Rename the Gardens Swarm to the TEC Swarm

I believe the Gardens Swarm should be renamed to the TEC Swarm.

The current “Gardens Swarm” is modifying 1Hive software to build a custom DAO, suitable for the TEC’s needs. There is no software being written that will be reused within 1Hive. The only benefit is from real world experimentation with the marketplace app (which at this stage 1Hive has no plans to use) and conviction voting. Whether this is something the community is interested in supporting is up to them but unless the Gardens Swarm makes an active effort to investigate and align their development with the 1Hive version of Gardens, I believe it should be renamed to differentiate between the 2 projects, the TEC DAO and the 1Hive Gardens.

Also for the interested I made a more detailed comment about the progress of the Gardens Swarm here: Continued progress on the Gardens Swarm seeking for discussion about alignment to which I am yet to receive a response.

For brief info about 1Hive Gardens please see:
https://1hive.gitbook.io/1hive/projects/gardens
https://hackmd.io/y8QzQqj4RWmMtHesrzdj4g?view (technical spec investigation)

For info about the TEC DAO I’m not sure where the best place to look is, without looking explicitly at the code being developed, although I believe some of these proposal posts can help to understand: Bootstrapping the 1hive Gardens Swarm DAO
Continued progress on the Gardens Swarm

As we have said sometime, the current Gardens Swarm has been focusing on the Commons flavor of Gardens, in order to help bootstrap the Token Engineering Commons. We will keep focusing on it until it’s launched, but that doesn’t mean that we are doing useless work for 1hive, as we already stated before.

The long-term goal of the “current” Gardens Swarm is to improve the alignment and governance tools of open communities, especially experimenting with Conviction Voting. We are not working only with TEC, neither only with the Commons flavor of Gardens. If that was the case, I would be happy to change the name to Commons Swarm, for instance. But our purpose goes beyond that.

Gardens Swarm, as any other 1hive swarm, has no formal authority over 1hive community. We are a bunch of people who is organizing towards a common goal (building Gardens, or improving new communities governance through permissionless conviction voting), but another group of people could also join and do it better, and they would also be Gardens Swarm. We do not claim exclusive use of the term Gardens. We are just building Gardens, as you do too.

That being said, I hope we can keep aligning our visions on what Gardens should be and what shouldn’t. I think we are going in this direction, and I’m glad to see all the progress on the disputable version of the honeypot, and I’m eager to use it!

The issue is we need to create a concise understandable narrative around the concept of Gardens, if we don’t the term could easily go the same way as the term DAO, which is interpreted in such a broad way it’s basically useless.

The “Gardens” you are building are not the same as the “Gardens” 1Hive is intending to build. The meaning of the term is pretty involved and includes a lot of very new ideas. If you call whatever you’re building Gardens then we will have to use a different term to ensure that what we build is clearly differentiated to our users so they can understand what it is.

On a separate note, I have never said what you’re building has no value or that it shouldn’t necessarily be funded, but unlike almost all other projects funded within 1Hive eg Buzz, Terra, Fauna, Celeste etc this project does not directly benefit 1Hive and Honey holders, it is a wider ecosystem support project, and this must be made clear.

It should be noted another ecosystem support project which doesn’t directly benefit 1Hive was recently funded Improve mobile wallet support for 1Hive applications so it’s likely you will still have support.

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My understanding is that anything with CV is Gardens. I hope we (the Gardens Swarm) can continue to improve the other flavors of Gardens as well. The work we are doing is going to make it easier for Gardens of all flavors to be deployed on xDai and succeed, increasing the use of Honeyswap and Celeste, which will directly benefit 1hive and HNY holders (IMO).

We are working on the narrative work, as we were advised. We have been talking with Luke about how to split this all up and name things, and have hired Chuy to help us work with Buzz and build this narrative out. It will take time, but we are set up to make progress on it.

Here is a quick post starting this work: Getting Closer to the Gardens Swarm

Our goal is to take this feedback we receive from the community and incorporate it into our roadmap. Keep it coming! We strive to make Gardens the obvious option for community DAOs. Having multiple flavors and multiple high profile users to model after is what will make this a reality.

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No matter how you spin it they are not related. The software being written for the TEC version is almost entirely unusable in the 1Hive version, I have spent hours looking at the repos you’ve forked and built, and the specs you’ve written, and there is barely anything there that is or will be useful for the 1Hive version.

From a UX perspective it isn’t useful to conflate a project that 1Hive will be working on with a project that’s building something almost completely unrelated. The only common denominator being that they both use Conviction Voting. It will make it hard for people to see the separation and many are likely to consider them related when they are not.

