# Nerman - Discord Governance Bot - Draft 1

## PRELUDE

The Nerman governance bot has been operating for over 2 years. This bot provides Discord communities a formal, automated governance process while also facilitating their participation in DAOs like Nouns and Lil Nouns.


Just under 40 Nouns votes are currently represented by communities using this bot to coordinate. It has been used by groups such as Nouncil, Nouns Esports, Pizza DAO, Builder DAO, Lil Nouns, and Nouns Amigos.

**Bot Stats**
- active in 25+ Discords
- 50+ governance channels registered
- 3000+ polls created
- 9000+ registered voters
- 35,000+ individual votes cast

## CASE STUDY: NOUNCIL

Nouncil, a council of Nounish builders, has been using this bot to automate participation in Nouns DAO for over 2 years. This automation helped Nouncil's members (almost 100 members at its peak) vote on over 500 Nouns proposals and maintain one of the highest participation rates in the DAO. Nouners and proposers regularly come to Nouncil discord to follow the live votes and discussion that happen in the Nouncil governance channels. You can explore this in the [Nouncil Discord](https://discord.gg/2eRJDmBeqq) - see the #nouncil-votes channel.

## OUR VISION

We are building an offchain, decentralized governance solution for Discord communities. This Discord-centric approach minimizes friction for voter participation and allows for fast iteration on functionality. Discord has 150 million monthly active users, and this bot could serves as an entry point for them to explore decentralized governance and community formation. Think of this as an offchain governance laboratory for offchain communities.

Our code is open source and our governance wisdom all public. Everything we develop will eventually translate into onchain governance infrastructure. For some communities, a Discord bot is sufficient. However, for communities who grow large treasuries or have increasingly contentious decisions, the trustless nature of onchain governance will become an obvious next step. In essence, this governance bot aims to onboard users into decentralized governance, and then to crypto.

## WHATS NEXT?

There are three priorities moving forward:

- **LIFE SUPPORT**
Communities are actively using this bot, and some work and maintenance is needed to keep it running over time. This includes fixing bugs (like emoji support in Nouns DAO proposal titles), adjustments when Nouns contracts are updated, and keeping depenencies updated to the latest versions.

- **BASIC FEATURES**
These are features that we can implement reasonably quickly that communities have already requested.
- When a Nouns DAO proposal is cancelled, automatically cancel the poll in the appropriate Discord.
- Implement a voting delay, to mirror Nouns DAO's, so voting doesn't start right away. Prior to voting, voters can discuss the proposal during the DAO's editing period.
- For each user report the percentage of their votes with reason (VWR) and abstains, so communities can see the data on these and have rules around minimum requirements.
- Add more helpful proposal info to Nouncil and Nouns polls, including Prop Spend and links to multiple DAO clients instead of nouns.wtf.

- **ADVANCED FEATURES**
We will discuss with communities and decide on a few more ambitious features to implement, looking to complete the most impactful ones that can be done within this proposal scope. These are some options:
- **FORMALIZE PSEUDO-ANON SETTINGS:**
Currently Poll Channels can only be created as public or anon. Nouncil uses custom pseudo-anon functionality, where votes are private but published if the user leaves a reason. We need to formalize our Pseudo-Anon code to make this feature available for any other community who wants it.
- **ADMIN CONFIG TOOLS:**
We need to build a simple UI for communities to manage their own governance configuration values, like voting roles and quorum. Currently an admin on our team has to change them.
- **GENERALIZED API**
Make a general version of our API (https://api.nouncil.wtf) so all communities can access their data and build with it outside of Discord. Currently only Nouncil can. We also want to add more information to the API as well, including more detailed poll and vote data that respects communities governance privacy configs.
- **AUTOMATED MEMBERSHIP MANAGEMENT**
Automated membership management. To join Nouncil people have to manually apply, a Nouncillor has to create a poll to vote to approve that user, and an Admin has to provide the role. As well, if a person leaves, or their stats drop below a required threshold, the role needs to be manually removed. This can be automated and provided as a feature to all communities.

- **REBRAND**
Over the last 3 years we have built a suite of tools, bots, and websites under the Nerman brand. The brand was fun, but having so much different projects under the name is confusing. The governance bot has seen the most sustained use and has the most potential for growth. We want to create a new brand for this bot, one that captures our vision can be understood by the broader Discord userbase.
- New brand and governance focused website
- Clear documentation so groups can permissionlessly add the bot and configure goverance in their own Discords

Moving forward, Nerman is going to serve as a guide to onchain communities, and continue to be the brand for our bots posting Nouns events in various Discords. Development for the rest of the Nerman ecosystem, including [Nerman Feeds](https://nerman.biz/), [Noun O'Clock bot](https://nounoclock.wtf/), our [SDKs](https://github.com/JoeCars/Nerman.js) and other older Nerman projects is not included in this proposal.

## DECENTRALIZED NOUNISH TEAM

Previously this project has been developed entirely by our internal team. We want to decentralize the project and guide it towards an open source, collaborative, community project. For this proposal we will continue to code some of the features ourselves. At the same time, we will onboard devs from the Nounish community to take on bounties and develop features. We will be providing leadership and quality control for all of this work, and plan to manage the project in public on Github.

We will be very selective in who we work with, and have already approached [Dot]([Dot](https://github.com/EricDevito)), creator of Lil Nouns, and [Benbodhi]([Benbodhi](https://github.com/benbodhi)), Nounish renaissance man, to tackle a few bounties with us.

**Core Team**
[Joel Cares](https://github.com/JoeCars/) - project lead
[Han](https://github.com/sobhan-m) - lead dev