A quick summary of my thesis as a delegate: “Nouns has a unique role in the ecosystem as a gathering place around public goods.”
I feel strongly that Nouns should not have a namespace that distinguishes between “canonical” projects and all other projects. Once a project is viewed as canonical, it will be hard to dislodge. Nouns should have a healthy ecosystem where projects naturally form and die. This allows contributors to step up, and just as importantly allows contributors to move on.
Much of this perspective is influenced by the Loot community, where projects viewed as “canonical” had significantly more sway among users than equivalent projects that were not viewed as “canonical”. If Nouns begins to bless certain projects with a canonical namespace, it will take energy away from non-canonical projects.
One simple hypothetical: What if Agora had a canonical namespace at nouns.agora.eth but House of Nouns did not? Is Agora now more “official” than House of Nouns? Should we bless more projects with official namespaces, to put them on a level playing field? What happens when those projects evolve, sometimes in ways that an official namespace would not like?
This is a slippery slope and I am opposed for that reason. As a courtesy, I registered nounsautobidder.eth and autobiddernouns.eth under my ENS at Papper.eth (also the owner, not the manager, of this ENS). I am happy to transfer these ENS domains to the team, and I am disappointed and a bit surprised that the team did not protect these ENS names prior to putting this proposal up. Canonical namespaces are a slippery slope, so let’s stick to non-canonical ones while norms develop.
