New Swarm: 1hive Sunbird 🦚

New Swarm: Sunbird :peacock:

Proposal Information

Proposal description:

I would like to propose a new swarm with the goal of maintain the core tooling we are using :toolbox:

The focus at the start will be to take ownership of a few of Aragon repositories that are no longer under maintenance, but that we are still using.

My intention is to gauge 1hive community support of this initiative and then create a similar proposal asking the Aragon Association to provide the funding themselves.

Proposal Rationale
This proposal is important to keep building our tools in a solid foundation and have the guarantees that the infrastructure we are using is maintained.

Expected duration or delivery date (if applicable):
We can aim for a 3 month period, and then consider a new proposal.

Team Information (For Funding Proposals)

Gabi: https://github.com/0xGabi
Sem: https://github.com/sembrestels
Paulo: https://github.com/PJColombo
Ana: https://github.com/Bitcoinera
Tonga: https://github.com/Harthor
Felix: https://github.com/felixbbertrand

Skills and previous experience in related or similar work:

Gabi: previous member of the Aragon One team, has been working with the Aragon technology for +2 years.

Sem: experienced smart contract developer, he developed several Aragon apps, working with the Aragon technology for +2 years.

Paulo: full stack developer with an understanding of the web3 stack, he developed several Aragon apps, working with the Aragon technology for 1+ years.

Ana: web3 developer, experience with the Aragon stack.

Tonga: junior developer, has been studying the Aragon stack for a few months.

Everyone is welcome to join the swarm. The intention is to encorage new 1hive members looking to learn about our development stack to join and guide them to where they can start contributing.

Funding Information (For Funding Proposals)

This is still to be done. We will create a xDai DAO to manage the swarm funding.

The goal is to ask 3 month of funding to the Aragon Association to kickstart the initiative.

Ethereum address where funds shall be transferred: TODO

More detailed description of how funds will be handled and used:
Would like to take the chance to use the funding that we will request the Aragon Association to buy a portion of Honey :honey_pot: on Honeyswap and then use the Payroll app to let members of the swarm choose how much they would like to get on Honey or stable assets.

8 Likes

Hey guys! i have kind of some opposite feelings with this proposal… while i think that is an important one and makes totally sense to do something like that i would personally not support any engagement with the aragon association right now.

For those new in the community we have been working together and really hard with the Aragon one team for more than 1 year and a half, i would say that a big part of our success is thanks to them.
Some days ago the Aragon one team resigned their positions on the team for some big differences with the association on how they are handling things.

So now that all of them resigned for a fair cause i think that taken our chances and stepping into to do what they were doing or part of it is like betray all of them who i personally consider friends and mentors.

So i see that we can take this proposal on our own together with any other community like TEC that is really using it like us having funding from both sources, also would be great to have a item list of what are we going to do, which repos, which features that would be great!

8 Likes

Hmmm.
So if I am understanding correctly to step in and offer to do the maintenance and ask for funding would be like strike-breaking, whereas we are already maintaining repos, so a better option is to keep ownership of what we are doing and not work with Aragon at this time?

This makes sense to me, and I didn’t think of this at all.
Thank you for pointing it out.

Also, if I am misunderstanding please let me know.

Thank-you.

3 Likes

Yes something like that, at least while the Aragon association is in charge.
As far as i know the Aragon Network DAO should being released not to far and there is another story because the community is in charge of the funding and decisions

4 Likes

Thanks for bringing that point Ro, I agree with your sentiment and I didn’t thought that much about that in particular. But I agree that we can kickstart the initiative with our own fundings and then consider a proposal to the Aragon Project when the Aragon Network DAO is live.

About the specifics of the repos and items, I will work on a document with more details to further discuss

4 Likes

After taking the time to read the proposal, I realise that this is for maintaning aragon. I would suggest that we make a swarm for development maintenance, but for our application. We have a lot of stuff that can be improved.

3 Likes

hey felix! this is a bit different. As you might know all our applications are built on top of the aragon products, back on those days when we needed something that could’t be done with the current state of the aragon stack we just contact with some of the A1 team and request them, or ask for help or whatever, right now there is nobody on the aragon side to request stuffs.

We are still relaying on the aragon stack and we will still need aragon stuffs so what gaby is proposing is to work on the Aragon repos where we are going to be needing stuffs for our future development, that is why i asked him to identify what we need to do, which features we need on the aragon stack for our future developments

2 Likes

It’s not the case that all our applications are built on Aragon, the 1hive DAO is, but there is a ton of dev work going on in the 1hive community outside of that, honeyswap, agaave, kshazu, and others. 1Hive may have started out experimenting with DAO governance using Aragon, but its so much bigger than that at this point.

We definitely use a lot of Aragon infra, and it is definitely a concern that it seems that the Aragon Association may or may not have plans to maintain those repos given the present situation, but I definitely agree with @Felix here that that we have lots of stuff to be improved, and I’m a bit wary about this being pitched as something so broad as “development maintenance”. I think if these repos are abandoned by Aragon, its very likely that we will need to adopt some of them because they are dependencies for some of our most critical projects, but I wouldn’t want to set the expectation that we would be maintaining everything or supporting all of the users of these tools more broadly.

