Flower Power DAO App: V0.5 Launch

The BTC Flower project has launched a fully on-chain DAO on the Internet Computer.

FPDAO
The Internet Computer Review
7 min readMay 23, 2022

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Welcome to the Flower Power DAO V0.5 app, the first release of the flower fam’s governance mechanism, the first DAO on the Internet Computer after the NNS, and one of the first fully on-chain DAOs ever.

The app opened on May 6th, and without hiccups has enabled each and every flower holder to vote on existing proposals and create new ones.

V0.5’s initial goals, limitations, and rules were outlined in the FP DAO Constitution. As the first step in formalizing the DAO, Proposal #0 was created: A vote to ratify the constitution. The results: 83% of flowers voted, overwhelmingly accepting the constitution with a final tally of 4,990 to 5. It’s an unprecedented level of voter participation in any mode of governance, and an admirable first milestone for FP DAO.

With enough time for the community experimentation having passed, it’s time to address the design decisions and how things will work moving forward.

The first principles of the FP DAO’s design are to maximize openness and simplicity. Given that such high participation can put the two at odds, the DAO as it stands warrants some explanation of the functionality, design considerations, adopted proposals, and anticipated changes to follow.

How It Works

All proposals and their results are publicly viewable on the app homepage.

There’s a login option for Stoic and Plug wallets for users wishing to use their flowers. After logging in, the upper right displays your wallet address and voting power:

  • 1 BTC Flower = 2 votes
  • 1 ETH Flower = 1 vote

***ICP Flower will also be granted 1 vote following its Q4 release.***

All holders with a flower will have a “Create Proposal” button at the page top. With it, you can populate and submit a proposal with a title (20 character min), description (200 character min), and options to select (up to 10). Proposals can be plain text or utilize markdown and images. Once submitted, the proposal will be open for everyone to vote on, and the number of votes cast is displayed in real time, but not the results.

Proposals can be filtered by the open, accepted, and rejected tags. Once issued, they remain open for one week and are accepted if >50% of the voting power had been used, and are otherwise rejected and archived. In each case, proposal results and votes cast are displayed publicly once the week has elapsed, but not before.

The only other tag is core, marking team-issued proposals, which sometimes require participation for future voting incentives. For example, ETH Flowers that vote on the Core Pineapple Punk proposal will get a whitelist.

That’s it. It’s quite simple to start, yielding an honest consensus on aggregated feedback from flower holders. One ounce of practice is worth a pound of theory, so we encourage you to play around with it if you haven’t already.

Visual Design Considerations

You might have already noticed our new logo:

This is just the initial logo, simple to start, with more than a dozen versions making use of different shapes. Every time fpdao.app is loaded, the homepage picks one at random. It’s designed to be versatile and never static, representing the DAO’s constant progress, and how members can change and control the DAO’s future.

The DAO design itself is an extension of this idea, always open to change in form based on the wants and needs of the members it represents.

This initial version is a clean slate, a blank canvas if you will. Only black and white, classic but still modern visuality with contemporary shape language and smooth edges everywhere. It is representative of the “white cube” (the white room) from analog galleries and museums.

In this way, the website itself is not the center of attention, but a space for art content to populate and live undisturbed. It’s a bridge between the visuality of two diametrically opposed styles. On the one hand, the serious and professional feel of analog art is captured by the DAO structure, font, coloring, and shapes; mixed with the young and funky style of digital art to be displayed.

By crossing the digital and analog worlds’ visuality, fpdao.app should foster appreciation from both target groups, whether for the technical novelties, art on display, or joining of the two:

Functional Design Considerations

Flowers have always been and will be a ticket into the Flower Power DAO, so it felt wrong to limit any kind of access to holders in V0.5. Every flower holder can make proposals because we trust the community will limit spam and actively discourage or ignore foolish proposals. Our expectations proved true, and we have over 20 legitimate proposals created. It’s already crowdsourced some good ideas and measurable consensus. Keep it up flower fam!

The next version plans to separate proposals by category, each being filtered before making it to the voting dashboard and having a formal template. What constitutes a fair filter, appropriate template, and set of categories is something we hope the community will help shape for FP DAO V1. As we keep collecting data from more proposals, the best voting parameters and general direction for the community should become apparent.

A key design decision is blind voting. In other words, proposals will not show how flowers are voting until after the voting period has closed. This is to avoid the bandwagon effect, or temptation to vote with the majority. The best results come when holders vote or abstain purely based on their beliefs, not what others are doing. Voting choice doesn’t come with a reward or penalty in V0.5, so just be you.

The fpdao.app has been built internally from the ground up, making it future-proof, iterable, and prepped for integration with a marketplace hub of FP DAO art. It will eventually be integrated with the art it will help create, making its simple and minimalistic UI ideal for our purposes. The design won’t distract, influence, or otherwise take away from its functional purpose… or the art that will grow to be a part of it.

Accepted Community Proposals

Following proposal id#0, which ratified the constitution, we had 2 other proposals make it passed the 50% voting quorum for acceptance.

Proposal id#1: Punk should only be airdropped [only to] people that voted on id#0 proposal

The vote had a participation of 74%, with 43%:31% in favor, but the proposal is a request that would have to be enforced by the core team. Unfortunately, we are rejecting this proposal on the grounds that it is inconsistent with previous proposals.

Namely, the Punks proposal was created and is pending acceptance based on airdropping all BTC Flowers and whitelisting ETH Flowers that voted on that Punk proposal. By the time Proposal id#1 was accepted, voting on id#0 had already closed, which would mean holders would have the rules changed on them after it was too late to do anything about it.

Even if Proposal id#1 was not in direct contradiction with other proposals, this is a classic example of how flowers will have a direct conflict of interest. This proposal is good for voters, bad for everyone else, and so an inherently biased vote. For this we’ll quote the FP DAO Constitution:

“Proposals made based on self-interest that jeopardize FP DAO longevity will be discouraged or ignored by Ludo and the team.”

Democracy is hard, and this is a key example of why, but that’s never been a good reason to stop working toward it. Consider this a quirk that we’ll work to remedy together for V1. What we’re doing instead of excluding non-voting BTC Flower holders is giving them all the gold standard OG treatment they deserve and airdropping unconditionally.

Proposal id#1: Reveal mode on punks sale

The vote had a participation of 54%, with 41%:13% in favor. The request was for a 48-hour randomized reveal for the punks, just like with the flowers. To that, we accept.

The punks will be released as a uniform work that reveals its unique form 48 hours later.

The remaining proposals were rejected or are still open, but we are still at the very beginning of things.

Even though rejected proposals didn’t hit the 50% quorum, the results of people who did vote are still displayed and a solid gauge of community consensus. We hope they’re referenced in discord discussions and resubmitted in improved forms. Going forward, it will be difficult to have 50% voter participation, so our social channels are to be key to getting the best proposals their deserved recognition.

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FPDAO
FPDAO

Written by FPDAO

Community controlled NFT launchpad by @btcflower — Merging the best Web3 stack with the finest art

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