House of Nouns v2: Public Good
TLDR
This is a revision of our previous House of Nouns proposal. Based on feedback from the community, we’ve reduced the budget significantly, clarified our goals, provided product mockups, and answered open questions.
tl;dr: We’re asking for 190 ETH to fund 5 months of development for House of Nouns v2. Our MVP has seen tremendous traction, growing 100% each month, and proving to be a critical piece of infrastructure for governance. Now, we’re looking to build the best-in-class pre-proposal client to kill Discourse, create a layer for generating Nounish ideas, open source our core infrastructure, and expand to all Nounish DAOs. This will return value to the DAO via better decisions, increased participation, powerful infrastructure that the community can build on, and proliferation of Nounish governance.
We believe that governance is THE bottleneck for Nouns’ participation and ultimate success. And we’re here to fix that.
Click here to view this proposal on House of Nouns.
Background
House of Nouns was previously funded with 20 ETH through Prop House. Our mission is huge: fix Nouns Governance and empower its contributors.
We saw tremendous success in our basic MVP from October through December:
- Discussion on House of Nouns that exists nowhere else
- Usage (MAUs and pageviews) grew >100% month-over-month
- Continual expressions of love and support from the community
- A go-to client that streamlines governance and prop discussion
Deliverables
Our MVP was just a small part of the vision for House of Nouns: a full suite of supercharged governance tools, for all Nounish DAOs, built on open source infrastructure that anyone can extend.
Here are the key components we’ll build into House of Nouns v2.
Pre-proposal client. Discourse is starved of life, and HON v2 will streamline everything that happens before a proposal goes on-chain, saving energy and empowering contributors to do their best work.
- Rich discussion layer for getting feedback on a draft
- Inline commenting on specific parts of a draft
- Templates and multiplayer editor for creating proposal drafts
- Ability to revise and re-release versions of a draft (like ProductHunt, or this House of Nouns prop)
- Imported data from Discourse for backwards compatibility
- One click to promote to on-chain, or have a sponsor do it for you
- (Note: see demo at top of prop)
Ideas client. Aligning the DAO on what matters is essential; we want to help contributors know what the DAO is excited about.
- Reddit-like platform for generating, voting on, and rewarding ideas at the earliest stage
- Backwards compatibility and integration with Prop Lot API
- (Note: see demo at top of prop)
Open-source infrastructure to enable the next 100 governance clients. HON v2 will eliminate all barriers to building on Nouns governance, and improve decentralization. We don’t want to be the last great governance client; we want to be the first of many.
- API for all governance data, discussion data, Nouner profiles, and more
- SDK for easy integration of client components to other platforms
- Frontend repository for House of Nouns website
- Technical documentation to help new Nounish builders launch their governance apps
Public good for all Nounish DAOs. The success of Nouns is directly correlated to the success of Nounish forks; HON v2 will proliferate Nounish governance and drive value back to Nouns through forks (beyond ones created through Nouns Builder, like Lil Nouns, SharkDAO, etc) and branding ⌐◨-◨.
- See activity from all of your Nounish DAOs in one feed
- Keep track of all urgent to-dos and notifications across DAOs
- Full House of Nouns functionality for all future forks of Nouns
- (Note: We’ve already been funded by Nouns Builder to support their DAOs. Extending to non-Nouns Builder forks is a minimal effort on our side, and neither of these integrations contribute heavily to this prop’s budget. However, we wanted to ensure that we committed to it explicitly here, because we do see it as an important public good to support a future ecosystem of diverse forks.)
First-class integration with other Nounish tools. HON v2 will be your single looking glass into the rabbit hole of Nounish governance.
- Agora delegate profile data
- heyanoun anonymous commenting
- Federation DAO-to-DAO governance
- Nouns Atlas search
New & improved core governance tooling. You asked and we heard — we’ll be delivering a faster and improved experience on core proposal tooling. This includes an improved UI, much faster loading, notifications for new proposals, enhanced profiles, and other improvements.
Moving beyond. We move quickly. While we don’t want to overpromise, we’re also excited to go above-and-beyond with social media data indexing, contributor profiles, and a post-proposal client once we ship our core objectives. These will provide richer context and data, more functionality for DAO alignment, and greater transparency for the community.
Most of all, we want to make governance fun and easy instead of a chore.
Budget, team, and sustainability
We’re requesting 190 ETH for 5 months for full-time development work from the team. After revising our proposal, we believe this is in line with standard service development costs seen in coming out to 9.5 ETH/developer/month.
This will be spearheaded by:
- dadkins: longtime crypto hacker
- Wojciech Kocjan: frontend & design engineer
- Jamal Hashim: ex-Amazon, blockchain engineer
- John Cairns: longtime crypto builder, ex-Gemini
For the sake of transparency, House of Nouns is by Collective, which is a VC-backed company that has expertise in NFTs and community tooling (previously launched MomentRanks.com and grew community tooling to 50,000+ Flow blockchain users). That being said, we want to make sure this is a self-sustaining and fair investment for the DAO; as such, the end goals include open source infrastructure and self-sustainability for the product, and the budget reflects what we think is a fair pricing for development services.
We plan to offer bespoke upgrades to other DAOs similar to Red Hat’s monetization model, as well as charging hosting costs for larger communities.
These upgrades will be built into the broader platform and framework for all users. To reiterate, Nouns will have permanent access to the product open-source base infrastructure from this proposal, and future upgrades for other DAOs will improve upon this base layer, meaning Nouns receives HON v2 and reaps the benefits of future compatible upgrades.
