#DappCon22 : Day 2 - Building Context In DAO UX, James Duncan

Transcript

hey hey up there we go cool hi thanks for coming I'm excited to talk to you guys about this a little bit um so contacts in dot ux we'll talk about context uh and specifically why standard proposals will simplify Collective action I'm working at Seasons um my background oh right my background I'm Duncan I've worked on a few different projects in the past that she may know me from but currently I'm working at Seasons it is a platform to fractionally own and manage nft assets and we're it's actually really convenient um that the previous talk was the gnosis team because we're using

we're essentially a factory for the safe snap uh Dao uh pattern in that framework um so we fractionalized nfts into governance tokens and you're able to manage those nfts as a Dao the little diagram over here is essentially the contracts at a very high level obviously that we're using we're using the safe in the middle the down module around that and then a token contract to actually manage those fractional nfts if that makes sense um sweets some ground rules for the presentation too I would love this to be interactive so uh I will be asking sort of questions throughout this time uh we're going to

go through the definition of context the context in Dows why context is important in Dallas uh challenges which is kind of a big piece of the presentation and then simplifying context with standard proposals so we want to make this a conversation I'm going to ask questions please raise hands I would like to keep kind of conversation to maybe a minute or so but I would like this to be more of an interactive thing rather than me just kind of telling you things because I think the collective knowledge In This Crowd I'm sure is going to be useful to to continue to fill out some gaps in information and anything we don't get to we can table for the end so first the definition of context I think this is actually pretty interesting I like look

this up on the Google uh you know on Google it's like what is the definition and it actually has the example of using context to pass a proposal in like some European governmental uh right directive like the proposals need to be considered in the context of new European directives right so so context is inherent in understanding uh how to make decisions as a as a group of humans right which I think is pretty fitting for why we need to have Collective context in Dao's in our order to make decisions and past proposals to create proposals Etc the way that context is built also does is dependent or determined to some

extent by the Dow framework right this is a really fun little uh diagram that I think kind of I'm attempting to explain the difference between maybe permissioned organizations that act with more centralized decision-making party and a more decentralized system that has a autonomous incentives driving the actual like Dao part of it and also just to give some context for the room how many arrays of hands how many are involved with doubts today maybe a member or okay nearly everyone amazing and then how many feel like the context for those dials you're involved in are easy and sort of straightforward to

grasp both as a member or a newbie okay no one amazing okay so context endows is like inherently complex right um but we need to make decisions via proposals and that's kind of again like why is context important because we need to make decisions so challenges today I'm sure none of you will have this won't be surprising right uh everyone is pretty aware of challenges in Dao's today and essentially decentralized participation or distance realization really requires the participation in these Democratic Dow systems that we're building in general right otherwise it's then just a unilateral decision by a by some minority party

um and that participation requires context the reason context is so hard to grasp is because you have to filter through forums and read long essays with many different links to fully understand what a proposal is actually what is the consequence of this proposal and as a voting participant why am I voting for this in one way or the other how do I even make a decision about having an opinion on this I first need to be a like a research analyst and like get to the bottom of the outcome right which is it just takes quite a bit of time and no one wants to read those essays essentially um so yeah I think you know in general The Proposal systems are kind of like

herding cats um and we have snapshot though which I will say is the kind of Premium proposal system today it's like the most effective or the probably most used system that that we have does by raise a hands has anyone had a proposal made on Snapshot or made a proposal on Snapshot epic okay so like half the room and then has anyone made a proposal with a transaction attached to that proposal sweet like uh like a 10 of the room okay beautiful um the reason I I say that is because actually to so snapshot I guess in the previous presentation it was discussed that

um you know snapshot is usually used with hypnosis safe that has some multi-6 signers decisions are made in the snapshot or sentiment is gathered in the snapshot vote and then it's pushed to the multi-six signers as being responsible parties to execute but with the safe snap uh you know governance framework you're able to actually put a transaction that can be placed on chain uh through the snapshot interface it's just that you need to be essentially a developer to place that transaction in the first place and create the transaction and so that's kind of a painful experience if you're trying to build a consumer grade product for people who don't necessarily have a web 3 knowledge they just kind of want to like a cool nft or some exposure to a cool nft

