Authors
Treasury League, DAO Architecture area - @emixprime, reviewed by @Biaf @Teo @Felix @RTP2016
Summary
Lately, we’ve seen many discussions happening in the DeFi space about DAOs regarding how to improve and scale them long-term. Most of the discussions have focused on DAO tooling - infrastructure and applications to help DAOs to be more efficient and effective in various areas of DAO management.
That said, some areas of tooling are more developed than others and many tools are still refining their core features.
*added Idle Leagues to this overview made by @nichanank
In addition, to facilitate the experience of the core contributors of a DAO, these tools also include features to increase democracy within a DAO (with new voting methods) and meritocracy (by rewarding those who contribute).
Given the proven usefulness of some of these tools, during the last mandate, we decided to explore the other more well-known tools to understand which of these tools could be adopted by the Idle DAO to make day-to-day operations and community building/governance more efficient and effective.
Idle DAO Modular Stack
First of all, to understand and better identify which tools to test, we asked ourselves what the difficulties and problems that a user in the governance processes could find were.
Thus, we have summarized DAO activities that are mainly performed, listing for each activity what were any barriers or problems experienced during the process:
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Voting (off-chain & on-chain)
All votes related to proposals and initiatives discussed in the DAO.
Problem: actively participating in voting is not for everyone, and if the voting platforms to use become multiple, there’s a risk of making the voting experience harder for community members. Currently, Idle DAO provides three sites for voting:- Snapshot IDLE (off-chain vote for IDLE holders)
- Snapshot stkIDLE (off-chain vote for stkIDLE holders)
- Idle Governance Dashboard (on-chain vote for IDLE holders, while for stkIDLE holders there’s the approved voting framework);
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Proposals (Discussions)
How an idea, novelty, or proposal is born, grows, and is submitted for a vote in the Idle DAO. The discussion aspect is the core of this activity. Problem: for this activity, currently, we use the Governance forum (Discourse), where all ideas are brought from creation to discussion to on-chain voting and then implemented. A lack that can be highlighted for it is that there aren’t many options to encourage the active participation of users. But other than this, we haven’t found any problem to highlight. -
Bounties (Grants & Rewards)
Being rewarded for contribution on something the Idle DAO needs to get. This activity consists of creating specific discussions to pay a reward to the contributor who worked on some task for the Idle DAO, then possibly initiating payment directly from this discussion if there are no votes against it. Problem: for bounties or grants completed by external and internal contributors, we have always processed payments and the creation of tasks separately (after the completion of a bounty, ask for the contributor’s address, copy and paste the address, have the signatures from the other League’s members, then pay the contributor). -
Notifications (off-chain & on-chain)
Receiving notifications for any new event in the DAO: could be a new discussion, a new vote, a reminder, or an important announcement. Problem: sometimes, we published snapshot polls or IIPs in a short period, and we noticed some missing votes. The reason could be that some users forgot to vote in one poll rather than another or could be unaware of these polls at all. Until now, Leagues’ members were in charge of manually communicating the start and end, with the outcome, of these votes. Thus, something automatic and synced with governance events would be helpful.
With this highlighted analysis, we decided to find a model that can include several tools, helping to aggregate what is currently multiple and simplify and make it more interesting what is single.
So, we chose to follow a modular approach.
In this context, a modular approach describes the flexibility and easiness of integration and interaction with these tools and platforms. Having a modular approach could allow us to use tools and integrate on some platforms and later, or simultaneously, to new ones that might be more complete than others.
This approach would also avoid the constraint of being too tied to a single platform.
Tools and Platforms to Adopt
As seen from the scheme above, we added a platform where these activities can be carried out (or will be carried out if they are new activities).
The idea of having a stack model is also to use, through integration, multiple tools, and platforms, even for a single DAO activity (e.g., Snapshot, which could be integrated into multiple platforms).
