DevCon4 prep reading series : Interview with John Light about AraCon, Privacy and Aragon Dream DAO pitch party
In this series, we are interviewing Ethereum community members who are taking key roles bringing community together by organising various events around DevCon4.
In this blog post, we interview John Light from Aragon.
Hi, John. Great to have you on this interview series. Can you introduce yourself?
Hello! Great to be participating, thank you. I work on the community team at Aragon One, one of the teams building Aragon. We are building open source tools for the governance of organizations and decentralized applications built on Ethereum.
I first met Jorge and Luis (the founders of Aragon) at Edcon 2017 in Paris when they were just two of them and now Aragon looks like a big team. Can you let us know how your organisation grew in the last few years?
The Aragon project was started in February 2017 and has grown so much since then. We have two full-time teams working on the project, Aragon One and Aragon DAC, as well as many independent contributors and Nest grant recipients who are contributing to Aragon development.
Aragon is always active in Ethereum community space and I see them everywhere (including sponsoring the ENS Hackathon Makoto organised). What kind of communities has Aragon been involved in so far and what kind of community/event are you guys actively reaching out to?
We have mainly been involved in Ethereum hackathons, developer conferences, and community events such as the EIP-0 Summit in Toronto. We are primarily interested in events bringing together people interested in and working on Ethereum development, governance innovation, and economic freedom.
Now you guys are taking it to the next level by organising the first Aragon conference. Tell us more about the event!
Most of the important details are in the announcement blog post but for the audience here, we will be hosting AraCon on January 29–30, 2019 and discussing four main “themes” in the conference: Aragon, Ethereum / Web 3.0, Decentralized Governance, and DAOs. There will be panel discussions and presentations about these topics, including presentations from all of the teams working on the Aragon project. Attendees will learn about the state of the art in on-chain governance tools for organizations and dapps.
You gave us lots of useful feedback about our Kickback UI from user’s security and privacy perspective (Thanks!). How important are security and privacy to you?
Security is integral to any dapp, without security no one will have any trust in what we’re building. And privacy is necessary to give people control of how their personal information is used. As dapp developers we have to be conscious of the long-term ramifications of what we’re building, especially since we’re building on an immutable public ledger. This means being careful not to release any code that would cause our users to lose money or reveal personal information to unintended parties in a way that cannot be undone.
For your Aragon Dream DAO pitch party, what kind of crazy pitches are you expecting? Do you have any tips and advice for the participants?
I don’t want to plant any ideas, so I will just say that if you have been captivated by the concept of Decentralized Autonomous Organizations and have an audacious dream for a DAO that you’d like to become real, we invite you to join our event and give your pitch. We’re excited to hear all of the interesting and exciting ideas that people come up with!
The last question. Are Luis and Jorge going to DJ?
We might have some special appearances ;) Come to the event to see for yourself!
Thank you so much for taking time answering all the questions!
If you want to meet John and team Aragon and talk about DAO and sing along Carlos Matos, please join their awesome Aragon Dream DAO pitch party via Kickback!
