Proposed design for a DAO's home page within Aragon

The Organization Identity initiative relates to allowing a DAO to manage and showcase organization attributes such as a logo, organization description, manifesto, mission statement, member registries, and (eventually) external feeds.

The ultimate vision is that the DAO’s home page is a dashboard composed of a collection of widgets, which are customizable by the DAO. Updating organization information can be protected by role(s).

The initial proposal is presented below, would love to hear your feedback!

Design concept

Hide the traditional app navigation when on homepage (can access via hamburger)

Technical Architecture

Where does it live?

  • Similar to Permissions:
    • Contract: aragonOS
      • Auth controls for making updates to the content and other settings
    • Frontend: Aragon/aragon

DAO metadata storage

Defining membership to a DAO

  • Point the Membership Settings to a Token Manager instance deployed for the DAO (will require custom Token Manager for ‘unmanaged tokens’)

How does a user access it?

  • Either: via clicking on the DAO’s logo or Home tab in left nav (if we choose to keep it)

Widget Gallery

Different widget types that can be added to a DAO’s homepage. There should be the ability to add, update, delete, and rearrange sections. Each widget type will have a different schema.

  • App Event Streams
    • Each app can have an event stream
      • E.g. Voting app: Pending votes; Payroll app: New payroll; Rewards app: new rewards to claim, etc
      • Pushed upstream from apps and passed downstream to apps
    • Ideally there will be “quick actions” on the app widgets, to open the related action panel (and not simply navigate the user to the app)
  • Content Blocks
    • General: Announcements, mission statement, handbook
    • Reference (consumed by other apps): Manifesto, bylaws, code of conduct
      • Point of reference for Aragon Court jurors
    • Markdown text blocks, including support for embedding images
  • External Feeds
    • Socials, blog feed, forum link, recent forum posts
  • Membership Registry
    • Display user profiles based on token manager instance
  • Navigation Block
    • Allows DAO’s home page to have more than one layer (or page anchors, tbd)

Organization Settings

  • Profile (this content will especially important for ecosystem wide DAO discovery)
    • Organization logo / avatar
    • Organization name
    • Organization short description
  • Layout
    • Which widgets are displayed and in what position
    • Customizing the navigation block
  • Branding
    • Theme accent color
    • Theme background color
    • Dark or light mode
    • Background logo (must be SVG)
    • Cover photo
  • Content Blocks
    • Creating new content blocks
    • Editing the markdown of a specific block
  • Token Settings
    • Tokens that define membership
    • Token logo
10 Likes

So kind of like a website template or Facebook business page template, but for Aragon DAOs? You just connect, click a few options, and users have a beautiful dashboard of all the important things related to that DAO accessible via a link or the mobile app?

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Yes @burrrata, this is meant to be a pretty simple home page that you would see for example when you visit your DAO at https://rinkeby.aragon.org/#/dune.aragonid.eth

It would be a bit different from Facebook as it’s a bit more modular which content would be displayed where.

Here is an early look at how the widget concept would work, which is very much inspired by mailchimp for now. Let me know your thoughts!

(Click to enlarge images)

Widget gallery

Content block editor

6 Likes

That looks awesome @stellarmagnet! We would love to try the widget, in case there are any progress. Had been poking Autark’s GitHub, but can’t find it. Any pointers?

Otherwise we would love to join forces and work on that project as well :hugs:

1 Like

Yeah ditto. I was just thinking that it would be cool to upgrade Docusaurus to a framework that makes DAOs easier to interact with and more community oriented, but realized that’s kind of what you’re already doing :slight_smile:

@jjperezaguinaga this has not been developed yet, as our proposal relates to enhancing the native Home application that is part of the client.

Considering this requires enhancements to the client, aragonOS and the API, our process is to post both designs and then the technical approach to get buy-in first from Aragon One who manage those repositories right now.

@luis and @Paty - any thoughts/feedback?

1 Like

@stellarmagnet Roger that, thanks for the reply! I’ll ping our designer to chip-in a bit some of our insights and maybe do some shared design-collab session to see what works best? Then maybe we can chip in to see what makes sense best for everybody and add some extra resources from our side to help that, as it seems to be a bit of a big task if it touches that many components of the Aragon SDK.

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I like this very user-friendly design!

I think it would be difficult to implement this in a way that it’s cohesive with the rest of the client. Basically, I think there are two alternative ways that the client can evolve:

  • As the management interface for organizations
  • As the canonical way to interface with organizations, both for management and for usage

I think that it makes sense to focus on the management for now. Covering all possible usage seems hard, as organizations may create their own products that don’t live inside the Aragon client.

Organization management can also include some very basic interactions that need the underlying properties of an Aragon organization, such as putting money into a crowdfunding or requesting a finance transfer.

Some of the underlying properties of an Aragon organization are sovereignty and uncensorability. Everything that needs those properties is likely to benefit from living on the client as an app.

I think a home app like this may be better suited as a traditional website, which can be easily updated via whatever website management mechanism the admin or users wants to use.

If the website needs to be fully decentralized and censorship-resistant, I think that it will makes sense to separate the website management interface from the website itself. For example, a website could be stored on Pando or aragonPM, and then we could build a very basic app which just renders the latest commit on that repository. Then you can use any static website generator to create your website.

I think that in the short term, a way for a DAO to define an aragonPM URI as their home app may be everything we need. Also, this current iteration may require introducing the concept of “app widgets” (which sounds interesting!) that seems to me as something that would need a lot of thought in terms of how that would technically work.

Looking forward to hearing your take!

6 Likes

I think there is a big advantage to having a customizable home app like described within the client as opposed to a static site generated externally. As you indicate within the Aragon organizations there are a lot of possible combinations of processes and applications. Its impossible for us to cover all bases. This makes it incredibly confusing for users, when they first visit an org they see a fairly useless home screen:

Even if we expanded this to incorporate other actions as new applications are installed, there is no contextual information at all. It’s this contextual information that is really important for users to understand right away before they engage with any of the applications. We see this with the AGP process and with the CFDAO process, its the context of how the process works, and how you interact with the process that is important to understand not just what actions are available.

While I agree that it may not be the case that this stuff needs to be censorship resistant… and there may be better tools to manage a general website available that can be more feature rich and supplement what we make available in a customizable home app… I think there is a ton of value in enabling organizations to customize the first interaction that users have with their organization.

And as organizations become more complicated and information is siloed into individual apps, the ability to summarize and surface important details like active votes, or votes ending soon, or top funded tasks, allows organizations to provide a hub for user to interact efficiently with the organization. These types of plugins make sense in the context of running the app where there is a web3 connection and a connection to an ethereum node, but might much more difficult to build into your typical web2.0 hosted website.

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I could not agree more. This is essential.

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I totally agree. My point was more around making it simpler, so we don’t have a full-fledged web dashboard system since day one, since today with our stack it’d be quite slow once you start loading multiple sources of data

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Is there an ETA for dark mode? I would really really really like to see that feature, and I’m sure a lot of the other nights and weekends Aragon community members would as well :slight_smile:

Aragon One is actually shipping that with 0.8!

Check out preview.aragon.org/#/daoname and click the moon icon in the top right :slight_smile:

Note: I don’t think think everything is fully baked on this URL yet

And this is more of a user setting vs a DAO branding setting

2 Likes