These are the platforms we tested, listed by type of activity:
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Notifications (off-chain & on-chain)
- EPNS: This platform sends any notification from a protocol, whether there’s an off-chain or on-chain event. As officially announced, we’ll be able to send notifications about governance activity to DAO members with this integration. We can also create further and personalized notifications in addition to the governance ones;
- Commonwealth*: they have in-app notifications & opt-in email notifications, so the DAO members can stay up-to-date whenever there is a new discussion or proposal. (*provides notifications only for governance events);
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Voting (off-chain & on-chain)
- Snapshot & Idle Governance integration
- Commonwealth
- Boardroom
- Messari Governor
- Tally (only on-chain)
All of these platforms (except Tally) are pretty similar in what they offer, having the option to integrate Snapshot, and being able to cast off-chain votes directly on their platform. Votes and the status of the Snapshot polls are updated in real-time.
In addition to the integration for off-chain voting, these platforms offer the option to integrate on-chain voting, in this case directly from the Idle governance dashboard. DAO members will also be able to delegate their voting power directly from these platforms.
- Snapshot & Idle Governance integration
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Proposals (Discussions)
- Discourse integration
- Commonwealth: the Idle forum can be exported and integrated; DAO members can create new proposals and comment directly on the Commonwealth platform;
- Boardroom*:Easy integration of the Idle forum; users can read all forum discussions via Boardroom (*read-only, it’s not possible to create new discussions or comment posts)
- Messari Governor*: Currently provides the main info (author, post title) of the forum post linked to an on-chain or off-chain vote and redirects users in the Idle Governance Forum.
- Discourse integration
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Bounties (Grants & Rewards)
- Colony: this platform runs on the xDAI chain (now Gnosis Chain).
It offers many features, and by enabling the motion feature, DAO members can create discussions to send a reward to contributors for tasks done. The process of a motion creation is unique: the creator must stake X amount of token to publish this motion, and members in favor must stake X amount of token as well. Once the staking period is over, and there weren’t any disputes (read more here to see how a motion can be rejected), the payment is ready to go, and members can claim back the funds staked.
- Colony: this platform runs on the xDAI chain (now Gnosis Chain).
Conclusion 
There is an ongoing integration on some of these platforms as we look to improve the various processes within the IDLE DAO, others are completed, and others are yet to begin.
All of them have been tested by us to see if Idle DAO could benefit from them.
Having all the tools used by the Idle DAO so far in a single platform is a great way to improve the ease of engagement of new users in making governance activities.
On the other hand, modularity remains essential to be flexible enough to adopt new tools if there are any in the future.
Now there are some points on which we would like to hear your opinion:
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Forum integration - Commonwealth
The peculiarity of this integration is that, once the forum is imported to the Commonwealth platform, the discussions will continue there, without being synchronized at the same time on the discourse forum as well.
What do you think? Would you rather have a testing period to see if it might be better than staying here on the forum? -
Reputation system - Colony
It is a very interesting concept that makes the members of a DAO actively involved. Reputation can be earned through rewards for work done or if a dispute is resolved (but the reputation is not recognized for being active in discussions or in the DAO channels) and is necessary if you want to create motions, disputes, and votes. If the DAO member is no longer active for a specific period, the reputation incrementally lowers. What do you think? Is the reputation model something we could use in Idle DAO?(To get more ideas about Colony and the structure behind it, you can read this article written by @Felix).
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One single platform which integrates all the Governance tools
As you’ve seen from the explanation above and the stack scheme, some platforms offer features to cover almost all DAO activities (Messari Governor included, it’s close to this setup but it lacks a real forum integration inside, @jpurd17 do you think would be possible in the future)? Would having all the governance tools integrated into one platform be practical for you?
Do you feel a risk of centralization in some ways?
We are keen to hear your opinions, especially from @unicorn @Falcone @Coinballers @JonnyReid @8bitporkchop @AllinCrypto @wlamhk @tom @FedeCrypto @idal @idlehusbandry @emilianobonassi who have actively contributed in the forum and for the growth of the ecosystem, some of them since the real beginning of the Idle Governance 
We want to thank @Jaf from EPNS, Kevin from Boardroom, @jpurd17 from Messari, @georgebeall from Commonwealth, and Jack from Colony for the help and the support provided during our integration tests, helping support and provide all the information needed from us to start the integrations and test their platforms 
