The Vocdoni Guild

# The Vocdoni Guild Vision: *Create, promote and maintain a set of tools and infrastructure that empowers communities and individuals in the practice of governance and decision making in a self-sovereign, neutral, transparent, open source, censorship-resistant and decentralized manner* --- In the light of recent events, we raise our voice to provide an opportunity to a project we believe has an inspiring vision and mission and that due to the events of the last year and a half, our team has been unable to fully commit to. We believe that Vocdoni technology has a huge potential. There is no other technology on the market that allows organizations to perform voting in a transparent, censorship-resistant, and verifiable way, providing comprehensive guarantees and low price. Our team has a significant know-how on the digital voting and continues to work on improving this technology with proposals such as zkVote or zkMultisig. In addition, the current release of Vocdoni.app (codename Azeno) has reached beyond the status of MVP; it has become the keystone of a potentially very powerful product that includes zkSnarks voting. We believe that the Vocdoni brand has value. This is certainly true in the cryptospace, but particularly so in the real world. We have executed many successful voting processes, appeared recurrently in the media, and received very positive feedback from users. Such successes included the 14F Catalan elections poll and the first official and completely digital referendum in the Spanish state, held for Bellpuig municipality. Since the conception of Vocdoni, we have given voice to dozens of thousands of citizens. Vocdoni was born in 2018 with an ambitious goal. The first years of development embodied an early-phase excitement and the project celebrated remarkable success in technological innovation and applicability. Nonetheless, the economical situation was not facing such good times. The finalization of our agreement with Aragon on December 2020 was received with enthusiasm by many team members and saved the project from a very critical financial situation. Joining the Aragon ecosystem was an opportunity to keep developing what we saw (and see indeed) as a crucial tool to reimagine and advance the governance system as we know it. We believe that the current governance structure of the Aragon project is halting the development due to excesive bureaucracy and difficulty to align across such a diverse group of stakeholders. We believe change is needed to create better conditions to build the technology we envision. We believe that a more decentralized approach would be a better option, following the example of successful projects such as Consensys, Gnosis or ChainSafe that have already applied this approach of independent self-governed guilds. The Vocdoni guild ojectives are: + Build the infrastructure required by the web3 community and Aragon for scalable, censorship-resistant, trustless and self-sovereign voting. + Release the solutions that the traditional world organization need for decentralized decision making following Vocdoni's principles. + Execute specific projects and build alliances in order to bring the the Vocdoni technology to the main stream. In order to make this possible and keep contributing on the Aragon ecosystem, we believe the following **changes** are required: - Decrease the team complexity and work as a 100% independent guild with no inference from the rest of Aragon groups. - Consolidate an empowered autonomous team, having most of the required role members within the guild (UX, UI, backend, marketing, product, etc.) with almost no dependencies on the Aragon team. - Apply a horizontal, inclusive and democratic governance model within the guild team. - Define our own tech roadmap, focused on building infrastructure, services and solutions for decentralized governance on traditional organizations and web3, with independency and day-to-day autonomy. - Allow the guild to execute projects considered relevant for Vocdoni's mission as long as it does not conflict with Aragon's. - Ensure the allocation of necessary resources to enable our next-generation universally verifiable and secure digital voting system in both the traditional and DAO worlds. - Assure the token vesting for the team members that continue involved in the guild. This set of changes has the consensus of the signing team members and are considered necessary to further collaboration with Aragon. We believe that this is aligned with the values and strategy of Aragon. We are aware that this is a sensitive situation. We empathize and sympathize with any other project, led by Aragon contributors, that go along the same lines of providing an alternative. With any of these projects we are willing to collaborate and work closely. Our will is to keep contributing on the Aragon ecosystem by building technology and solutions that help people and align with the visions of both Vocdoni and Aragon. To this aim, we propose the following **commitments** that must be held by the Vocdoni guild: - The guild will prioritize proposals such as zkVote and/or zkMultisig on our roadmap and build all necessary tools that empower as well Aragon users, in their exercise of decision making using Vocdoni's technology. - The guild will mantain a close collaboration with other Aragon groups in order to coordinate on the process to build the upcoming technology. - The guild will ensure that the Aragon brand and name will be always present on all Vocdoni publications, products and projects, making it very clear that Vocdoni work is funded and supported by Aragon. - All solutions built by the guild will by designed for enhancing the current ANT utility placing it in the core of the infrastructure incentivization and securitization. - The guild will collaborate with the research guild or other guilds for allowing the full implementation of the zkAragon proposal, to the extent that the contributions are relevant to the Vocdoni roadmap. We hope that this letter will lead both Vocdoni and Aragon ecosystem to better and more comfortable collaboration. # Signatures **Signed by:** - Pau Escrich - Ferran Reyes - Jordi Pinyana - Gioacchino Mazzurco - Gui Iribarren - Emmanouil Dimogerontakis - Marta Sancho Moreno - Roger Baig Viñas - Daniel Martí - Jordi P. Aulet Signers fully support and want to join this adventure immediatelly. **Supported by:** - Marc Velmer - arnaucube Suporters emphatize and agree with the letter, they might join or not the adventure once started. --- [Removed texts](https://hackmd.io/@ferran/BkHozscwq)