15 July 2022: Delegated Voting Summer
15 July 2022: Delegated Voting Summer
Two forum posts on delegated voting, new Aragon smart contracts shared, ETH CC on the horizon.
Top 3
It’s time to talk about delegated voting. The Blossom Labs and 1Hive teams proposed TAO voting for Aragon (the tech side), and Samantha (hey that’s me!) with the help of Ivan, Alex, Mario, and Jessica posted a delegated voting procedure (the social side). Check them out on the forum and leave feedback, so we can build the best structure possible together.
We shared the new Aragon Smart Contracts, which will be paired with the upcoming Aragon App. These lightweight contracts are built on the premise of DAOs as permission management systems. Read more in the Weekly Highlight below.
EthCC is coming up in Paris from July 19-21. Ivan will be speaking about “Challenges in Decentralized Collaboration” on July 19th, 15:00 CEST in the Sorbonne room. Juliette will be speaking on “The Smart Contracts Behind DAOs” On July 21, 11:10 am CEST in the Monge room.
Brighten your Friday with this photo from ETH Barcelona of Aragon, Vocdoni, Lido, 1Hive, and Blossom all in one room. How many people can you name?
Weekly Highlight: Aragon Smart Contracts
We shared the new Aragon Smart Contracts in a blog post this week, laying the groundwork for the upcoming Aragon App.
This tech stack will be modular, flexible, and adaptable, allowing DAOs to build the structure that works for their specific use case. Our thesis is that DAOs today are permission management systems, so we’re building tech to support that.
In the Roles contract, our most used DAO framework, DAO builders deploy a lightweight contract that can be customized with plugins.
In this contract, the components are similar to a remote control to a DAO’s assets. The remote control says what gets executed or not, but the control needs to be given access to controlling the TV in order to run the actions.
The Roles contract grants, revokes, or freezes permissions and can ask oracles to allow calls based on on- or off-chain state.
For more, read the full article and tweet thread below.
Votes
No live votes this week.
Vote Results
No vote results this week.
Forum Proposals
Guild Members Pod (GMP): a financial safety net for primary contributors
This would introduce a Guild Members Pod (GMP) with its own treasury for wellness of Aragon guild members, with pod-controlled assets that fill the gap to provide grants as insurance for AN DAO long term operations. If passed, this proposal would provide three months of unemployment insurance for contributors who were being paid by the DAO previously, but failed to secure funding the next round. It could also be expanded to provide benefits such as healthcare.
Demoing a Tao Voting DAO
The 1hive, Blossom Labs, TEC, and General Magic teams collectively request $35,000 to fund the development of a delegate-enabled DAO and community education, estimated to require 8 weeks.
By tailoring the existing Aragon code, they plan to provide proven governance tooling for delegated voting, which includes:
Delivering a demo for a Tao Voting, delegate-enabled DAO: a fortified DAO with the simplest design, and least possible attack surface, to hold the majority of funds and periodically send funds to another designated DAO.
Delivering a series of community education opportunities to build collective understanding around delegates and possible voting parameters and aid engagement around the upcoming transfer of funds.
Delegated Voting: How We Govern
This is a procedural document that outlines a possible delegated voting plan for the AN DAO. This document is not intended to replace the charter, but build a basis for large scale decision making in the DAO following the treasury transfer.
Topics covered:
Who are we? Defining membership.
Delegate responsibilities, restrictions, and payment.
What delegates should and should not do.
Proposal outline and proposal process.
Forking.
Governance experimentation.
Network Highlights
EthCC Speaker: On July 21, 11:10 am in the Monge room, Juliette will be speaking about “The Smart Contracts Behind DAOs.”
EthCC Speaker: On July 19th, 15:00 CEST in the Sorbonne room, Ivan will be speaking about “Challenges in Decentralized Collaboration.”
Podcast appearance: Our Agile and Operations expert Alex Meyers spoke on Agile in DAOs in this episode of The Modern Agilist:
DappCon Berlin Speaker: Juliette will also be speaking on “How to code a DAO” at DappCon Berlin:
Aragon was recognized as a player in the ZK sync space:
Events
Self-care with Fabs: Wednesdays at 2pm UTC in the Aragon Discord Server: Join the Aragon DAO self-care session every Wednesday at 2pm UTC to get back to your most productive self.
1Hive dgov AMA: July 18th 8:00pm UTC in Twitter Spaces: join the 1Hive team to hear about their TAO voting proposal and other cool things 1Hive has to offer.