With regard to working with the Aragon Association, they have a large treasury and as far as I’m aware still have a mandate to use that capital to support the Aragon ecosystem of users and developers and I hope they do just that. However, 1Hive unlike Aragon is a real DAO and its not really feasible or desirable for it to take on formal funding/grant work from entities like the Aragon Association even if there would be mutual interest in having this work get done… and given the recent issues with A1 and questionable behavior with other grant recipients like Autark, I would just recommend anyone choosing to work with them does so with caution, refuses to sign contracts containing NDAs, and demands full transparency. I’d really like to see the Aragon Association take the A1 situation as a wake up call, figure out how to do right by their community and move towards a governance structure that actually aligns with their stated values and ideals. Aragon was an inspiration for me, and I really hope that the project realizes the vision of its founders and becomes a fully fledged DAO.

So essentially my position on this is that if the Aragon Association wants to formally work with individual or groups within the 1Hive community, and those individuals want to work for them, I think that’s great and can be left up to those individuals to negotiate the details and figure out an arrangement that makes sense for all involved. If the Aragon Association wants to engage with the 1Hive DAO, they can buy honey and support proposals and perhaps find opportunities to support and contribute to the community in a positive sum way.

10 Likes

Yeah i am agree with you luke, Maybe i should say all our “governance module” is on top on Aragon.
Also agree that we should not maintain the aragon stack BUT given that gaby have some idea of what we want to do and the current state of the Aragon stack he might be seeing that we need to do X improvement or X feature inside the Aragon stack that might be needed for us and that is what i would support any kind of development for features that we might need, that is why i asked him the details about what he think is needed, but yes as you said not supporting it in a widely scope as kind of real maintainers of the repos.

3 Likes

Definitely need to see specifics as there’s no point maintaining infrastructure that isn’t used within 1Hive or which only takes marginally longer to understand and use compared to an updated version.

For example, we still use Solidity v0.4.24 which isn’t ideal, but the cost of migrating to recent Solidity versions far exceeds the cost of learning to use an older Solidity version. I think this is similar with stuff like the CLI that’s outdated but doesn’t lack functionality so it doesn’t need to be updated.

Interested to hear the specific repos and features you have in mind.

4 Likes

When I was talking with Gabi about creating this swarm, I was thinking on maintaining fixing some Aragon repos for the interest of 1hive. Here are some ideas:

  • Aragon Client: The latest version does not traspile due to a parcel error. As a swarm we could be vigilant to that.
  • Aragon Core Apps: We could fork them so they have compatible icons with xdai tokens.
  • Aragon Buidler Plugin: We could upgrade it to hardhat.

For me calling it development maintenance is too generic. I would call the swarm with something that remembers more of aragon, since we are going to work on it’s technologies. If Aragon’s mascot was an eagle, why don’t we adopt a sunbird in the swarm?

As nectar is a primary food source for sunbirds, they are important pollinators in African ecosystems. Sunbird-pollinated flowers are typically long, tubular, and red-to-orange in colour, showing convergent evolution with many hummingbird-pollinated flowers in the Americas.

I’m currently focused on the gardens swarm and won’t be able to contribute a lot to this swarm for the moment, but I think that taking care of some Aragon infrastructure and specially making sure it works fine in xDAI will provide a lot of value to 1hive DAOs.

4 Likes

Thanks everyone for the replies. Reading your messages I agree that approaching the Aragon Association in the way I was proposing is not a good idea.

I agree that we should not set an expectation of giving maintenance to a lot of things neither provide extensive user support. Instead my motivation is to focus on a few key pieces that will improve our developer experience.

In my opinion, the main areas to focus as a starting point for the swarm would be:

  1. Aragon Connect: https://github.com/aragon/connect
    In my opinion this was one of the higher leverage tools build by Aragon, allowing projects to create their own UX/UI.
    The goal here would be to continue the development to reach the first v1 of the library tailored to the requirements of the Gardens swarm.

  2. Buidler Aragon: https://github.com/aragon/buidler-aragon
    This was a great experiment with a lot of potential. With the migration of Buidler to Hardhat, this plugin need an update. We can discuss if a refactor or new plugin entirely is the best option.
    The goal here would be to leverage new development tooling build on Hardhat to improve the development experience.

  3. Migrate our most critical Aragon apps to the new Hardhat plugin.
    The goal here would be to keep up with latest development experience and make it easy to other to reuse the apps.

  4. Aragon Client: https://github.com/aragon/client
    Small fixes.

2 Likes

What needs to be added to make this v1?

Can you give any insights as to the benefit of updating to HardHat?

@sem Besides bugs I don’t think maintaining the client or updating the core apps client interfaces is worth the effort. The client is deprecated, no one is creating new interfaces for it, it is only being used with old apps that aren’t likely to be updated and work fine as they are.

@gabi I think the maintenance tasks you’ve suggested are generally worth doing. Although I would say its only worth migrating apps to the HardHat plugin as and when they’re updated as there is a lot of them.

I’d also like to suggest that the maintenance suggested generally take low priority compared to project development tasks that people in this Swarm are also working on.

And finally pending a successful proposal you commit to maintaining up-to-date info in the Wiki regarding this Swarm.

1 Like