EDIT: If in future it is possible to integrate TEC DAO’s/Gardens into the 1Hive Gardens interface then we could revisit the naming convention used, but until then they are clearly separate projects.

The goal of gardens originally was to make it accessible for communities to take advantage of tokenization, and create and form truly decentralized autonomous organizations, like 1Hive.

Creating a community is really hard, but the actual process of creating a DAO shouldn’t be. It shouldn’t raise complex legal questions, it shouldn’t require a legal wrapper, it shouldn’t require forking and deploying new code, and it shouldn’t cost thousands of dollars… it should be something anyone can do, like creating a new sub-reddit or hashtag.

I think there is a ton of value in 1Hive making it easier to create conviction voting based DAOs, but I will admit that there is some truth to this meme:

One thing that makes it confusing is that we have been using the term Gardens to refer to this concept of a DAO creation factory or platform that uses conviction voting… but also a specific DAO template which we had originally intended to support on the gardens platform. The template was heavily inspired and owes a lot to the engineering and design work of the Commons Stack. However, I think conviction voting is really the key component, whereas the the bonding curve mechanism (while useful in its own right) could be replaced with other mechanisms.

When we decided to migrate 1hive to xDai we decided to simplify things by removing the bonding curve component and relying on an issuance policy instead. At the time we called this simplified version the Karma template, but there was a lot of overlap, and the interface for conviction voting we were building and planned to use for Gardens platform was first built to support this new template which we use to interact with the 1hive DAO at 1hive.org, and has since been forked a few times for other deployments including the TEC.

We have also gotten interest from other communities, who want to use conviction voting but already have their own ERC20 token, and so we have discussed creating a third flavor of template to enable that use case.

Over time this has resulted in the use of Gardens referring to Conviction voting based DAOs in general, and we have so far identified 3 distinct configurations that seems to be relevant.

  1. Single-token issuance based funding (like 1hive)
  2. Bonding-curve w/ exchange fee based funding (like commons stack and TEC)
  3. Wrapped token with exogenous funding (like what was proposed for Whaler/TreeDAO)

Each of these have different pros and cons, and may be appropriate for different communities.

The single-token issuance based mode is nice because its simple and self-sustainable (though not necessarily stable). It won’t run out of funds, because issuance and outflows will reach an equilibrium point. It also simplifies things significantly from the legal perspective, because there is no need to raise funds, tokens can be given away to community members to bootstrap, and then naturally find a market value.

The bonding curve with exchange fee based model, that will be used in the TEC, has the nice property that the funds used are in a different token, likely a stable, interest bearing currency. As a result, budgeting and allocation decisions are not as tightly coupled to buy and sell pressures, and the dollar value of funds to be allocated can be made less volatile and less correlated with the staking/governance token itself. Though because of the bonding curve, launching a DAO of this flavor may be more involved both technically and legally, as we have seen so far with the TEC work.

The wrapped token model would essentially allow any existing ERC20 token to be used within a conviction voting DAO. Users would need to deposit their token in order to participate in the staking process, and optionally a percentage of deposited or withdrawn tokens could be moved to the common pool. Alternatively, the DAO would simply utilize signaling proposals or rely on external cashflows in the form of revenue or donations to be routed to the common pool. The big advantage here is that projects that have tokens that may have already been created can simply create an organization, and use their existing token.

With all that said, this leaves the question of what is Gardens today, what is the Gardens swarm working on, and how it all fits together.

  • The 1hive.org interface, which is being updated along with conviction and delegative voting contracts (by the celeste swarm) to support integration with Celeste.
  • The “commons template” a flavor of a conviction voting DAO being deployed with the help of the the gardens swarm and commons stack for the Token Engineering community.
  • A vision to eventually enable people to easily launch a conviction voting DAO using the 1hive.org interface

This ended up being a rather long post, but I wanted to provide some additional context because I think the conception of Gardens has existed within 1hive for a while (predating the xDai migration), and work towards that goal has been happening on many fronts, not just within the Gardens swarm.

While the Gardens swarm has focused their efforts on the TEC and “gardens/commons template”, the Celeste swarm has been working on Celeste and integrating it with the 1hive.org interface, with the intention to extend that from simply being an interface to interact with a single DAO (1hive), to a platform where people can create and interact with DAOs similar to how Aragon/DAOHaus/Colony/DAOstack allow people to create and interact with DAOs of a specific flavor from a single and simple interface, inline with the early conceptions of Gardens.

