House Of Nouns
TLDR
We're requesting 340 ETH for 6 months to continue building House of Nouns, a supercharged platform + context layer for Nouns governance. We want to make governance participation fun.
Our vision is to create a governance platform that is both delightful and easy to use, empowering voters to effectively govern NounsDAO. The client is being created on top of an upcoming open-source framework, built by nounish developers, for nounish developers.
Current progress
We've had early success with House of Nouns, with many Nouners and non-Nouners alike expressing their love of the intuitive interface. We want to continue building on this success and make it easier for people to participate in governance in an engaging way.
Not familiar with House of Nouns? You can discuss proposals with others, view important context, and vote all in one intuitive interface on https://houseofnouns.wtf.
Some data:
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MAUs - growing 100% month / month
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Working with Nouns, Lil Nouns, and Gnars. In talks with many more communities.
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~13.5% registered-user market penetration
- 170 registered users / 1263 total members in Nouns (delegates + Nouners + anyone who has voted or made a proposal on-chain or in Prop House)
Core vision and goals
Our vision is to make it easier for voters to participate in Nouns governance by providing rich context, intuitive conversation tools, and seamless integrations with other Nounish platforms. This will be built on top of an open framework, empowering developers and solving impactful problems specific to nounish governance.
In short:
- Provide all context on proposals, voters, builders, and team members, and view all conversations from Discord, Twitter, and Discourse in one place
- Build a custom forum client directly into HoN that is backwards compatible w/Discourse, allowing users to create and discuss proposal drafts and get early feedback
- Provide first-class support for Nouns forks and Prop House, and deeper integrations with Atlas, Federation and Agora
- Create the open source House of Nouns framework, serving core data displayed on the site through a GraphQL API, paired with a developer friendly SDK for building on top of House of Nouns infrastructure
Product Breakdown
Context layer
We will attach more information to proposals, such as FAQs, comments, relevant links, conversations from other platforms, video attachments, and more. We're currently working with @maty.eth on integrating data from proposals.wtf.
We also will provide more context on Nouners, builders, and team members, such as their past proposals, voting record, and Agora profile, directly in HoN.
After a proposal is executed, we will make it easy to see what has been delivered as a result.
Forums + conversation stack
We're building an alternative forum client like Discourse that pulls data from Discourse, and integrates token signaling and Ethereum-based identities. This will be built into House of Nouns and will allow users to create and discuss proposal drafts, get early feedback, and graduate drafts to proposals. It will also provide context on builders and members, and allow token-based voting.
We also want to provide more intuitive ways to get early community consensus, such as upvote/idea boards. This will allow users to easily move from an idea to a draft proposal, get comments, and then move to an on-chain proposal with ongoing comments and voting.
Integrations
Deeper integrations with other Nounish products like Nouns Atlas and Nouns Agora.
View conversation from Discord, Twitter, Discourse etc. in-line on houseofnouns.wtf.
First class support for Nouns forks, Prop House, Federation, and other governance sources
- one-click governance clients for Nouns forks
- vote on Prop House rounds directly in HoN with intuitive and easy UI
- Federation integration (ex: vote on HoN as a Gnars holder)
While we will make sure our infrastructure can support all Nounish communities, we will focus on solving problems specific to Nouns governance in the next 6 months. We believe this is where we can have the biggest impact.
House of Nouns Framework
We are building an open source framework to give builders the tools they need to build custom governance and discussion experiences for their communities. We will build House of Nouns on top of this framework, in a similar vein to Vercel being both a builder and end-user of NextJS.
The main components of the framework are:
Open access to core data displayed on the site through a GraphQL API.
React SDK for developing on top of House of Nouns infrastructure, including hooks to access data, pre-built components etc.
Differentiation
Agora approaches the problem of low governance participation from the delegation perspective. Don’t want to vote? Delegate to someone to do it for you.
House of Nouns approaches it from the conversation and context-aggregation perspective. Empowering Nouners to vote independently and be empowered to think for themselves.
Both approaches are valid and necessary for the ecosystem to grow. We will be working closely with Agora to ensure we don’t build the same things and otherwise waste valuable energy.
Success Metrics
Our goal is to have 30% or more of the Nounish ecosystem using (voting/discussing/viewing) House of Nouns every week. Currently, about 14% are registered users. We believe that with further improvements to the proposal conversation stack and better user experience, we can reach this goal.
Ultimately, our goal is to have the House of Nouns framework and SDK integrated into 10 or more clients by July 2023.
We will use these as the two primary metrics to evaluate our success in 6 months.
Transparency & decentralization
As a governance platform, we want to avoid centralization of power by taking the following measures:
- Building the House of Nouns framework as an open source public good
- Offer up all data through APIs and a developer friendly SDK
- Transition discussion data to open data layers as soon as an attractive option has wide adoption / traction
- Offer a React SDK for components and data fetching
- Current House of Nouns team members added together will commit to not represent more than 5% of NounsDAO.
Our goal is to open-source the core building blocks of governance and discussion, and provide killer developer tooling on top of the HoN rails so anyone can build custom experiences for their communities and subcultures.
Sustainability
We plan to generate revenue by offering bespoke upgrades to other DAOs similar to Red Hat, as well as charging hosting costs for larger communities. Our goal is for the HoN client to become self-sustainable within 12-16 months. These upgrades will be built into the broader platform and framework for all users.
For the HoN framework, we’re exploring alternative public goods funding routes (Nouns model, Gitcoin etc.) so we can be empowered to continue building something maximally useful for the entire ecosystem.
Team
We are a small startup (collective.xyz) that has been building for Nouns and won the governance client mandate round 3 months ago.
House of Nouns team:
dadkins - 9 years in software, longtime crypto hacker, cofounder @collective.xyz
whise - lead data engineer ex: Amazon / longtime buildor
Wojciech - Killer product engineer, built nounslaunchpad.wtf
Tim G - former head of engineering at crypto startup, full stack maestro
with support from rocketman and jac
Funding Request
We compare closely to other proposals, like Agora’s 3-month proposal (170 ETH for a team of 4 for 3 months (14 ETH per mo./ person), or Nouns AI Pod (12.75 ETH per mo./ person).
We request 340 ETH in USDC to fund development of House of Nouns framework & client over the next 6 months (Jan ‘23 - Jun ‘23).
• 330 ETH: 4+ engineers (13.75 ETH per mo./ person)
• 10 ETH: funding for Prop House round(s) to build out alternative clients and views into governance+discussion on top of the HoN framework.
50% deposited immediately to the teams wallet via USDC payments contract.
50% USDC streamed over a period of 6 months from a 3/5 multisig held by trusted members of the community. Signers for this safe will be: Al409, Noun 40, CDT, rocketman, and Gami.
Deliverables
House of Nouns client
The entire conversation and governance stack in one supercharged client, with deep composable integrations both in-and-out to other platforms.
Everything you’d ever care to see and do with a proposal in one intuitive UI :)
House of Nouns Framework
GraphQL API, open-source SDK, and component library to empower builders to create custom governance and discussion experiences.
Testimonials
“congrats on HON, it has officially become my go to for governance” - @cryptoseneca
Gnars.House feedback:
Happy to answer any questions on Twitter, on https://houseofnouns.wtf, or in the Nounish Builders Discord etc.
Thanks for reading friends, stay nounish ⌐◨-◨
