Yes on AGP-19 for new project and social tools in Aragon
I’m the project lead for Autark, and we have applied for $390,000 in DAI from the Aragon Network. Autark has a mission of building a world where progress is accelerated by making it easier and more fair to coordinate on shared visions of the future.
To accomplish this we have initially been developing Aragon applications that are payout and budgeting tools so that organizations can design customized reward programs with the ability to easily account for task-based payouts to either groups or individuals. This work has been funded via Aragon’s Nest program. We are excited to finally share a video demo of our work to date!
We are interested in developing the building blocks that will enable more collaborative and cooperative behavior in online communities. There are common tools needed that will meet the primary coordination use case across all of these sectors: this is already evident by enterprise software companies such as Oracle and SAP, who build generic systems that are adopted across industries. We plan to build specialized project management and social collaboration tools, tailored toward DAOs that will provide the accountability measures required to operate as decentralized organizations.
We are looking for your vote of support in AGP-19, which is our funding proposal to continue our team’s work and become an integral team in the Aragon Network.
For more details on what we plan to build, review our proposal
That Planning Suite
I began contributing to the Giveth Social Coding circle in early 2018 and that’s where I got to know Quazia aka Arthur Lunn, who is our technical lead. He has direct experience with governance experiments through his work with Giveth, and has participated in multiple high profile Ethereum audits including the WHG audit of aragonOS and MakerDAO.
After chatting a lot in Riot, we both realized we had a lot of passion for the Aragon vision. Arthur and I put together a proposal for a Nest team to create a toolkit of payout and budgeting tools so that organizations can design customized reward programs with the ability to easily account for task-based payouts to either groups or individuals.
Arthur and I will also be at AraCon next week, have have two different talks — one of them will be our Planning Suite live demo.
Why AGP-19 is important for Aragon
Luke, the research lead at Aragon has provided his public support and reasoning for AGP-19 in the Aragon forum, quoted below:
Position: Yes
Justification: Autark is an extension of the TPS nest team, which although has been somewhat delayed, I think adds a specific set of functionality that is necessary for operating an organization on a day to day basis, where as the existing set of apps produced by A1 provide a strong foundation for securely managing an organization at a high level, being able to use the the planning suite to efficiently come to consensus on assigning work, evaluating completed work, and paying/rewarding contributors will be important for early adoption. If this proposal is not approved for flock, I would also be happy to see the TPS nest grant extended to support this teams continued development of the application suite.
To add to this, I believe we are one of the only Nest teams who has tried to really push the limits of what can be accomplished with Aragon applications. Yet Nest does not provide the funding level that is aligned with our vision or commitment to Aragon. When Flock was announced, it seemed like the perfect opportunity to continue our team’s work and supercharge forward.
Space Decentral
Autark includes many team members such as myself, who are part of Space Decentral, a soon to be Aragon DAO. The success of Space Decentral is very interlinked to the success of Aragon.
It’s important to hear part of the Space Decentral backstory to understand how our team has emerged. Space Decentral has always recognized that a robust governance layer is a requirement to succeed in creating a citizen-lead space agency that’s by the people, for the people. We made a decision in early 2018 that Aragon would provide that layer.
This decision was in equal parts due to the ideals of the founders and the Aragon community as it was in relation to the technological capabilities of the platform. I first presented Space Decentral’s plans to utilize Aragon at the Ethereum Community Conference (EthCC) in Paris in March of 2018.
EthCC is also where I first met Otto Garcia, who later become a Space Decentral community member and now a co-founder of Autark.
Space Decentral has an interest in the stewardship for planet Earth just as much as the exploration of planets beyond. For more background on Space Decentral, checkout my talk at DevCon4 from last October where I explain why it’s important to create an international space agency.
Now, Space Decentral has kind of decentralized to create a focused Aragon initiative Autark, which also includes Kevin Siegler and Radek Zasiadczuk of Space Decentral.
