Aragon Nest Proposal: signaling solutions

[mariapao]

Abstract

As the Ethereum blockchain grows, so does its community and the governance of its decision-making process becomes more critical for the project to succeed over time as a public platform. It’s clear that the role of effective communication in governance is key. We must find ways to communicate or document the relevant governance processes to the community and measure its sentiment on relevant topics. We need tools to track the signals different stakeholders (including users, developers, client maintainers, ETH holders or miners) send each other. Signaling systems are coordination tools that help the community make decisions. With good signaling tools, loose or informal governance processes can become an effective and legitimate governance system for base-layer blockchain protocols such as Ethereum, where objectivity and impartiality are the most important features.

Examples of signals are coin voting, transaction volume, number of contracts deployed, number of ERCs submitted, number of GitHub contributions, hash power, prediction markets for possible forks, and public statements from relevant teams and individuals. Different signals can be collected by a single signaling tool, an aggregator, that can be designed with an specific stakeholder in mind. With these coordination tools and mechanisms the sentiment of different groups from the community can be taken into account to have a collective result that will influence a relevant decision. We would love to fund teams building these type of tools to collect key signals and metrics from the Ethereum community and improve the communication of its governance model.

Deliverables

To be discussed or to be proposed by the team requesting funds as it depends on the specific tools being built.

Grant size

Funding: from $50k up to $100k in ETH, split into chunks paid out over achieved deliverables.

Success reward: up to $50k in ANT, given out when all deliverables are ready.

Application requirements

• Proof of concept implementation or well thought-out technical design document detailing how the project will be accomplished
• Details of the team members and time commitment
• Estimated average burn rate for completing the deliverables
• Legal structure to be adopted, if any
• Willingness to open source work

Development timeline

To be discussed or to be proposed by the team requesting funds as it depends on the specific tools being built.

[GriffGreen]

We have a team put together for this! If anyone else is working on this, let's coordinate!

[mariapao]

@GriffGreen once we receive an application for this proposal we will let you know. :)

[paula-berman]

I submitted a reply to ANP #49, but Sovereign is a great fit here as well! We employ coin voting as signaling - compatible with multiple ERC20 tokens, including ANT.

Proof of concept
Team
Open source: ✅

Happy to discuss where this can be made most useful in the Aragon ecosystem and outline deliverables and timeline from there!

[mariapao]

I'm closing this proposal as we already funded a team working on this idea