# Aragon Flock proposal: Aragon Black

## Summary

Aragon Black is the 3rd Flock team of the Aragon Network, focusing on the sustainability and decentralized governance of open-source projects and common goods. After 6 months in the Flock program, the team is applying for a 1 year extension in order to:

**Enable capital allocation to DAOs** by taking the Fundraising App to mainnet
**Facilitate curation, discovery & staking** into DAOs with the “DAO Jones” platform
**Contribute to Aragon Stack's** growth with a focus on Aragon JS
**Build up Aragon’s Development Infrastructure** with Pando
**Driving Aragon Adoption** with onboarding support and educational programs
**Synthesize and spread out knowledge** through Aragon Black Blog

To cover its operational costs for the next year Aragon Black is requesting **$1.5M** paid in DAI [or any other stable assets] and a **800k** ANT package vested over 4 years.

## Deliverables

We are splitting deliverables across the following initiatives with team effort dedicated to each initiative expressed in percentage next to their name.

### I01 - Aragon Fundraising | 20%

Aragon Fundraising is already deployed on Rinkeby. However, its specs have evolved since then to include pre-sale functionalities. We are currently gathering feedbacks to improve user experience and are expecting the results of a third security audit [covering these new functionnalities]. Mainnet launch is scheduled for the first half of October. Promoting Fundraising as a critical piece of the Defi composability stack will be a major area of focus for the next coming months alongside ecosystem wide experimentation.

#### Deliverables

**Maintain and improve Aragon Fundraising.** There are several improvements that we would like to bring to Aragon Fundraising's UX experience in an upcoming v2.0.0: automatic order claiming incenvitization, improved UI/UX, etc.

**Develop a simple token swap bonding-curve.** We would like to develop a simplified version of our bonding-curve [with no order batching nor tap mechanism] to serve as a possible basis for A1 Court's ANT / ANJ swapping module.

**Develop an arbitrage bot.** Aragon Fundraising is designed to accept two collaterals by default: DAI and ANT. The rationale behind this choice is to provide arbitrage opportunities to drive the demand for ANT and thus strengthen the sustainability of the Aragon Network. We would thus like to implement an open-source arbitrage bot to enforce this demand.

**On-boarding.** Turn Fundraising into a widely adopted crypto-primitive while keeping an eye on transformative evolutions of bonding curves enabled by future scalability improvement and execution environments.

### I02 - DAOJones platform | 22%

The DAOJones platform [temporary naming] would work as a standalone [though decentralized] website allowing users to easily discover, rank and invest into fundraising-enabled Aragon organizations.

#### Deliverables

**Develop the DAOJones frontend.** This frontend would provide: 1. an easy way to browse and search through a curated list of fundraising-enabled DAOs 2. an easy way to curate fundraising-enabled DAOs through a staking system 3. a dashboard displaying user's portfolio, trading history and performance across DAOs.

**Research.** There exists tons of curation / TCR architectures. We would run some research to come up with a simple and efficient staking mechanism relying on an ANT bonded token for curation of DAOs.

#### Long term vision

Going from DAOs as social experiments to an asset class of their own with the go-to DAO Jones portal featuring highly visible Aragon based organizations.

### I03 - Aragon Stack | 16.5 %

Aragon Black has contributed to several components of the Aragon Stack during the past couple of months: we have merged an updated version of the Agent app, contributed to some components of aragonUI v2.0.0 and provided feedbacks and improvements to the new template system. We have also started implementing an experimental browsing frontend for aragonPM [a demo of which will be published before ANV-4]. We would like to keep enhancing the Aragon Stack with a particular focus on aragonPM and aragonJS.

#### Deliverables

**aragonPM.** The developement of the aragonPM frontend has been frozen due to the lack of standard metadata in aragonPM packages. We would like to drive an effort towards this standardization to deploy the frontend we've been working on during the last couples of months.

