Proposal: Custom Nouns Terminal (Community Dashboard for Transparency & Context)

NounsDAO NounsDAO Proposals
1

TL;DR

Build upon our existing Nouns terminal to deliver the ultimate tool to understanding and fueling the propagation of the Nouns meme.

VALUE PROP

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The purpose of Nouns DAO is to propagate the Nouns meme, forever.

In order for this to be a virtuous cycle, it’s important that value is created (i.e. function is improved) from each funded initiative in a way that meaningfully fulfills the Nouns DAO mission.

As communities scale, we believe there are critical ingredients required to create an environment for this to happen. It’s cultivated through distributed context, transparency, and social accountability.

This is what our Nouns Terminal will address. A home to report on objective onchain and offchain metrics that help community members stay informed, delegates to maintain accountability, and surface treasury information to support healthy governance decisions.

WHO WE ARE

Forefront is a tokenized community focused on uplifting other tokenized communities (a meta-community, if you will).

Our thesis around tokenized communities is stated above - we believe that scaling communities have hit an inflection point where focus should be on creating more mechanisms and guardrails to ensure value is created in a way that is captured back to the DAO.

To take the first step, we built Terminal.co, a dashboard for all tokenized communities. As one of the purest and most exciting experiments of our thesis, Nouns was one of the initial launch partners for Terminal. You can find the Nouns Terminal here. This is just scratching the surface of what we want to deliver – the next steps for us are to work alongside the community to collaborate on novel metrics that help ensure all members are informed to make the very best decisions on behalf of the DAO.

DELIVERABLES

Collaborate directly with Nouns contributors and community to:

  • determine desired metrics that drive accountability and transparency (focus on governance, delegates, and proposal metrics)
  • prototype proposal rating system and iterate based on feedback
  • design and deliver a custom Nouns Terminal that can be integrated into the main nouns.wtf site and app, OR hosted on a custom domain such as nouns.terminal.co

Video walkthrough of example metrics here: Loom | Free Screen & Video Recording Software

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The Gameplan

Part A: Research and Discovery

  • Send out an open-invite survey to a Nouns holders
  • Work within Discord to interview community members
  • Work alongside contributors to develop novel metrics based on DAO needs (ex. Banzhaf metric & Nakamoto coefficient to measure concentration of power).
  • Share prototypes based on community suggestions and make iterative changes based on feedback

Part B: Terminal Development

The Nouns Core Terminal

Prior to R&D, Nouns Terminal will include four sections with example metrics that we could explore:

Community:

  • Total members
  • Social data (Twitter, Discord, etc.)
  • Social growth
  • etc.

Membership:

  • Total network size (including holders of fractionalized Nouns or derivatives that hold Nouns in treasury like Lil Nouns)
  • Gini Score
  • etc.

Treasury

  • Treasury holdings and growth
  • Runway (based on recent burn rates)
  • Floor price of Nouns
  • Volume
  • etc.

Governance

  • Voting activity (ex. # of Proposals, # of Creators, Voter participation rates, etc.)
  • Voter activity (Top voters x delegation vs. owned, Power Index)
  • Delegate insights (ex. Consistency in voting, % votes against majority, etc.)
  • Proposal activity (status, outcome, delegate participation)
  • Proposal rating system - token gated ability to add a rating and comment
  • etc.

Initiatives:

  • Funded projects (general info, e.g. initiative name, amount funded, status, etc.)

Part C: Discord Bot

Creation of a custom Discord bot to track off-chain Nouns community metrics

  • Breakout by Discord roles
  • Message activity (ex. Total messages, Avg msgs per member, etc.)
  • Member activity (ex. Active members vs. lurkers)
  • etc.

Timeline and Budget

This project will be complete in 4 months from the approval of this proposal.

  • Month 1-2
    • Complete and deploy the Nouns Core Terminal to nouns.terminal.co
    • Complete R&D process and publish a report of our findings for the Nouns community
    • Create Discord bot and add to Nouns Discord to start accumulating growth metrics to be surfaced upon launch
    • Share Terminal prototypes based on community suggested metrics and update accordingly based on community/core-team feedback
  • Months 3-4
    • Complete and deploy Complete Nouns Terminal to nouns.terminal.co or deliver terminal to be hosted on main website (nouns.wtf)
    • Continue with Iterations and maintenance based off of community feedback
  • TIMELINE: 4 months total
  • BUDGET: 42.0 ETH
1 Like
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Jihad from Forefront here!

I’m excited to work to bring this proposal to life. Nouns DAO is the premier tokenized community today, and Forefront is fully committed to helping Nouns – and other tokenized communities – reach their full potential.

Would love to hear everyone’s feedback!

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I think this looks really cool. There is one dashboard I look at quite a bit made by a community member named hildobby. SG retroactively funded this for 3 ETH. I would really want to understand what advantages Terminal has over Dune before I supported funding another dashboard for 14x the cost up front.

4

Thank you for the feedback @Noun22!

We think there is an order-of-magnitude improvement in the thesis of the product.

Obviously, the Dune dashboard that exists is jam-packed with data, but a major goal of Nouns – and all other tokenized communities – must be to build systems for 1) evaluating projects against the mission (meme propagation) and 2) distributing context so the community can make good decisions.

In other words, there is a difference between distributing information and distributing the right information.

To get a bit more specific, the Nouns Terminal will include:

  1. A project evaluation mechanism for community members to rate and comment on whether a funded project was successful in propagating the meme. This doesn’t mean that every project needs to optimize for that mission to the extreme, but we should have a mechanism for ensuring that expectations meet reality to some degree.
  2. Collecting and synthesizing off-chain data to deeply understand how community activity impacts various DAO goals/initiatives and vice-versa. Looking at strictly on-chain data doesn’t paint the full picture.
  3. Custom metrics that more clearly distribute context. It’s one thing to see your on-chain token distribution, but seeing a Gini score in comparison to other communities is a whole different story. Another example is working on governance metrics to bring greater transparency to voting, protect against collusion, etc. – the current dashboard only shows proposals and voter participation. Communities need to be able to get information in the right context and framing, and custom metrics are a great way to achieve that goal.

TL;DR: Nouns DAO will be successful if the community is able to make good decisions. As the DAO grows and the ecosystem becomes more complex, being extremely intentional about what information is distributed and in what way is going to be critical.

This is what Terminal will help achieve.

We’re really stoked about the opportunity to bring this vision to life alongside Nouns DAO.