Overview of Guidelines: How to get funding

Aragon DAO
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Hi everyone! We discussed how to get funding in the new Aragon DAO in today’s Friday Social. Here are the key takeaways:

  • Teams should have proposals ready by December 23rd.
  • Anyone can become a delegate. People seeking delegation should announce their intention in the Aragon DAO section of the forum.
  • The funding process will function similar to how it does currently. We will still have a strategy and OKRs. The primary difference is that ANT holders via delegates will be allocating funding rather than the committee.

These are all guidelines, which are simply standards to increase clarity, coordination, and collaboration amongst teams. There is no social layer enforcement.

Timeline

December 23, 2022: the last day to submit your team’s funding proposal on the Aragon DAO forum. Teams can post on the forum earlier and make adjustments as they receive feedback.

January 7, 2023: Voting on proposals begins and first treasury transfer begins.

Up to February 28, 2023: Teams can re-submit their proposals any time in this period if they didn’t get funding passed in round 1.

Terminology

Strategy - The overall direction for the DAO. This is proposed and/or endorsed by delegates/large ANT holders. There can be multiple strategies published on Github and endorsed by different delegates. Link to hyperstructure strategy.

Objective - Clear, attainable, actionable pieces of the strategy that teams can apply for funding to solve or work on.

KR: Key Result - Measurable results that stem from objectives and create a clearer direction for teams on what they should be aiming to achieve with their proposals.

Teams set their own OKRs that map back to the higher-level DAO strategy.

Suggested Proposal Template

  • Title
  • Short description/TLDR
  • Strategic alignment: how will your team advance the strategy?
  • Funding request
  • Longer description and technical specifications
  • Team OKRs
  • Team description
  • Risks and dependencies: if you could fail to meet your OKRs because of dependencies on another team, describe the possible risks.

OKRs

New OKRs will be set at the November offsite. Teams can work with Ops Guild to craft their proposals and prepare for the Dec 23rd deadline. The OKRs will likely be an extension of what we’ve already set.

Delegates

Becoming a delegate is permissionless—you just need to state that you’re interested in receiving ANT delegation so ANT holders know to delegate to your address.

Potential roles of delegates:

  • Endorse strategy
  • Review DAO-wide objectives
  • Allocate funding by voting

Delegates can negotiate directly with token holders for payment or put forward funding proposals to the Aragon DAO to be paid for their work.

Being a delegate is probably not a full-time job—it would be a role on top of your existing one. As the DAO changes, the roles of delegates may change, but that will be up to ANT holders.

Next week we will discuss the on-chain deployment.

Add questions to this specific framework in the comments below. Thank you!

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Thanks @samantha

Can you add the GitHub link (in the original post) to help people locate the current strategy for the purpose of

  • developing proposals
  • publishing other strategies
  • endorsing as delegates
  • referencing for general transparency

Aragon · GitHub contains the hyper structure strategy but are there

  • permissions required and
  • a specific location people should post/reference if other strategies are submitted for delegates to endorse?
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Added the link! Thanks for the feedback. As for permissions to publish and advance other strategies, I’m punting to @Joan_Arus @evanaronson @fartunov because the strategy-as-a-platform idea comes from their side!

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Thanks for the comments @lee0007. These are great questions/comments, and ones that I don’t think have clean answers. I’d say this is one of the best examples of the challenges of this transition period between being governed by wet code contracts typical of a state-recognized legal entity or being part of a trustless organization governed fully by token holders. This is especially the case if we are serious about holding any future DAOs to the standards of a properly functioning tech startup, that is, those with the executive expediencies that come from centralization, but with the benefits of being on-chain.

That said, this version of the Strategy to Become a Governance Hyperstructure is the strategy currently being followed by the Aragon Association. It was written by AA contractors to provide strategic direction to our current core contributors. Similarly, the current Aragon organization in github (and thus the repo I created) are managed by Aragon Association. The permissions are managed by our DevOps team, with some additional engineering leads having permissions. It contains the codebases of most (all?) of Aragon’s products. Our github is not permissionless.

Due to the trustless on-chain nature of a true DAO, the strategy cannot become “the” strategy with any kind of binding enforcement like that of traditional orgs. This has been at the center of our DAO design considerations, which are echoing similar concerns throughout the industry, as the initial appeal of DAOs has started to wear off. There are some great reports from Compound, Maker, and even in this Uniswap proposal that are converging on these topics.

Building a strong delegate culture of “endorsing” strategies that can be written by anyone, anywhere, I do believe could be a great step in creating the needed directionality and accountability. This is what a “platform” is, and what Sam referred to with “strategy as a platform”. Delegates don’t need to be strategists, but rather someone who can map capital allocation to an existing strategy.

On a personal note, I was initially uncomfortable with posting the hyperstructure strategy myself into the Aragon repo. I felt that it gave an unfair weight to the strategy in the official github, which isn’t aligned what I just described. If there is this impression, I acknowledge that, and wish it wasn’t the case. Having said that, I am a paid AA contributor and thus its the property of AA. Professionally and legally, posting it in an official Aragon channel was the correct and only option.

My recommendation for those without access to the Aragon github is to either fork it into your own repo, or even somewhere that lacks the version control. IMO it has equal merit regardless if its in github, notion, mirror, medium, hackmd, etc.

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