Rebuilding the foundations for DAOs by Juliette Chevalier

so let me introduce myself my name is Julet taler I am a developer advocate for Aragon and today I will be speaking about how we've been thinking of rebuilding the foundations for Dows as we move forward into this next wave now like many projects in the ecosystem Aragon came around out of a necessity to address a growing per a growing amount of global changes that we're seeing in a world today when we have a failure of governance current governance infrastructure to address these and of course after we came to be in 2017 these Global challenges have only grown in magnitude in complexity in quantity and so the promise of daos really stems from our ability to align incentives and provide different ways to experiment with decision making that allow us to reach the solutions that the world needs however at the same time that these challenges have been glowing in complexity we have also seen an exponential growth and acceleration of technological innovation that have made it incredibly hard for humans to adapt to the technologies that are providing the solutions to address these Global challenges as individuals there is really only so much we can do to adapt to these new technologies and to really understand and learn how we can use them for better we can only do so much to solve these great social issues and so it really comes down to collaboration to coordination to organizations to be able to come up and make the best decision-making that we can to address and so the bottom line is that we ultimately just have to build together but it's not enough to build together we need to build smarter together we need to build faster together we ultimately just need to build Better Together Easter said then done right and so in order to address how do we actually build better together we've been taking a bit of a trip down memory lane to understand how we can do this now if we look back to 2014 we'll be able to see you know the first article that came around from vitalic coining the term of decentralized autonomous organizations swiftly transcending into decentralized currencies and the high the rise and demise of the Dao as we saw the fork of ethereum ethereum classic now from then on Aragon Rose is the first Dow framework to try to provide a way to concretely create more or unchain organizations easier and from then on a bunch of great Dow Frameworks came around we saw Mok implementing The Rage Quit functionality we saw compound bringing around more governance mechanisms and within the span of a few years we started seeing a bunch of protocols deifying and from then on the media crew in interest the investors starting putting in their funds Talent started migrating into the industry we started seeing scaling Solutions go of chain different ways of fundraising and ultimately as we are in this bare Market we ask ourselves the question what next how do we build this next Dow wave now even though it's been a short span of time we have seen a lot get done but it is ultimately clear that it's been a roller coaster and that there is still a lot more that can be done in order to crack the Dow code if we look at the Foundations at which Dows are born today we see an niku system that is hard to navigate with hard to use UI built on top of complex technology with a lack of diversity a lot of speculation a complex technology regulation uncertainty and so these organizations from all sizes colors and shapes are being bred on their Rocky terrain and so as we build the next era of the Aragon of the Aragon project we've been taking a step back to rebuild our foundations and really learn from the lessons that our history have provided so today my dear friends at eth Denver I am honored to announce the beginning of the new Aragon project we are officially launching out in the public two products thank you very much two products one protocol one app but one integrated stack to enable everyone to experiment with governance at the speed of software now the first lesson that really bred a lot of our decision making was complexity I cannot tell you the amount of times that the word comp complex came up in our user research not only is the ecosystem complex to navigate but really building Dows is still highly complex and ultimately using our product was also complex when we first launched the Aragon stack we built a software that was safe that was robust that had a lot of functionality embedded into it and that ultimately was a bit Advanced of its time really the users and the builders there didn't need most of the functionality that we were providing and so we came into a scenario where uh Dows were being launched but they were struggling to change as their organizations evolved only a handful of talented Engineers can come in and for car code and experiment and this is at a time when we needed experimentation the most and so with our new protocol we've really taken a step back and rather than embedding functionality into what we're building we've embedded adaptability because we realized that organizations change organizations are a group of people and so how can we build mutable organizations on top of an immutable blockchain this is the challenge that we've been seeing and we realized that in order to build that extensibility into our stack we needed to have plugins at the center of everything plugins are smart contracts which extend the iic and the functionality of what Dows can do our protocol itself is extremely lean our architecture is small and the idea is that every functionality that Dows can do is actually enabled through these plugins that organizations can install uninstall upgrade as organizations mature now our second big lesson has been user experience I think anyone who's interacted with uh DBS in general has probably experienced some type of pain uh through through the user experience and ultimately this is something that cannot be um that cannot be mentioned enough and we've heard this feedback over and over throughout our our use of research ultimately until everyone and their grandmas are able to play with tools on chain we won't be able to experiment to not at a speed to reach the innovative solutions that the world needs and so this was already a key component where we built our first stack we wanted to ensure people could go in and quickly Spa up Dows with the least amount of barriers if possible and yet the learning curve was still too steep through providing a strong user experience we really ended up building a product that was still opinionated and monolithic to a ever evolving uh industry and so with our new app again we've taken a step back rather than embedding um so much functionality into the application as we launch we want to ensure that we're laying down the foundations that enable the home base for dowo Builders and DOW members currently the Dow ecosystem is still highly fragmented we see organizations using a different tool for uh payment processing and than they do for voting than they do for handling their community and ultimately not only is this hard for Builders it's also hard for members who have to learn each new tool as the organization evolves and so the idea with the Aragon app is not that we're creating a bunch of functionality to add into it but rather that we can connect Dows with the rest of the ecosystem and the rest of the amazing projects that all of you are building now the third uh lesson that I want to share with you today is inclusivity this is key because as the crypto industry came about most of the content was still tailored to Engineers particularly even solidity engineers and so we realized that in order for our stack to be Adept to the different cultures and the different languages and the different needs the people around the world had we needed to provide the functionality to build best spoke user experiences and so we're open- sourcing our SDK the SD the Aragon SDK is merily a gateway into the prot functionalities it is a JavaScript agnostic uh software development kit which enables users to perform the actions that most Dows want so we can create Dows change Dow settings manage members track our financial assets create proposals VC and proposals execute actions But ultimately we can create the best spoke user experiences the people in Japan need the people in Panama need that people across their different backgrounds and skills sets need in order to play with this onchain experimentation of governance but because not everyone wants to build ad dob from scratch which can still be highly complex we're also providing an open design system which enables Engineers to tap into UI components without having to create everything from scratch if they want and these are the two big tools that are fueling our app the idea of our app is that it feels like a very human centered design embedding education within the application so that people understand what the best practices are and are able to make the best decisions for themselves and so it's been through this process of user research and experimentation that we've come to really rebuild the foundations that Aragon was built upon and the hard thing about this is that we can only achieve the solutions that we need through building together if you guys are in this room today it means you're innovators you're Pioneers you're working at the bleeding edge of technology and so only through working together and building these plugins building these connections connecting all of our projects together will we be able to really uh achieve the experimentation needed and the decision making to make the solutions that we need now a little hint hint uh we're also launching a global Dow Global hackathon for tooling um if you want to check it out please please go into Dow Global hackathon dcom um this is another effort to really try to promote um a lot more experimentation and solutions into the industry because ultimately the main mission that we're trying to achieve today is enabling everyone to experiment with governance at the speed of software so that we can get the decision-making and the solutions that the challenges that we face today deserve thank you [Music] [Applause] I