[TEMP CHECK] Proposal for Senate to Enable Dedicated Tooling for Aave Governance

Governance General
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09/04/23: UPDATE: Snapshot proposal on this topic is live now until this Wednesday! Please vote here: Snapshot

04/27/23: UPDATE: This proposal has received a $5K grant from Aave Grants DAO and we’ve started implementing dedicated features for Aave Governance.

04/07/23: UPDATE: After receiving feedback from @MarcZeller and carefully considering it ourselves, we have updated our grant request from a retroactive grant to a $5k grant.

Hi, everyone. I’m Kohei from Senate Labs.

We are building Senate, a tool to facilitate DAO governance, and we currently support 75 Aave voters, which is the largest number on our app. Over the past few months, we’ve been considering expanding our scope for Aave governance. Therefore, we would like to receive feedback from the community before applying to Aave Grants DAO.

References

  1. Senate website
  2. Senate Github
  3. Senate Twitter

Summary

This grant proposal aims to implement a set of dedicated features for Aave governance, providing the Aave community with a tool to easily stay aware of the governance that increases the voting participation rate, and the number of new voters and prevents proposals from not reaching quorum.

Deliveries

Senate is a new set of governance facilitation features that reduce the friction of participating in governance. We currently support 30+ DAOs by providing a proposal dashboard and a daily bulletin email to help their voters easily stay aware of what’s happening in governance.

However, each DAO’s governance is unique. To continue contributing to Aave governance, we concluded that we should implement features that are tailored to Aave.

The following work packages outline the project scope in sequence:

1) Aave governance notification

We will build a governance notification that is dedicated to Aave. This will allow delegates and voters to easily stay informed about active proposals (offchain & onchain), including the due time and voting status of each proposal.

SenateAave02

2) Subscription button on the forum

To allow the Aave community to sign up and receive the notification directly from the Aave page, we will build a widget that enables community members to subscribe to the Aave governance notification from the forum.

SenateAave01 aaaa (3)

3) Quorum threshold notification

To prevent proposals from not reaching quorum, we will add support for Aave proposal quorum and create Aave quorum notifications to be sent to voters who haven’t voted in a proposal that is about to end without the quorum.

SenateAave03

4) Real-time notifications

Aave has one of the most active governance, and emergency proposals sometimes require immediate voting by the community. Currently, we send a governance notification once a day, but we have realized that we need to enable real-time notifications to support Aave’s governance needs better. Therefore, we will implement this feature as well.

Why integrate Senate with Aave?

Decentralized governance is crucial for DAOs/Protocols to be robust and secure, but it can be a significant challenge to stay actively engaged in governance, especially for high-activity governance like Aave. With proposals emerging on different platforms (offchain & onchain) without a schedule, it’s easy for voters to miss out on crucial decisions that can lead to low participation rates or missed quorums.

11 proposals failed to reach quorum in the past year alone (a recent proposal discussing this problem) and this situation can be a significant stumbling block to Aave governance and growth.

By implementing a set of dedicated features on Senate, Aave can provide the community with a tool to stay aware of the governance with ease. This can help increase the voting participation rate and the number of new voters, as well as prevent proposals from not reaching quorum.

Grant Size

After receiving feedback from @MarcZeller and ACI, and carefully considering it on our end, we have updated our proposal. Instead of requesting a retroactive grant, we would like to request a $5k grant from AGD to implement the listed features and conduct a test run for 3 months.

KPI we expect to achieve

Senate aims to improve the following key metrics

  • Voter participation marginal increase
  • Number of net new voters increase
  • Number of proposals that didn’t reach quorum decreased

Previous Work

Senate is a new set of governance facilitation features to make DAO governance easier.

We reduce the friction in participating in governance by aggregating all active proposals (offchain & onchain) along with due time and voting status for each proposal in one place, a daily bulletin to keep aware of everything with ease, and tracking other voting wallets feature.

Usage metrics:

  • Currently, 75 voters are following Aave governance through Senate

Implementation:

Others:

Next steps

  1. Discuss concerns or questions regarding the integration of Senate
  2. If there is enough community consensus, we will apply to AGD
  3. Once it’s approved, we will start implementing
  4. After 3 months from the integration date, we will share the results of the changes to the KPIs
  5. If the trial succeeds and shows positive changes to the KPIs, we plan to propose a mid or long-term service to Aave DAO
9 Likes
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This is an excellent Governance Facilitation initiative.

I have used Senate in the past, and I can vouch for the utility of this product and its features.

We support this integration and look forward to seeing how much value can be added in 3 months if approved.

2 Likes
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Thank you @kohei for this proposal and glad to see team building governance solutions!
Quick questions:
a. Are there examples with metrics from other DAOs on increased voter participation, new voter increase and decreased in proposals reaching quorum by using this product?
b. Do you have any suggestions for what the retroactive grant amount could look like and how it can be tied to your KPIs?

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hello @kohei,

Thank you for your proposal. the Aave-Chan Initiative (ACI), acknowledge the potential net benefit that Senate, could bring to the Aave DAO.

However, we must express our firm opposition to any form of retroactive funding. We would prefer to establish a short-term service agreement with the DAO and discontinue funding if the value addition isn’t demonstrated, instead of being presented with an “invoice” for a service that hasn’t been authorized by governance.

In our view, there are two viable options:

  1. Arrange a quarterly “test-run” funded by the Aave Grant DAO (AGD), as it aligns with their purview.
  2. Directly fund the “test-run” through the DAO.

For medium and long-term scenarios after a potential successful “trial” run, we believe that the DAO should directly cover this service. However, neither option can be seriously considered without knowing the cost of the service.

We kindly request Senate to amend the current TEMP CHECK by presenting a proposed budget.