Testimonies
…and many more <3
House of Nouns v2: Public Good
TLDR
This is a revision of our previous House of Nouns proposal. Based on feedback from the community, we’ve reduced the budget significantly, clarified our goals, provided product mockups, and answered open questions.
tl;dr: We’re asking for 190 ETH to fund 5 months of development for House of Nouns v2. Our MVP has seen tremendous traction, growing 100% each month, and proving to be a critical piece of infrastructure for governance. Now, we’re looking to build the best-in-class pre-proposal client to kill Discourse, create a layer for generating Nounish ideas, open source our core infrastructure, and expand to all Nounish DAOs. This will return value to the DAO via better decisions, increased participation, powerful infrastructure that the community can build on, and proliferation of Nounish governance.
We believe that governance is THE bottleneck for Nouns’ participation and ultimate success. And we’re here to fix that.
Click here to view this proposal on House of Nouns.
Background
House of Nouns was previously funded with 20 ETH through Prop House. Our mission is huge: fix Nouns Governance and empower its contributors.
We saw tremendous success in our basic MVP from October through December:
- Discussion on House of Nouns that exists nowhere else
- Usage (MAUs and pageviews) grew >100% month-over-month
- Continual expressions of love and support from the community
- A go-to client that streamlines governance and prop discussion
Deliverables
Our MVP was just a small part of the vision for House of Nouns: a full suite of supercharged governance tools, for all Nounish DAOs, built on open source infrastructure that anyone can extend.
Here are the key components we’ll build into House of Nouns v2.
Pre-proposal client. Discourse is starved of life, and HON v2 will streamline everything that happens before a proposal goes on-chain, saving energy and empowering contributors to do their best work.
- Rich discussion layer for getting feedback on a draft
- Inline commenting on specific parts of a draft
- Templates and multiplayer editor for creating proposal drafts
- Ability to revise and re-release versions of a draft (like ProductHunt, or this House of Nouns prop)
- Imported data from Discourse for backwards compatibility
- One click to promote to on-chain, or have a sponsor do it for you
- (Note: see demo at top of prop)
Ideas client. Aligning the DAO on what matters is essential; we want to help contributors know what the DAO is excited about.
- Reddit-like platform for generating, voting on, and rewarding ideas at the earliest stage
- Backwards compatibility and integration with Prop Lot API
- (Note: see demo at top of prop)
Open-source infrastructure to enable the next 100 governance clients. HON v2 will eliminate all barriers to building on Nouns governance, and improve decentralization. We don’t want to be the last great governance client; we want to be the first of many.
- API for all governance data, discussion data, Nouner profiles, and more
- SDK for easy integration of client components to other platforms
- Frontend repository for House of Nouns website
- Technical documentation to help new Nounish builders launch their governance apps
Public good for all Nounish DAOs. The success of Nouns is directly correlated to the success of Nounish forks; HON v2 will proliferate Nounish governance and drive value back to Nouns through forks (beyond ones created through Nouns Builder, like Lil Nouns, SharkDAO, etc) and branding ⌐◨-◨.
- See activity from all of your Nounish DAOs in one feed
- Keep track of all urgent to-dos and notifications across DAOs
- Full House of Nouns functionality for all future forks of Nouns
- (Note: We’ve already been funded by Nouns Builder to support their DAOs. Extending to non-Nouns Builder forks is a minimal effort on our side, and neither of these integrations contribute heavily to this prop’s budget. However, we wanted to ensure that we committed to it explicitly here, because we do see it as an important public good to support a future ecosystem of diverse forks.)
First-class integration with other Nounish tools. HON v2 will be your single looking glass into the rabbit hole of Nounish governance.
- Agora delegate profile data
- heyanoun anonymous commenting
- Federation DAO-to-DAO governance
- Nouns Atlas search
New & improved core governance tooling. You asked and we heard — we’ll be delivering a faster and improved experience on core proposal tooling. This includes an improved UI, much faster loading, notifications for new proposals, enhanced profiles, and other improvements.
Moving beyond. We move quickly. While we don’t want to overpromise, we’re also excited to go above-and-beyond with social media data indexing, contributor profiles, and a post-proposal client once we ship our core objectives. These will provide richer context and data, more functionality for DAO alignment, and greater transparency for the community.
Most of all, we want to make governance fun and easy instead of a chore.
Budget, team, and sustainability
We’re requesting 190 ETH for 5 months for full-time development work from the team. After revising our proposal, we believe this is in line with standard service development costs seen in coming out to 9.5 ETH/developer/month.
This will be spearheaded by:
- dadkins: longtime crypto hacker
- Wojciech Kocjan: frontend & design engineer
- Jamal Hashim: ex-Amazon, blockchain engineer
- John Cairns: longtime crypto builder, ex-Gemini
For the sake of transparency, House of Nouns is by Collective, which is a VC-backed company that has expertise in NFTs and community tooling (previously launched MomentRanks.com and grew community tooling to 50,000+ Flow blockchain users). That being said, we want to make sure this is a self-sustaining and fair investment for the DAO; as such, the end goals include open source infrastructure and self-sustainability for the product, and the budget reflects what we think is a fair pricing for development services.
We plan to offer bespoke upgrades to other DAOs similar to Red Hat’s monetization model, as well as charging hosting costs for larger communities.
These upgrades will be built into the broader platform and framework for all users. To reiterate, Nouns will have permanent access to the product open-source base infrastructure from this proposal, and future upgrades for other DAOs will improve upon this base layer, meaning Nouns receives HON v2 and reaps the benefits of future compatible upgrades.
Testimonies
…and many more <3
