House of Nouns extension prop draft

[nounslaunchpad]

TLDR

We’re seeking funding for 6 months to continue building House of Nouns, a supercharged client + context layer for all Nounish governance.

The vision? Supercharging the entire prop conversation and decision-making stack with rich open context layers and cross-platform integrations. One-click deployments of kickass governance clients for all Nounish communities, to take governance participation to the next level.

Current progress

Governance participation as an individual is hard work. Giving members the context they need to make decisions in a delightful interface is essential if we want to scale Nounish governance for the mainstream.

We’ve had early success with the House of Nouns client, with many Nouners and non-Nouners alike expressing their love of the intuitive interface.

Some data:

• MAUs

• 50 prop discussion comments posted

• Working with Nouns, Lil Nouns, and Gnars. In talks with many more communities.

  https://houseoflilnouns.wtf

  https://gnars.house

• 12.5% registered-user market penetration across Gnars/Lil Nouns/Nouns

  • 158 registered (connected + signed-in) members / 1263 total members in Nouns (delegates + Nouners + anyone who has voted or made a proposal on-chain or in Prop House)

Core goals for the next 6 months

Product

Context layer

Attach more rich data for every proposal including FAQs, notion-esque commenting, relevant links, conversation from Discourse, Discord and Twitter, video attachments, and more

• Currently working with @maty.eth on integrating proposals.wtf data

Builder / Nouner context

• click into a Nouner/builder/team member and view past proposals, voting record, Agora profile etc. in-line on HoN

Post-execution proposal details - easily view what has been shipped / delivered as a result of proposal execution/funding.

Forums + conversation Stack

A better version of Discourse (with token signaling + eth based identity) baked into House of Nouns.

• Create and discuss proposal drafts, get early feedback, graduate drafts to proposals
• Discussion with crucial builder/member context and token-based voting built in

More intuitive ways to get early community consensus including upvote/ideas boards etc.

• Graduate ideas → draft proposal → comments + signaling → on-chain prop + on-going comments + voting + vote reasons

Use Delegated Nouns to curate, support, and graduate the best prop-drafts to on-chain proposals

• Take the best draft proposals / ideas of the month and graduate them to on-chain proposal
  • Reach out if you’d like to delegate your Noun to this end

Integrations

Deeper integrations with other Nounish products like @nounsatlas and @nounsagora

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 easy UI
• Basic Federation integration (vote on HoN as a Gnars holder for example)

While we will make sure our infra is scalable to all Nounish communities, we will focus the next 6 months on solving problems around Nouns governance specifically (where the highest impact governance issues exist).

Data + SDK

Open access to core data displayed on the site, from governance to profiles to discussion, to enable interoperable frontends

SDK for developing on top of House of Nouns infrastructure, including React hooks to access GraphQL API, basic components etc.

Metrics

Our goal is to be in a spot where we have 30% or more (greater than the “early adoption well of 18%”) of the Nounish ecosystem viewing/commenting/voting on HoN weekly (currently have ~12.5% of Nounish ecosystem as registered users).

We believe with further upgrades around the proposal conversation stack and making the decision process easier w/rich context and UX upgrades, this is an attainable goal.

We will use this as a primary metric to reevaluate our success in 6 months time.

Additionally, we’d like to have at least 1 proposal draft from HoN every month going on-chain. We believe, given delegated Nouns, we can be an effective steward and supporter of early proposals, pushing them towards success on-chain.

Transparency & decentralization

Similar to Agora, as a governance platform, we want to avoid centralization of power by taking the following measures:

• Offer up data through open APIs and a developer friendly SDK
• Transition some of our backend data-store to open data layers as soon as an attractive option has wide adoption / traction
• Offer a React SDK for basic components like proposals/discussion etc.
• Finally, 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.

Out of transparency, we’ll likely seek revenue from other sources for bespoke upgrades (that will be built into broader platform for all), as well as charge basic hosting for larger communities with the goal of becoming a self-sustainable public good.

Finally, we’re exploring alternative public good funding routes (Nouns modal, Gitcoin etc.) so we can build something maximally useful for the entire ecosystem, without compromise.

Team

dadkins - 9 years in software, longtime crypto hacker, cofounder @collective.xyz

Laszlo - 10x fullstack dev, built current iteration of HoN alongside Danny

Jamal Hashim, lead data engineer ex: Amazon / longtime hacker

Will + Wojciech, product engineers and hackers will be working part time (15hrs+ a week) as well.