Since the AGD possesses a dedicated budget and is trusted by the DAO to manage it autonomously within their scope, option 1 does not necessitate governance involvement.

Should the AGD decline to accommodate this budget, the proposal may proceed through the standard governance process.

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Thank you @MarcZeller and ACI for considering our proposal. We would like to express our gratitude for taking the time to review our proposal and we understand your concerns regarding retroactive funding.

We agree that a short-term service agreement with a clear budget would be a suitable option for Aave to test and explore the possibility of integration with Senate.

Initially, we had planned to request $5k as a retroactive grant. However, based on the reasoning above and ACI’s feedback, we would like to update our proposal and request $5k from AGD to conduct a test run. If the trial succeeds and shows positive changes in KPIs, we plan to propose a mid or long-term service to Aave DAO through the standard governance process.

Regarding the scope of the future proposal after the test run, we are confident that we will gain valuable insights and learnings from the next three months of building the tool and receiving feedback along the way. We would like to summarize our findings and propose a longer-term service based on the trial’s results.

Please let us know if you have any further questions or concerns.

1 Like
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Thank you @jengajojo for taking the time to consider our proposal and for sharing your valuable questions.

Regarding your inquiries:

A. We have a number of delegates and voters following supported DAOs governance through our app. However, we have yet to gather metrics to quantify this support. To this end, we plan to conduct a test run and measure changes in the set KPIs following the integration with the Senate on the Aave forum.

B. Following feedback from @MarcZeller and ACI and careful consideration on our end, we have revised our proposal and would like to request a grant of $5k from AGD to conduct a test run. It’s important to note that the requested amount is not tied to the set KPIs or development cost but rather serves as a pilot fee.

Please let us know if you have any further questions or concerns.

1 Like
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Thank you @Kene_StableLab for taking the time to consider our proposal. We appreciate your valuable support and we are looking forward to building the tool for Aave Governance if approved.

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Thanks for your answer @kohei

Now that we have better visibility on the cost of this “trial” run. Let’s wait for @0xbilll to indicate if AGD is ready to support this governance facilitation experiment or if we continue with this TEMP CHECK.

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Thanks for waiting for AGD here @MarcZeller. @kohei - we appreciate you bringing the proposal to the forum, incorporating community feedback and applying for a grant. I am pleased to confirm that we have approved the $5k grant as requested and outlined in the post. Please check your email for next steps. We are excited to see how Senate can help increase wider governance participation and awareness. Congratulations :ghost:

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Thank you @0xbilll for posting updates. We would like to express our gratitude to you for taking the time to review and approve our proposal. We are thrilled to have received AGD’s support, which will enable us to move forward with implementing our plan as soon as we complete the remaining steps of the process. We will keep the community informed of our progress along the way!

2 Likes
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We’re delighted to announce that we have received a $5K grant from Aave Grants DAO and have started implementing dedicated features for Aave Governance. We’ll continue to share updates on the progress of the implementation!

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Hey everyone! I’m Paulo from Senate Labs.

We want to update the community on our progress and next steps on this temp check.

Let me start with a timeline of events that you can also check above:

  • We posted this temp check on April 6th,
  • Got the approval for the $5k grant from AGD on April 10th
  • And we received the grant on April 28th.

After that, we’ve been hard at work to develop and fully test this integration and had the development and testing of it done 2 months later, by the end of June.

Since then, we’ve been coordinating with folks from Aave Companies to proceed with the installation and setup of this integration, and after a technical review on their part where they gave their “okay”, we were recommended that the best next course of action would be to do a Snapshot vote for the community to vote on this Temp Check.

Given this, we request the Snapshop admins (which I believe @MarcZeller to be the most active one right now) for this Temp Check to move into the Snapshot vote stage in the next 7 days, if possible.

In the meantime, we welcome all additional feedback, critiques, and suggestions from the community about this proposal of ours.

Also, if you want to check on our progress yourself, you can check out our GitHub repo for this integration, the tests we conducted, and respective results, as well as a live demo of the integration on our Test Discourse instance.

Just go to senate.discourse.group and click on the [ :email: Setup Proposal Notifications ] button on the top right and you can already start getting notification emails every time there’s an Aave proposal for you to vote on. This is the same user experience that we are proposing to be available for the users of the Aave governance forum.

Thank you all!

5 Likes
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Hey everyone!

There’s a snapshot vote, available for all of you to vote on until this next Wednesday, on this topic.

Please vote here: Snapshot

Also tagging here everybody that commented on this post previously, namely: @Kene_StableLab @jengajojo @MarcZeller and @0xbilll.

Thank you all!

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Our team members have had positive feedback on Senate’s tooling as it has helped them keep up to date with the higher cadence of proposals, specifically the Senate Bulletin. @kohei @paulofonseca.

We’re excited to see the recent temp has passed in favour.

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Hello following Snapshot decision, I implemented the senate plugin.

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I bring an important update regarding Senate and our integration with the Aave governance forum.

After careful consideration, we have made the decision to close down Senate, including the app and its associated company. Regrettably, this means that the features we developed for Aave governance will no longer be available from our end.

All the promised features, Aave Governance Notification, Subscription Button, and Quorum Threshold Notifications have been successfully developed (as you can find in our repo) and integrated into the Aave forum for the first month. However, we regret to inform that we were unable to complete the remaining 2 months. Consequently, we have returned the entire grant for this proposal, amounting to 60 $AAVE, to the Aave Grant DAO Treasury (the transaction) due to our inability to fulfill the entirety of our proposal.

We sincerely apologize for this update. Although we are discontinuing Senate, our commitment to supporting decentralized governance remains unwavering and we are dedicated to exploring new ways to contribute to the Aave community and the degov space as a whole.

If you have any questions, please feel free to reach out. (tg handle: koheingt)

5 Likes