# Collab Land Deep Integration/Kevin Malone Deprication


## tl;dr

CollabLand is heading in a direction where they want to open up their platform and allow other protocols to use the CollabLand Bot as a Distribution Channel.

A way to think about this is facebook app marketplace vs the app. They are turning the CollabLand Bot into an open marketplace that can host other protocols/apps functions within the collabland bot.
- If a DAO wanted to use Govrn, they would then "flip the switch" and enable Govrn for their DAO's specific instance of Collab Land

This opportunity surfaced as we discussed a more simple integration, which was to use CollabLand for wallet verification.

I'm not sure how I feel about this yet, so wanted to create this as the start of an open conversation.

## Background

For background, something we had already been discussing was to try and spin Kevin Malone out into an Open Source Bot Project.

I do believe that Kevin Malone will always be a needed way to interact with the Govrn Protocol, but it was starting to become a platform/interface of it's own (in a good way).

The thinking was that if we turned it into an open source bot project, we could leverage the benefits of open source, have a cool way to build new user functionalities that DAOs wanted, while also maintaining it as a way to plug into Govrn.

## Considerations

1. If we added Kevin Malone to the CollabLand platform, we could in theory continue to maintain our version of Kevin Malone. That said I'd probably be inclined that if we did use CollabLand, it would make our own life easier to just deprecate our version and point our DAOs to CollabLand to use Govrn from discord.
2. A good amount of our platform still derives from Discord. Even with v1, we use discord for a lot of conversational and data structure pieces.

## Implications

1. While the CollabLand integration would allow us to use CollabLand as a portal, we'd still have to maintain all the backend code. It's essentially just created a new portal/interface for people to interact with our backend code we'd right and maintain.

## Position

I'm not sure I have a strong position on this one yet. Part of me thinks that this aligns with the direction we wanted to head and simplifies our life, but also the idea of deprecating Kevin Malone is a bit frightening.

I will say that putting it in the collabland marketplace, does offer a huge amount of distribution. CollabLand is used by a ton of DAOs right now, and it will allow us to crossover into telegram.
- Further, James Young is a homie, and collabland came up around the same time Govrn did too. We're in the same ecosystem, and this would be a strong partnership announcement for us.

I am worried though about this might impact how much of our architecture is around discord users and servers?

## Additional Resources
Here's the conversation I had with James Young

## Notes from Decision Meeting
- Would want to get access to the docs to best understand the SDK.

Integrating with CollabLand shouldn't restrict the functionality we're building with our Bot.

Would using the collabland bot change the way data is submitted and stored?
- It shouldn't
- Our understanding is that CollabLand is just calling our bot code under the hood.

**Pros:**
- Increase distbrution channel
- Helps white glove new DAOs by giving them a full startup package (i.e. automatically do token gating)
- Reduces potential future work by leveraging collabland
- Use the bot to push them to the webapp.
- Does the wallet verification for us as well
- This would be a solid PR/Content for us to publicize.

**Cons:**
- Lose visibility of a "Govrn" branded bot
- Potentially capped by the CollabLand limitations
- Lack of flexibility on what we can do. Even if the SDK is super flexible, it's less flexible then a completely custom solution
- Risk of if collabland stops being a marketplace

## Decision Framework

| Name |Scale of Approval (1-5) |Comments |
| -------- | -------- | -------- |
| Aaron | 4 | |
| Christine | 3 | there's some unknowns re: privacy, branding, how long collabland will support us but also a good distribution opp|
| Keating | 3 |seems like a good amount of energy will need to be dedicated to this |
| Stefen | 4 | |
| Flip | ⭐⭐⭐⭐ | Would like to address slash command registration, limitations |
| Scott | 2 becomes 4 with --> | Need to work out messaging/slash command API |

Conditions:
- SDK is built in a way that doesn't hinder us or create too much new work.
- Is there a baseline level of collabland functionality you need to use?
- Are there privacy implications?

## Output

If we moved forward:
- We'd want to continue supporting Kevin Malone for a period of time for risk mitigation
- Run tests on what is a more effective playbook to recommend to new DAOs.
- Understand how many new DAOs start using Govrn.
- We'd want to update the coversation language to be clear that they'd be interacting with Govrn

**Decision:** Move forward conditional on technical DD and effort assessment.