**aragonJS Lite.** The existing aragonJS library has been designed on top of particular technical choices and for an exclusive use inside the Aragon Client. These choices make the use of aragonJS to fetch informations out of [and interact with] Aragon DAOs outside of the client cumbersome. We would thus propose to develop a more modular and lite version of aragonJS intended to be used in the development of standalone Aragon applications and productss.

### I04 - Build up Aragon’s Development Infrastructure 18.5%

Some of our most enthusiastic early adopters are open-source developers. We are committed to completing the required features for a full-fledged decentralized VCS with Pando.

#### Deliverables

**Publish Mainnet Pando App.** With a revamped design and markdown editing from inside the Aragon Client.

**Experiment with a decentralized merging system.** The main reason why pando's development has been slowed down is the technical difficulty to handle pull requests [and merging of those] in a decentralized fashion. Thus, we would like to expriment with off-chain computation mechanisms to be used as decentralized oracles [such as iEx.ec] to allow for decentralized Pull Requests.

**Leverage synergies between Pando and the rest of the Aragon Stack.** Host Aragon repositories on Pando and experiment with contribution evaluation mechanisms using Open Entreprise and Sourcecred, link Pando with APM, use Fundraising for boosted sustainability of open-source repos.

#### Long term vision

With the Microsoft acquisition of Github censorship has become a norm rather than an accident. Pando is intended to be the first stone towards a future decentralized Github.

### I05 - Onboarding | 18.5%

Interfacing with the crypto ecosystem and wider pools of participants such as activists, community organizers, etc. is a strong part of our DNA. We intend to deepen our community efforts by increasing our reach, methods and interactivity.

#### Deliverables

**Onboarding** Graduate our first batch of on-boarded projects and launch successive rounds from Q1 2020. Refine our curriculum and publish a mechanism design and governance guide for continuous orgs as well as use cases.

**Legal integrations.** Developing bridges with the legal community and releasing a production version of the Contributive Commons Licence allowing a DAO to protect it’s collectively produced output under a fork of the Creative Commons Licence making open-source reuse free but commercial usage subject to a remuneration of contributors via a payment to a DAO/DApp’s ETH Address.
We will leverage the Agent app to empower DAOs to sign legal contracts such as the CCL.

**Support.** CFDAO and Nest grantees with our tech and ecosystem teams on user testing and on-boarding with our [e-mail] contact line.

**Laying down the groundwork of Aragon Academy.** Combining existing workshops and tutorials into a multiple part course that will guide nontechnical users through the Aragon stack (setting up a DAO, permissions configuration, mechanism and governance design, CLI etc...). Classes will start in Berlin from Q4‘19 and recorded to be shared with a wider audience.

### I06 - Black Blog 4.5%
Aragon Black Blog will continue to address to an every-day wider audience. Greater involvement in the Vade Mecum, last-born section, that will be focusing on explanatory "user manual" articles with the investment of onboarding team.

#### Deliverables

**A trilingual interface.** We believe that decentralization also operates through a careful work of transmission, and therefore a particular effort given to languages. The choice of french to begin, arises from our desire to address to our “political friends” and former companions of struggle. The choice of Spanish drifts from the history and inspiration behind the Aragon project. This improvement has been directly requested by the readers of the Black Blog.

**An editorial line built in a participative and collective way.** Black Monthly is here to stay, but choice is now given to readers to decide which monthly topic will be developed. Through a DAO based voting process, Black blog will propose 20 subjects and invite readers to vote for their 12 favorites, becoming the 12 topics of the coming year in Black Monthly.

**Towards a greater participation of readers.** The Black blog will keep a budget for articles rewards. Because we believe that spreading the philosophy and explaining Aragon’s tools should be rewarded in ANT. Not to “remunerate” the contributor, but to expand the franchise of token holders involved in the Aragon Network and permit them to participate in decision-making related to its future.

