# Aragon Cooperative Workflow Proposal

The purpose of this proposal is to describe some adjustments to the cooperative organization to more effectively allocate resources including the organizations merit token and funding that may be provided by grants.

I have been testing Autark's Planning Suite (TPS) on rinkeby and think that the Cooperative could leverage TPS apps to more effectively coordinate work. In order to accomplish the following changes it may make sense to redeploy the cooperative organization entirely. Redeploying the organization is a good opportunity to filter out members who have not been active, requiring them to re-apply to the new organization.

# Goal is to safely minimize voting

In order to make the cooperative productive its important for us to come up with processes which minimize how frequently we have to vote on things. The less voting we do, the less time, attention, and transaction fees we impose on other members of the organization. However, we also want to make sure there is oversight and accountability. To accomplish this we should set structures which allow individuals to take actions unilaterally, but impose budgets and consequences such as revoking privelleges within the organization in the event that individuals abuse their privelleges.

## Make merit transferrable

This is the main reason to redploy the organization, as it would require re-deploying multiple applications and there is currently no way to fully uninstall an unused application. [See this issue](https://github.com/aragon/aragon/issues/575) for more context.

Making the organization merit tokens transferrable is motivated by the fact that we cannot effectively distribute merit tokens if they are non-transferrable. If they are transferrable then we can leverage the projects app in TPS to attach merit to github issues as bounties.

Autark plans to support non-transferrable tokens in their workflow in the future, but for now I think it is reasonable for us to simply socially agree to avoid treating merit as a tradeable asset.

## Budgeting Merit and DAI

I propose we use a Vault and Finance app to hold the bulk of the organizations assets including DAI. Transfers from out of this vault would require a vote based on Merit. Periodically we can vote to move tokens from this into a seperate Vault which is connected to the TPS projects app.

Similarly we can mint Merit directly to a less secure vault, because minting tokens will require a vote.

DAI and Merit in the less secure vault can be used to fund bounties, and every member of the organization has the right to allocate funds towards bounties at their individual discretion.

People can request to work on a bounty, and a member of the organization can approve and assign the bounty to the person who requested. The requestor when ready can request funds to be released. To ensure review quality we can assign a few members the reviewer role.

If a member of the organization abuses their privelleges as a reviewer the most damage they could do is drain the low security vault, which should never have more than a weeks worth of funding in it. A member which blantantly abuses this process will be removed from the organization and publicly shamed 😤.

## Allocations

Not everything that needs to be done within the organization makes sense to turn into a bounty. The allocations app within TPS is designed for weighted payments between multiple parties. We can use this to fairly compensate members for making broad and general contributions which don't necessarilly make sense to create bounties for. Being a Bounty Reviewer may require time and expertise, submitting and commenting on issues, participating on the forum, or otherwise adding value to the organization should also be rewarded. We can adopt a policy of doing a weekly allocation where members of the organization can nominate each other for inclusion based on their contributions each week, and then members can vote to proportionally weight the allocation across nominated contributors. Allocations could be tied to same vault as bounties or have a seperate vault (and therefore budget constraint).

## Payroll

If there are some clear roles which we identify that need to be done consistently and we don't want to rely sporatic nature of volunteers we could consider leveraging the payroll application to provide a consistent stream of funds to specific individuals in exchange for performing specific duties. Changes to payroll will require a vote and can therefore be associated with the main vault.

# Governance

Membership will be structured the same, with members granted a single non-transferrable token each. We still need to define better membership acceptance criteria as well as set clear expectation for why and how membership in the organization is recinded.

Members will ultimately be in control of merit, they can both burn and mint merit at their discretion. And Merit will ultimately be in control of membership. This relationship should result in a strong overlap between members and merit. An address must hold merit to create a vote in the membership voting app, and an address must be a member to create a vote in the merit voting app.

Additionally, Merit is used to allocate the organization's resources and is required to approve transfers from the organization's main vault.