Twitter Spaces AMAs: Fridays at 2:30pm UTC. This Friday, we will talk with DeepDAO on DAO treasury visualization and analytics. Next Friday, CityDAO will join the stage!
Calls to Action
Brush up on your knowledge of Aragon Smart Contracts.
Weigh in on the two delegated voting proposals: the technical side and the social side.
Read Dickson’s proposal and respond to the lettucemeet if you want to be part of the Q&A.
Fill out the Future of Aragon AMAs form to tell the AN DAO what you would like to hear and learn about in our AMAs.
Share The Eagle with a friend, family member who just learned what a DAO is, Twitter reply-guy, coordinatoooorrr, meme lord, or web3-curious-Discord-server-lurker:
Talk of the DAO: Aragon as a Stateless Nation
This section is a short editorial from an Aragon contributor. If you have an idea to contribute to this space, contact me, Samantha Marin. I’ll also be reaching out to thought leaders on the team for this section in the future, so get ready for me to knock on your door :)
By Samantha Marin
One of the cool things about DAOs is that they’re autonomous, or self-governing. They write their own constitutions, make their own rules, and create their own money. They build entities that start to look more like nations than corporations. They have their own holidays and founding days. They have citizens and temporary pass holders. They even have tourists.
Setting up your own nation is cool until you realize you have to answer to Earth Law.
Earth Law is a catchall term for rules in the real world that always come back to us, no matter how we try to skirt them.
Dickson’s forum post on a DAO contributor safety net shows exactly what dealing with Earth Law in the DAO space is like: messy, uncertain, and confusing. But reading it really brightened my outlook on the near future of DAOs. We can begin to think about elements of Earth Law that work—in this case, a form of safety net—and help DAO members have a level of security in their work.
And it got me thinking: to pull this whole Aragon Network thing off, we need to think more like a stateless nation.
A stateless nation is a group of people united by shared heritage, values, ethnicity, or culture that does not have a plot of land to call home. The nation might be scattered around the world or might live in one section of a state they don’t call their own.
If you’re Jewish, or Catholic, or Indigenous, or Catalonian, or Palestinian, or a member of Alcoholics Anonymous, or a member of a secret society, or even a U.S. Eagle Scout, you’re part of a some type of stateless nation. Many of you probably fit into one or more of these groups. Or maybe you’re part of a stateless nation I didn’t list.
Some stateless nations are prosecuted and driven out. Some stateless nations thrive within the states they choose, and even rise above the existing state’s power. Some stateless nations fly underneath the radar. Some fight back.
How do these stateless nations fit into Earth Law? How do they reconcile their values, belief systems, and constitutions within the systems that they must operate inside of?
They bend in ways both big and small. They build networks and pathways. They build tunnels in and around, both physical and digital. They create their own ranking systems and rules and parameters.
But they’re still stuck in Earth Law.
As much as I want “Code is Law” to be true, I keep coming back to the plots of land we stand on. Code is only law as far as Earth Law recognizes it as such.
For example, as a DAO contributor living in the U.S., I’ll probably always struggle to get affordable health insurance, and may need to wait a long time to buy a home. I will be subject to self-employment tax, even though I essentially work for a tech company. I will lose the benefits of having the W-2 tax form.
When I go through these struggles, “code is law” begins sounding less like a cool value proposition of DAOs, and more like an ideal that will be increasingly more difficult to achieve as modern states continue to grab for power (even as they’re potentially declining).
Proposals where we think more deeply about the Earth Law needs of humans give me hope that we can find a better way.
I can gripe about Earth Law all I want, but it doesn’t move us forward. Instead, it’s important to recognize that giving our DAO contributors a good life beyond work is in our hands.
We don’t have to wait for Earth Law to catch up with Code Law. We can build the trappings of Earth Law right here at home. Maybe even with some code.
Stateless nations have been upholding their own laws and giving their citizens the benefits of being part of a nation for thousands of years. Why don’t we?
I’ll see you around the stateless Aragon nation, everyone!
Enjoy your weekend!
—Aragon Communications Team
EDIT REQUIRED: The General Magic development team requests $35,000 to fund the development of a delegate-enabled DAO and community education, estimated to require 8 weeks.
General Magic is requesting 4k TLDR can be copied directly from the proposals and live votes channel, that way if it's wrong you can blame me...