Announcing pando’s AGP proposal: Aragon Black

It’s been a year now that our team has been working on pushing open source development towards a higher degree of decentralization and sustainability. Most of this work has been funded by Aragon through their Nest program. The more we moved forward in this program, the more we realized that it was not only about getting funded, but about the emergence of a common thought, bringing together a community around the same vision. As this relationship has become more intertwined and synergic than ever, we have decided to take things to the next level, and have the pleasure to announce our run for Flock. In this article, we will thus propose Aragon Black, the new flag bearer of the pando vision, powered by and integrated to the Aragon stack.

Open Source Sustainability

January 2009, Bitcoin is released as an open source project. The following years saw an aggregation of talent around the technology: individuals took upon their role as contributors and turned it into a new common. Today, this journey continues with an accelerated momentum. The blockchain open source ecosystem has never been so vibrant and we witness the emergence of sizable ecosystem funds for the sole purpose of allocating incentives towards it. Though, something is missing: the ability to actually decentralize these very initiatives and cut off their dependence to any kind of social, political or economic centralized point of failure. One year ago, to contribute solving that issue, we started working on pando: a distributed VCS enabling DAO-based governance and curation of OS repositories.

As we write this article, pando has covered significant progress as we have:

• laid down the building block of a blockchain-native VCS
• implemented a new IPFS-based version-tracking system from scratch
• developed an on-chain governance scheme to handle basic collaboration around a repository
• implemented a custom Aragon DAO template [to be soon published on Rinkeby] allowing anyone to turn its DAO into a github-like organization

Everything will be demoed at AraCon on January, 30th. Come and say hi!

pando ❤ Aragon

Since the beginning, pando has been tightly linked to Aragon. First of all because aragonOS is the DAO framework pando relies on. Its fast-moving technical stack has allowed to fasten and strengthen pando’s development by orders of magnitude. Then, because these months of work and the features delivered wouldn’t have been possible without the help of the Aragon Nest grant program. Finally, since beyond funding, Aragon and its ecosystem have been an uninterrupted source of inspiration.

On the 8th of May 2018, Aragon published the Aragon manifesto. The text includes diagnostics with respect to the pivotal role of technology in social transformation: technological development is not a mere series of engineering achievements, but a battleground for freedom. Aragon makes its position very clear:

“We believe humankind should use technology as a liberating tool to unleash all the goodwill and creativity of our species, rather than as a tool to enslave and take advantage of one another.”

This explicit statement is what brought us as pando together in the first place. It still is what keeps us upstanding toward a common horizon today: enabling political/organizational experimentation, experimenting with new expressions of collective will, redefining revolutionary action. We think that Aragon, and the decentralized organizations it brings to the masses, will be [for the coming years and decades] a critical challenger in this fight for freedom — and we would like to be a part of it.

Our Proposal

More precisely, we propose to provide the Aragon stack the building blocks needed for a more sustainable and decentralized OS ecosystem. Thus, we expect to turn Aragon into the go-to choice when it comes to host and manage an Open Source good, the DAO way. To achieve this, we propose to work on the following topics.

Aragon Development Infrastructure

Pando is not ready for production yet, but will soon be ready for pre-production tests. Thus, we would like to keep on developing and enhancing the pando protocol, support Aragon teams in experimenting with pando to gradually migrate Aragon codebase to a fully decentralized infrastructure, and work closely with all the other Aragon teams to design [and experiment with] a possible reward systems for the Aragon contribution process.

Aragon Package Manager

Most of us rely on NPM for everything we work on. NPM is far from being perfect, though: centralized infrastructure, security issues, lack of incentivization, etc. To solve this issue, we propose to bring native compatibility to pando and aragonPM, and enhance aragonPM to the point where it becomes a serious — and backward compatible — alternative to NPM.

Fundraising

Spawning an open-source project is a challenge. Not only a technical one, but often, an economical one. We have been thinking about tackling this issue through curved-bonding primitives for a long time. Now, we would like to take this idea to the next-step and develop a fundraising application for Aragon DAOs that would allow anyone to raise funds the DAICO way in a few clicks.

One last thing

Working on Aragon has never been and will never be a technical-only task. Yet, as the pando team, we wanted to make a point of honor in theorizing the way we build the emancipation tools of tomorrow. This momentum towards the future can not be achieved without a remembrance of the past. That’s why, by advancing pando, we have shared our vision with the blockchain space and the OS movement but also with a wider community convinced in the rise of new tools that would enable a new activism. We still believe that, critique should most preferably take the form of a substitutive act and that spirit is what we intend to engrave in Aragon Black.

With the further integration of pando into the Aragon stack, we also hope to onboard new organizations into the Aragon DAO landscape by spinning content-DAOs out as a use case to the ecosystem and eventually to users beyond the blockchain space. We also will be working on enabling decentralized organizations to bootstrap their projects by lowering the cost of raising funds through the fundraising app. This mechanism to turn OS initiatives into financially sustainable and well-curated entities will create organic avenues for use case based on-boarding for Aragon.

As the toolset of Aragon is getting more and more comprehensive, we take the task upon ourselves to propagate the use cases which arise towards the larger community, both through ecosystem utilization of Aragon tools and public intellectual discourse with regards to putting revolutionary thought into practice.

All in all, if the Aragon community approves our proposal, the development goals of both Aragon and pando will merge in practice in the deliverables set forth by Aragon Black. It is with great excitement and anticipation that we share our intentions today and hope that it resonates with our community which has given us the most valuable and genuine support.