I’m generally supportive of the work the Gardens swarm is doing on the TEC and personally see collaborating with and supporting aligned communities can be a good use of resources. I’m supportive for the following reasons:

  1. 1Hive is heavily inspired by the research and work of the Commons Stack, Helping them to launch the TEC feels like a great way to support a community which has worked hard to produce public goods that we have utilized and helped us get to where we are today.
  2. The Token Engineering community is awesome, and helping them launch the TEC is likely to have long term, intangible benefits to 1Hive as these are some of the brightest and most aligned builders in the space and the public goods they want to fund with the TEC aslo have a lot of overlap with public goods that we are actively using, most notably Conviction Voting, cadCAD, and the Aragon open source stack.
  3. Working to enable more DAOs on xDai, will result in more usage of xDai, faster improvements to the network, and more native tokens to swap on honeyswap. And more DAOs using our implementation of disputable conviction voting and disputable delegate voting, would also result in more contributors to those code bases, and more users of Celeste, and more demand to stake honey once Celeste is launched.

However, I think that to Will’s point, the lack of clarity in narrative around Gardens is something we need to fix, and we probably need to do so by creating a distinction between the effort to extend the 1hive.org interface into a DAO platform and the effort productionize the Gardens/Common template and launch the TEC.

I would really like to be able to use “Gardens” to describe communities/DAOs on the platform, I like the idea of users (bees) being able to participate in multiple communities (gardens). But we could always use a different term if we think that Gardens should be a more broad term for any conviction voting DAO, and that since the Gardens swarm has formed around that broader conception, that we should use something else to describe the platform concept.

Anyways open to ideas… I think the main thing is just reaching some consensus on what is what and how it may or may not converge over time.

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I think there isn’t really a “canonical” 1hive version at this point. We as a community have used the term “gardens” to describe a lot of things over time and that’s not the Gardens’ swarms fault… The ideas have evolved pretty organically to this point. I think its an unfair assertion here, even though I think the root of the issue you are describing is something that needs to be resolved. I tried to add some context, in my post above to help show where there might be some semantic conflict.

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I think you’re misunderstanding that point. It doesn’t assert that the 1Hive version is the canonical version. I’ve even suggested 1Hive choses a different name. The point is that the version 1Hive envisions (as has been discussed informally for some time and is described here: https://1hive.gitbook.io/1hive/projects/gardens/alt-overview and here https://hackmd.io/y8QzQqj4RWmMtHesrzdj4g) is different and should be labelled differently.

“https://1hive.gitbook.io/1hive/projects/gardens/alt-overview” is something I wrote and its definitely my vision for gardens, and lines up with the original vision pretty well, but even the original vision references the bonding curve, and we also have 🌻 Gardens Overview which talks about the platform as well as specific templates and starts to expand the usage of the term within the community. As a result of this historical usage, I think its pretty reasonable for the Gardens swarm to have used the term to work on and productionize what has generally been referred to as the gardens template.

I think the characterization that people are trying to spin it isn’t really apt and I think frames the intentions of the gardens swarm as being manipulative when I don’t think that’s the case at all. We are just dealing with a situation where we have a term that is sort of a Meme, that has evolved and been used in different contexts, and now we are at a point where we need to refine our language and definitions to avoid further confusion.

edit: @willjgriff I think we are generally in agreement I just want to try and diffuse some of the strong language a bit and focus reaching consensus on what we should call things to avoid further issue.

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Again, besides the original post I have not objected to that.

I don’t intend for my words to imply manipulation, “spin it”, “interpret it”, it’s all the same.

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So a couple of possibilities that might be actionable:

  1. change the name of the gardens template, to commons template (not done in the repo, but the distinction is made between the two templates we currently have here Getting Closer to the Gardens Swarm)
  2. refer to the different dao template variations as flavors of gardens, and the gardens swarm as a working group that is working on these different flavors
  3. Stop referring to the plan to extend the 1hive.org interface as “gardens”, and instead come up with a new name for this effort (??)

Or

  1. rename the current gardens swarm the TEC or commons swarm, focusing on the efforts to productionize the commons template with the TEC (we don’t need swarms to persist forever, they can be narrow and project oriented)
  2. we use gardens and gardens swarm to refer to the project to extend the 1hive.org interface to support DAO creation and interaction

I loved the meme, so true :joy:

creating a distinction between the effort to extend the 1hive.org interface into a DAO platform and the effort productionize the Gardens/Common template and launch the TEC.

Yes, maybe it’s a wise decision to work on these two thinks independently, and naming them differently helps. We will keep doubling our efforts on communicating better, and being aligned with the 1hive technologies to keep the benefits of working together up.

I would really like to be able to use “Gardens” to describe communities/DAOs on the platform

I also would love to see you using Gardens wording for describing communities in the platform, and would not mind to change the swarm name to Commons Swarm.

Of course I would let some time for other people of the current Gardens Swarm give their opinion on the name change and on this topic. We’ll keep you updated! :blush:

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What we have done so far, is not everything that we intend to do.

