/discussion point in the Nest proposal evaluation framework / investment memo. Also like the idea of extending this financial analysis assessment to AGPs.

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I started making a Nest application tracker a while back that I used when making a Nest proposal. One of the application criteria as you probably know is to make sure nobody else has already made a similar proposal. So I literally had to click on 99 issues on Github to understand what had already been accepted/rejected/pending etc to see if there was overlap. (The title of the proposal often doesnā€™t give sufficient information what it really relates to). Here is that google sheet which might hopefully speed up the process for others making Nest grant proposals. Itā€™s still unpolished and about 2 months out of date now. Mentioning it here though because we can perhaps use it for the retrospective assessment too. In my experience, the learnings can be just as valuable from the projects that Nest did not back as the ones it did back.

On that note, what are some key questions/discussion points to include in the evaluation framework for the Retrospective?

A few off the cuff thoughts:

For projects that got funded

  • Did they deliver what they set out to deliver? If not, why not?
  • Was the product shipped to mainnet?
  • What kind of traction did get the product get since Rinkeby deployment? Mainnet deployment?
  • How was the projectā€™s communication with the community? Were they active in the Aragon forum?
  • Did they seek help when they needed it? Did they collaborate well with synergistic projects?
  • Was there a mismatch between the support promised to them from Aragon vs what they received? If so, what?
  • What support functions would have been most valuable to them?
  • Have they since applied for additional funding from Aragon? If not, why not?
  • How could the Nest application experience have been improved for them?

For projects that didnā€™t get funded

  • Did they end up getting funded by one of the Aragon competitors? Which one?
  • Did they end up building the product anyway? (Without any funding)
  • How could the Nest application experience have been improved for them?

If we can iron out which questions we should be asking, we can then begin the evaluation process.

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Hey @joeycharlesworth, awesome to see these proposals!

I really like 1., 2., 3. and 4. and overall think all these ideas are worth digging into. I especially like the idea of providing more project support services. Mor value provided to grantees would help make the program really sexy.

About 5.: it is already something that Aragon One and the Association have been doing a bit in the past by creating issues themselves in the Nest repo. But I agree we could definitely do better at bridging Aragonā€™s needs with Nest.

I had lots of ideas in mind for Nest a few months ago, and started implementing some (thesis, onboarding guide, best practicesā€¦) (1 , 2 , 3) but as you can see it remained in a very, very early stage :sweat_smile:. Weā€™ve been lacking resources to implement at the Association and were quickly caught up into other pressing commitments.

Iā€™d really like to exploit much more of Nestā€™s potential for Aragon. It would be great to find ways to empower people like you or @burrrata to execute more. Perhaps the CRDAO or some new Nest DAO mechanism could act as a compensation/reward?

Letā€™s make it one of the first things to discuss in the Nest WG?

Note: if you want to act more quickly, I would definitely help and support you in drafting a proposition to the CFDAO

Cheers

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Maybe we could start by submitting a quick CFDAO grant for @joeycharlesworth and I to:

  • draft a project evaluation framework (success metrics => ANT value increase)
  • (start to) dive into the archives and evaluate past Nest grantee performance and/or conduct user interviews
  • draft a NestDAO project/ecosystem support plan to fix some of the problems discovered in said digging and interviewing

This would not be a final analysis by any means. Itā€™s a step towards putting more data on the table for the NestDAO WG and the Aragon community. We would post preliminary results to the forum and/or #nest-wg chat for people to review. Then, after incorporating feedback, we would discuss at the next NestDAO WG meeting. From there the NestDAO could choose to iterate or move forward with some of the initiatives.

@joeycharlesworth is this something you would like to work with me on in the next week or two?

@LouisGrx is this more or less what you were thinking?

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absolutely :slight_smile: you have my keybase now.

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Good to see we already have some foundations that we can build on here.

Note: if you want to act more quickly, I would definitely help and support you in drafting a proposition to the CRDAO

I appreciate your support. Given the workload involved, Iā€™m keen to start on this sooner rather than later so that we have something to present on the next Nest WG call. Can you please clarify how CRDAO works exactly?

