Delegate Mission Request: Advancing Optimism Anonymous Community and Governance Tooling

[opjulian]

Delegate Mission Request: Advancing Optimism Anonymous Community and Governance Tooling

Delegate Mission Request Summary:

This Mission focuses on testing and generating accessible implementations of ZK primitives to enhance privacy within the Optimism Ecosystem. The goal is to create implementations and test behaviours in low-risk, publicly verifiable governance and community interactions. The successful application in these initial scenarios will set the stage for integrating these privacy-preserving solutions into more critical, high-stakes implementations within the ecosystem.

S5 Intent: Intent 3 - Improve the Consumer Experience

Proposing Delegate: Brichis

Proposal Tier 3: Ember Tier

Baseline grant amount: 8.000 OP per applicant

Should this Foundation Mission be fulfilled by one or multiple applicants: up to 4

Start date: - March 2024

Completion date: 3 months from the start date of the project

Apply Here

Specification

How will this Delegate Mission Request help accomplish the above Intent?

ZK is eating the world, and Optimism would benefit from generating more End User applications that can introduce OP Communities and Governance Participants to this technology. By developing tools that promote fair, candid, and balanced discussions, this mission will contribute to a more effective and equitable governance process.

Therefore it’s necessary to address these issues through the use of new privacy preserving governance applications that can lead to:

• Anonymous Feedback gated to specific Attestation holders (ex. Badgeholders) only
• Anonymous Whistleblowing gated to specific Attestation holders only
• Anonymous Voting gated to specific Attestation holders only
• Gated groups based on Optimism ecosystem IRL attestations & interactions
• By implementing these tools and systems, the mission will contribute to building a higher level of trust, credibility and quality process within the Optimism governance framework and set the building blocks to enhance and provide privacy preserving governance processes.

What is required to execute this Delegate Mission Request?

This Delegate Mission Request will leverage:

• EAS as an attestation layer for identity & credentials
• Semaphore 2 groups as industry-standard for anonymous ZK groups
• Bandada 2 as an easy-to-use UI & credential aggregator to lower the entry barrier for creating flexible anonymous groups, and finally
• Privacy Preserving Governance Applications: that will be built in this Mission Request
• Applicant teams must proof experience in web3 development using: addresses, messages, attestations, building with APIs.

Conceptual ZK knowledge to generate and verify a proof, knowledge on how to use SDKs and packages (Bandada o Semaphore) no need to be familiar with circuit creation.

Specific use case/community in mind, detailed scope on who would be using this application: hypothesis to be tested and expected outcomes of their use.

Technical Development:

• Design and Development of Applications: Building user-friendly web applications for governance and community engagement on the Optimism network.
• Initial “Happy Path”: 1) user connects wallet 2) if they are a badge holder, allow them to vote, give feedback, whistleblow
• These applications should be flexible enough so that they support other attestation-enabled groups like: RetroPGF recipient, previous badgeholder, delegates, etc.
• Integration with Bandada and EAS: Ensuring seamless integration to leverage the privacy and security features of Bandada (Semaphore) groups, along with the attestation issuing capabilities of EAS.

Community Engagement and Education:

Outreach Programs: To educate the community about new tools and their benefits.
Feedback Mechanisms: Implementing systems to gather user feedback for continuous improvement of the applications.
Testing and Deployment:

Beta Testing: Conducting thorough testing phases to ensure reliability and user-friendliness.
Deployment on Optimism Network: Ensuring the applications are fully compatible and optimised for Optimism Mainnet and/or testnet.
Documentation and Support:

Comprehensive Documentation: Providing clear documentation for both users and developers so other communities or projects that can benefit from these builds can fork them and reuse them.
Ongoing Support and Maintenance: Establishing a framework for regular updates and user support.
Governance and Reporting:

Transparent Reporting: Regular updates to the community and stakeholders about the progress and impact of the applications.
Collaboration with Governance Bodies: Working closely with Optimism’s governance system for alignment and support.
Sharing learnings on the development process, user experiences, and adoption for the Optimism Ecosystem to learn and build upon.
Note: Semaphore 1 & Bandada 2 teams from Privacy Scaling Explorations team (EF) have committed to provide as much technical guidance and support needed for builder teams to successfully complete this mission and leverage anonymous groups infrastructure and integrate them into new governance or community applications. Semaphore is an OG Public good in the ZK space.

How should the Token House measure progress towards this Mission?

• Development Milestones:
• Initial Design and Concept Approval: Date by which the initial design and concept for the applications are approved.
• Prototype Development Completion: Target date for the completion of the first functional prototype of the applications. This should have initial UI and basic mocked APIs.
• Integration and Testing Phases:
• Bandada and EAS Integration Completion: Deadline for successfully integrating the applications with Bandada(Semaphore) and EAS.
• Alpha Release: Scheduled date for the alpha release, focusing on core functionalities.
• Beta Testing Launch: Date for initiating beta testing, involving a select group of users to evaluate the applications’ performance.
• Beta Testing Feedback Review: Deadline to review and analyze feedback from beta testing to make necessary improvements.
• 3. Deployment and Rollout:
• Optimism Mainnet/Testnet Deployment: Specific date for deploying the applications on the Optimism Mainnet and/or Testnet.
• Public Launch: Target date for the public release of the applications, post all necessary testing and refinements.
• Community Engagement and Education:
• Community Outreach Program Launch: Date for starting community outreach and educational programs about the new tools.
• Feedback Collection Initiation: Deadline for implementing feedback mechanisms to gather continuous user input.
• During this mission it is expected for teams to provide:
• Monthly Update Submissions: Regular bi-weekly updates to the Token House through the governance forum, detailing progress, challenges, and next steps.
• A final report on learnings from the challenges faced in the adoption of this technology within the Optimism Ecosystem and suggestion for other communities looking to re-use this build.

How should badgeholders measure impact upon completion of this Mission?

• Number of unique users using the new applications.
• Number of unique interactions in these apps
• Amount of new anon-relevant groups created via the application
• Quality and quantity of feedback received from elected govNERDs, badgeholders and OP communities
• Quantity of incidents reported via the whistleblowing tool: Track the number and nature of incidents reported, assessing the effectiveness of the whistleblowing tool.
• Feedback from Badgeholders on their perceived ability to have more candid discussions (regardless of their tenure in the ecosystem) based on new interaction methods available.