Vote Yes on AGP-19
All ANT holders as of January 24, 2019 at 00:00 UTC will be eligible to vote “yes” or “no” our proposal for funding, AGP-19. The vote is open now — if you like what are building, we hope to have your vote!
To vote with a browser wallet, click the button above and find the AGP-19 ballot. For more details on the voting logistics, read Aragon’s blog post.
About Our Team
Follows us @autarklabs to keep up with our progress.
Yalda Mousavinia — Management, Product, UX, Community
Yalda has 10 years of experience in product management and UI/UX design. For over 2 years, she has been researching and designing system architectures that relate to open source ecosystems and using incentives to promote growth. This work lead her into the concept of DAOs and the founding of Space Decentral, a decentralized autonomous space agency. She continued this work as the Project Lead of the Planning Suite Nest grant. Prior to Space Decentral, she worked as a Senior Product Manager at Oracle for 2.5 years, on their Enterprise Resource Planning software suite. She has a Bachelor of Science in Mechanical Engineering from UC Berkeley and Astronautical Engineering Certificate from UCLA. → Github: stellarmagnet
Arthur Lunn — Technical Lead
Arthur is the technical lead of the Planning Suite nest grant. He has direct experience with governance experiments through his work with Giveth, and has participated in multiple high profile Ethereum audits including the WHG audit of aragonOS and MakerDAO. He graduated with a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science from Rochester Institute of Technology. Professional full stack developer for 2 years and a smart contract developer for 1 year. → Github: Quazia
Otto Garcia — Full Stack
Otto is currently a full stack and react developer with the Planning Suite nest grant team. He is a multidisciplinary self-taught developer and open source lover. He has been focused in the crypto space since 2013, involved into several altcoin community projects and blockchain startups in different fields, from mining pools to PoW algorithms, and lately doing Ethereum and dApps research, blockchain technical education programs, and managing several successful crypto communities in Spain. → Github: ottodevs
Kevin Siegler — Solidity/Web3
After fostering an enduring fascination with Skunk Works, Kevin obtained a B.S. and M.S. in Mechanical Engineering from Northwestern University with a focus in robotics, and worked 3 years in the aerospace industry as a mechatronics engineer. During that time he was a member of Cobham’s Leadership Development Program. Over the past two years he has been pursuing his dream of scaling the field of aerospace globally as a co-founder of Space Decentral and helping to bring the vision of a decentralized space agency to life. Most recently he has been a solidity developer with the Planning Suite team. → Github: topocount
Radek Zasiadczuk — Full Stack
Radek is a full stack developer for the Planning Suite team and Space Decentral. He has also been working as a Senior System Administrator and DevOps Engineer at Oracle for 13 years, where he builds and maintains Data Centres around the world. For the last few years with increasing fascination, he has researched augmenting human collaboration with software, starting with simple project management systems to emerging DAO-style endeavors, operating on non-linear and non-hierarchical principles. → Github: rkzel
Partner Organization: Open Work Labs
In addition to the Autark team, we are establishing a relationship with a partner organization, Open Work Labs (OWL). I met Thomas O’Brien at DevCon4, and he and Jonathan Schwartz are cofounders of OWL. They will provide the technical direction on our Data and Storage Standards initiative. They are ConsenSys engineers with experience developing and implementing such solutions.
Jonathan Schwartz
Jonathan is a frontend and web3.js developer at ConsenSys (Ujo Music) where he works with open data standards and synchronizing data across multiple providers. He has taught full stack JavaScript and created a blockchain course for Fullstack Academy of Code. Jonathan graduated with a bachelor’s in finance and co-founded an identity management startup while studying at the University of Wisconsin.→ Github: schwartz10
Thomas O’Brien
Thomas is a backend software developer at ConsenSys (Ujo Music) and focuses on data standards and distributed storage. Before ConsenSys he got a bachelor’s degree in political science, started a crowdsourced skate brand, and worked as a JavaScript developer for three years. → Github: thomasbeta