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:rocket:

CRDAO (community rewards DAO) is a WIP / AGP that currently does not have funding

CFDAO (community funding DAO) is live and well. Itā€™s meant to quickly fund small scale community endeavors

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Yes, here is the rough/wip proposal for Aragon App Mining

Will try and get it in shape to submit as a draft to the agp repo in the next few days. Though if anyone is interested in contributing to the proposal or just has thoughts feedback there is already an active discussion happing abut the proposal on 1hiveā€™s keybase chat.

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I think its important that you guys address the problems that motivate you the most as youā€™ll have to make your own way into this.

This being said, in recent months Iā€™ve seen piles of great ideas on the forum as well as in my personal notes, and was able to execute very little. This has been very frustrating.

I feel there are several low hanging fruits that would add value to Nest with high certainty. In my current mood, Iā€™d rather skip the interview and planning phases to move straight to execution. These low hanging fruits are: proposal guides, onboarding guides and best practices for grantees, Nest program thesis, evaluation metrics, targets for the programā€¦

So if you ask: Iā€™d prefer to share my knowledge with you, and help you execute faster rather than having a long pre-execution phase. Iā€™m getting allergic to those :sweat_smile:

Just my 2 gwei as Aaron would say! lmk what you think

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SAME!

Are you thinking then that rather then doing a formal analysis on past Nest grants and interviewing recipients, we would just draft the thesis, wishlist / requests for proposals, best practices, and evaluation metrics and present those directly to the group next week?

If so, we already kind of started doing that lol. We aggregated many of the ideas presented on the forum, and then were thinking to validate/invalidate them with research on past Nest grant performance and best practices in the grants/startup space. We couldā€¦ skip the retrospective and jump straight to drafting the investment thesis, evaluation metrics, and strategies to execute on those goals.

Yes! That would be amazing. Would love to jam on ideas and incorporate all of your experience to make the NestDAO better. What would be the best way to go about that?

  • drafting stuff in HackMD docs
  • drafting things in the Nest GitHub repo in a ā€œmeta-proposalsā€ folder or something
  • some other process

Also, @LouisGrx, if we submit a CFDAO proposal to improve the strategy and productivity of NestDAO, would you want to be included in that CFDAO proposal as well?


EDIT: Do changes to the Nest program need to happen via AGP, can the NestDAO WG make those changes on their own? Thinking about this in the context of expanding the Bug Bounty program to include Nest projects (maybe on a tiered system like was proposed here), and/or creating a security budget for Nest projects (as I requested here)

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Do you mean from this that you would skip doing the ā€œRetrospectiveā€ interviews/surveys?

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Yes. Iā€™ve already done some of that research in the past months and think we could skip that part for now.

Yes we can use Hackmd docs. We can also have a call this week to quickly go over: what you guys want to do, what information you need, what information we already have. Based on that you can determine what we can start executing on, and what we may have to plan more

What about a call Wed/Thur PM CEST?

Sounds great!

No, thanks!

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No strict guidelines on that. Depends on what amount of legitimacy you feel is needed for the change (if high, go through AGP process), and how significant the change is. We (NestDAO) are accountable to ANT holders for excuting the proposals they approved, but the NestDAO has some flexibility to operate ofc. Letā€™s collectively (NestDAO members) determine If an AGP is needed. If necessary the AA can always voice its opinion on each specific cases.

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CFDAO RFF Created!

Since weā€™re moving fast on this in order to present before the next NestDAO WG call, how long should we wait to submit the funding requests to the actual CFDAO?

Sounds great! Very curious to hear your thoughts and get to work. I think thereā€™s a lot we can do to improve the returns on investment and contributor experience for devs :slight_smile:

That works. The later in the day the better. @joeycharlesworth would that work for you too?

Sounds good. How about Thursday 5pm CEST?

I guess that is the latest time that most reasonable people work during that day. Ok. That works for me lol

letā€™s discuss that in private!

Many of the ideas in this thread have been formalized into a Nest Analysis & Strategy report. Full details on that can be found here.

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