Funding Breakdown + Accountability

We compare closely to other proposals, like Agora’s 3-month proposal ($210k for 3 months).

We’d like to request $420,069 to fund our team for 6 months (335ETH @ $1250/ETH), as well as 5 ETH to incentivize voter participation, and 20 ETH for Prop House rounds to build out alternative clients and views into governance on top of the HoN SDK.

50% deposited immediately to the teams wallet via USDC payments contract.

50% ETH 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, and three more to be confirmed.

Deliverables

The entire proposal conversation stack in one place through House of Nouns, with deep composable integrations out to other platforms.

GraphQL API and open-source SDK for building on top of the House of Nouns rails.

Upgraded version of House of Nouns that includes much needed context to make decisions. View everything you’d ever care to see about a proposal in one intuitive UI

Testimonials

Happy to answer any questions on Twitter, https://houseofnouns.wtf, @houseofnouns on Twitter, or in the Nounish Builders Discord etc.

Thanks for reading friends, stay nounish ⌐◨-◨

[CHEFFO]

The HON client is strong. The team has done a great job of MVP building. The team is productive and very nounish.

The funding seems high. Funding levels are becoming perhaps too high for developers and client builders, especially when there are feature sets that are similar, open source or integrated in other clients. At some point, if all the builds are working as designed we will not need more clients, or at least fewer. Of course new builders will come with new ideas, styles and function…and that will be important to evaluate individually then, but for now we are reaching a saturation point based on the current need. Adding a clear revenue model at this stage is very important for the sustainability of the project.

These are internal tools and not yet part of the on-boarding conversation. The daily auction and Prop House are the main things people know and talk about IRL. It is important to understand that this is a tool to increase participation and decrease drop-off of non-funded builders, not necessarily proliferate the meme. Proliferation should not always be the goal. Internal tools are equally important to create functionality. Functionality leads to proliferation. It is important to understand the difference.

Overall, I would like to see a clearer product pathway and smaller budget. The tool is great.

[nounslaunchpad]

I appreciate the feedback sir

The funding seems high.

we are requesting the same amount per month as the Agora prop did (for something that I think has more users). we can reduce the team size working on it if that’s something the community wants to do to reduce the budget, but to build out the vision I think it’s worthwhile to have a full team on it. I believe we’ve demonstrated clear capacity and understanding of the needs of the ecosystem and thus think it’s a fair ask.

clearer product pathway

do you mind expanding what you mean here? are you talking about what we’re building specifically or a clearer pathway to sustainability?

Funding levels are becoming perhaps too high for developers and client builders

i’d argue the opposite, funding deployed for developers building scalable infra for the ecosystem isn’t nearly where it needs to be IMO. Meanwhile funding for one off proliferation projects that don’t build sustainable long term value has skyrocketed recently.

necessarily proliferate the meme

we’re going to have noggles as part of the core branding for all clients. not apples to apples here, but: https://twitter.com/cryptoseneca/status/1599949925713707008

if all the builds are working as designed we will not need more clients, or at least fewer.

ultimately the points you made here really speak to what we’re trying to do by building out this proposal conversation framework/sdk/api as a public good in addition to the supercharged client. there’s so much fragmentation being built in the space and we’re trying to build 1. an all in one client to reduce fragmentation for end users and 2. an open source framework for building on top of the House of Nouns rails so we can empower developers to reduce the fragmentation and increase cooperation more broadly.

-rocketman

[CHEFFO]

By pathway I meant…“Adding a clear revenue model at this stage is very important for the sustainability of the project.”…I think that projects that ask for this level of funding should be exploring revenue streams or layout a multi-year timeline that could include additional projected funding and run estimates. It would be good to understand the goals of the team beyond the prop 6 months. An example of the basic hosting charge would be great. I think that there could be a price point(s) that would work with any community and would be great to bake this in now if possible…idk?

HON is already a used nounish client and will be a bigger part of the eco in the future. I like the client and look forward to seeing new features and more communities when this prop is under way.

[nounslaunchpad]

agreed - will update the prop to be a bit more forward looking re: sustainability.

general idea here is we build an open framework + data layer, and build HoN with that layer.

we can monetize HoN through charging basic hosting for larger communities, and bespoke upgrades
we can make that framework self-sustainable through public goods funding (Nounish auction, Gitcoin etc.)