We will be doing a lot of work on Conviction Voting which is used by all flavors of Gardens. We made a strategic choice to focus on the pieces needed to initialize the Commons Template. But we have started to support the Celeste Team in the Disputable CV update and will have an external code review of that work.

We also have other users that will want to use the Honey Template that we hope to support (Giveth for sure and there are a few other conversations going on as well).

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I welcome all the input we can get on Conviction Voting and Celeste development and the Honey Template usage and I’m glad to know there is more to come for the Gardens Swarm beyond the TEC DAO/Gardens.

With regards to differentiating to users between these projects, do you see why I think they need to be differentiated? And do you have any suggestions, besides changing one of the names, for doing so clearly?

Also I apologise for the way I originally responded, I didn’t mean to be harsh or unthoughtful.

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Absolutely, they have different use cases and different requirements, that doesn’t mean the swarm needs to change it’s name tho… it means the marketing and explanations around the different templates needs to improve.

I am very down to changing the name of the Templates… but I would like to keep the name of the Swarm and the focus of the Swarm on keeping the development of all three templates aligned.

While there are 2 (soon 3) different Gardens templates, they share a lot of dependancies, and it would be tragic if all three had triplicate the work for their own development paths, I vote that we unite the work under the Gardens Swarm to avoid diverging into having 3 different repo’s for disputable CV :smiley:

This is a documentation and branding issue, I agree that the Gardens Swarm was doing a piss poor job at that, so we are changing it! We found our comms hero in @chuygarcia92, who has been a force of nature so far, and we are going to kick some ass and make it easy for users to design and deploy their own Gardens, whether it is the Commons Flavor, the Honey Flavor, or the soon to evolve, BYO Token Flavor :smiley:

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The suggestion of creating better documentation and marketing, instead of changing the name, to help differentiate between the versions is a reasonable one. However, firstly there currently is no documentation or better marketing, therefore in the short term it will remain to be confusing. In the long term there’s a chance it will continue to remain to be confusing. As I’d like to point out it was suggested you create better documentation about 3 weeks ago and so far I believe all we have is this post from @chuygarcia92 who isn’t technically involved: Getting Closer to the Gardens Swarm (please correct me if I’m wrong). The remaining lack of clear technical specification doesn’t convince me that you will be able to illustrate the separation reliably through proper documentation and I fear it will ultimately require more work from 1Hive members to ensure this is the case. So unfortunately I’m not currently convinced by this suggestion.

I’d also like to clarify that whether we use different names, or the same name, the development process will be the same and code and work that is shared will not have to be duplicated. The only thing that might have to be duplicated is Marketing. However, each of these projects will need separate marketing campaigns initially anyway because they are different projects accessed through different Web App’s/UI’s.

It also occurs to me Conviction Voting is likely to be used outside the context of 1Hive and the Commons in the future because it is a useful mechanism, perhaps it will be used as is or rebuilt. I don’t believe those protocols/DAO’s should also be referred to as Gardens because their functionality could greatly differ, creating unnecessary confusion.

Speaking from a marketing perspective I think there’s a great opportunity to pitch Gardens out there as The DAO Builder with everything that’s going on with xdai chain and layer 2 adoption, regardless of the UI each flavor uses.

I do agree there’s still much work to be done regarding documentation, however very few of this is achievable if we don’t have the support of the rest of the 1hive community to get more funding. Comms is an important part of keeping people involved and I don’t think a technical approach is the right way, since it’s already something difficult to explain as it is to non-technical users.

I personally don’t agree with the idea of flooding 1hive with different marketing approaches to flavors that in the end have a common goal. I would go for finding a way to organize all these flavors by what they share in common and understanding this as Gardens while it develops its marketing strategy. If CV is the concept we’re looking for that we can base some of the marketing ideas on, I don’t think that’s a bad idea at all.

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What I think we need is to hang out more often in order to share the roadmaps and the different ideas we have around the communities we want to build. We messed up by not being responsive to the chats, and little information has been shared between the groups. I hope we can change that.

@lkngtn @willjgriff we won’t be having an AMA this Thursday since we still didn’t reach a consensus on the common narrative around gardens, but if you already booked 4:00 PM UTC for that, we could use that time very well to talk about a common roadmap regarding conviction voting templates and the future of Gardens Swarm.

I have a lot of interest on your plans and vision for Gardens, and I would love to understand better some of the things in this document, maybe we can chat about it, prepare the TEC/Celeste AMA, and catch up.

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UPDATE!

We are changing our name to the Commons Swarm. Thank you @willjgriff for the suggestion!

See more info here:

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