um so yeah to my point uh General Frameworks in the framework that is currently in snapshot is really good for developers but it is not great for people who don't have that technical knowledge right not great for most people that are interacting with these systems um additionally that sort of process in this difficulty in gathering context does result in sort of attack vectors for these Dao systems to then be exploited by malicious actors who do have the technical knowledge to submit proposals and sort of take advantage of those who don't have the right safeguards in place to prevent from them from stealing treasury funds Etc

so we want Dao's to be effective right it's it's somewhat difficult with the general Frameworks today um but we don't want that burden right to vote and gather context and in order to simplify context at Seasons this is something we've thought about like quite a lot I think there's a number of different ways to simplify context it's a nice problem for us to solve as well as a platform because we have a relatively specific type of Dao we are dealing with we're dealing with Dows who are fractionalizing nft ownership which you know isn't necessarily as risky as some of these D5 systems or complex is like updating a protocol right you don't generally have a few different actions

that are done over and over again um and so that like Q standard proposals so this is one type of way that we are thinking about how to simplify context for these Dao systems that are created on Seasons platform is to use standard proposals that again allow people to create actions that are common across these Dao systems um and that is through human readable interfaces so no transaction building going to etherscan pulling a contract and finding the method call uh verifying that that transaction that that transaction will go through Etc just abstract all of that give them an interface they can input a number of

parameters and execute the proposals submitted to make it work and so this is a little GIF that is going to explain or show our interface we're going through just the transfer eth proposal currently so um yeah you can just see it play out and at that end step it just sends to our interface and then is able to be voted on by the voting population or the token holders who own pieces of that nft basket that's actually all I had so I yeah if anyone has any questions feel free also

we do have a po-up at our booth and it's in the back of the conference it does give you access to a dapcon 22 collection so if you grab your Co-op we're airdropping those every like once a day so make sure you do that and you can actually see the interface and play with our application which we'd love feedback on whenever you have a chance cool yeah thank you Duncan we have a few minutes for questions maybe I can ask a question too like does

anyone have like a super painful experience they've had with Dows in general or yeah no uh no no answering your question um have you guys looked at what uh Dao star has done in terms of like harmonizing definitions within those because I think one of the initiatives there is gonna is is around standardizing proposals throughout governance Frameworks so it you know we're uh we together with key we were talking about it as uh in Denver in February I don't know if you've looked at like that standard yeah um I I'm somewhat familiar with Dallas star I know some of the people from like the medigov crew there

um and are you talking about the URI that is created there yeah yeah right so I've looked into it but I guess I don't um I we haven't you know looked into how to necessarily apply it deeply into our application at the moment okay we can follow up yeah yeah we can follow up that'd be sweet yeah does anyone have any Dao horror stories that you'd like to share yeah you were talking about uh your ex and context so what's your process in building these applications

um because I think one of the challenges is you know or one of the crucial part of your ex is gathering feedback from users and this is in my opinion always a big problem in web3 because it's not so easy yeah absolutely um so I think that that is definitely one of the biggest challenges in building applications in web3 um we've been fortunate to have a few launch partners that we did work really closely with so we had a few collections that were launched early last or late last fall that had millions of dollars in of nfts in them um so Rel like really quite valuable they had a reason to really care about

the product and it working well and we had a few assumptions that turned out to be incorrect initially so we had a few standard proposals one was add an nft to get more Dow tokens the second one was buy out the entire basket of nfts um it turns out that we after some feedback we found that very few people want to sell the entire basket of nfts at the same time they'd prefer to potentially access liquidity by selling an individual nft one at a time and then distribute that eth um in in whatever way suits them but they they can also decide to maybe buy another nft afterward and so we restructured the standard proposals which was a lot of the work that we did

in the past uh six months really from that user feedback uh and yeah and then continually you know I think there's a lot of uh problems that we'd still like to solve to make the actual governance system more efficient one being potentially creating a more um like benevolent dictator model that has a like a check by the general population so that they could veto a decision that is made more unilaterally but that does make the decision making a bit more accessible for the system today currently the uh the reality.eth and safe snap system is is still a little bit too complex for most people to actually go in submit the uh the bond

and and do play the arbitration game essentially so kind of solving for that is one of the primary pain points that we're looking at right now foreign I think if there are no more questions we'll wrap it there thank you so much Duncan uh the next talk is at 5 15. [Applause]