**Black Monthly compilation.** Publish, at the end of the year, a book compiling these articles [under a CC licence] to offer the Aragon ecosystem more visibility outside of the crypto-space.

#### Long term vision

In a double challenge of popularization and common reflection, Aragon Black Blog would like to build in the future a kind of library centered on the blockchain and, at the same time, a DAO-like platform that a plurality of contributors would maintain and complete.

## Grant Size

We would like to request **$1.5M** paid in DAI to cover our operating costs from Q3 2019 to Q3 2020. These funds would be used as follow.

### Estimated operating costs

| Type | Description | Amount |
| ----------- | --------------------------------------------- | --------- |
| Payrolls | Payroll and performance incentives | $1.3m |
| Contractors | Bounties \| DevOps \| Design \| Legal \| etc. | $80k |
| Travels | Conferences \| Offsites \| etc. | $70k |
| Offices | Co-working | $20k |
| Equipment | | $20k |
| Services | GitHub \| Google Suite \| Chat \| etc. | $10k |
| **Total** | | **$1.5M** |

### ANT Package

The rationale driving ANT packages allocation has been [clarified](https://forum.aragon.org/t/aa-communication-on-flock-team-ant-packages/1086) since ANV-2. This makes the architecture of our past ANV-2 ANT package request unclear and misaligned with this new rationale. Thus, we propose to merge / replace our ANV-2 ANT package request [which has not been delivered yet and would thus be cancelled] into a new ANV-4 ANT package request. Therefore, we would like to request a total of **800k ANT** with 6 months cliff (to account for time already in Flock) and 4-year vesting for long-term incentivization and governance purposes.

## Team

Aragon Black is made up of 8 people at the moment. We intend to hire one more Solidity dev and two more frontend devs extending the team up to 11 people. Team members and open positions can be found [here](https://www.aragon.black/#jobs).

## Requirements

Blog access on blog.aragon.org
Repo access on the entire @aragon organization
Unrestricted use of the Aragon trademark
Publish access to aragonpm.eth
Access to Aragon servers and cloud infrastructure
Access to Aragon DNS and ENS domains
Admin/moderator access on aragon.chat and forum.aragon.org

## Organizational Structure

A multisig is currently being used to dispatch funds to contributors and an estonian limited liability company [Dhumavati OÜ] has been opened to remunerate freelancers in fiat and incur business expenses.

We are a geographically decentralized team with our team members working remotely.

We are keeping our treasury assets in DAI.

## Resources

[Quarterly report](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1gGqWMciwKDSSQwcKrIsD2cxPghDIkVVfjvJ6OHcBVgY/edit#)

### Publications
[Black Blog ](https://blog.aragon.black)
[Aragon Fundraising announcement](https://blog.aragon.org/introducing-aragon-fundraising/)

### Product
[Fundraising demo | Rinkeby](https://rinkeby.aragon.org/#/0x94d94ce1e782785079d63e6bd565afe13979864f/0x929e90523efe06df881079ceaf3f2a7098a8bbb2)
[Pando Rinkeby](https://forum.aragon.org/t/pando-live-on-rinkeby/712)
[CCL POC](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1fzNkwv6-Z5o8KuOe-nBar5QBQaUWDgVGZPwb3Puc7y8/edit)

### On-boarding
[Publication DAO](https://twitter.com/CemFDagdelen/status/1157217483763396609)

### Code
https://github.com/AragonBlack/
https://github.com/pandonetwork/pando

### Concept Designs
[Pando Redesign](www.figma.com/file/p8e40NkajhWosAXLgEqqmI/Pando-redesign?node-id=0%3A1)

### Previous Grants
[Nest Pando](https://github.com/aragon/nest/issues/3)
[Nest Fundraising ](https://github.com/aragon/nest/blob/master/grants/Apiary/README.md)
[AGP-34](https://github.com/aragon/flock/blob/master/teams/Aragon%20Black/2019%20-%20Q3%20%26%20Q4.md)