TLDR
We’re requesting 25 ETH to build a House of Nouns for all nouns builder DAOs. House of Nouns is a supercharged platform + context layer for Nouns governance. We will make governance participation fun and empower nounish DAOs to make decisions as efficiently as possible.
Our vision is to create governance platforms that are both delightful and easy to use, empowering voters to effectively govern nounish DAOs.
We are going back onchain to get funding from Nouns DAO to build out the majority of this public good. We decided to propose part of the scope to Builder DAO, specifically to build the infra which enables generalized support for all Nouns forks.
What does this mean in practice? We build infrastructure so every Nounish DAO launched with nouns builder can have their own custom governance client like houseofnouns.wtf. These clients will be accessible on House of Nouns, where you can easily switch between the different houses.
Current progress
We’ve had great success with House of Nouns, with many Nouners and non-Nouners alike expressing their love of the intuitive interface. We want to continue building on this success and make it easier for all nounish DAO members to participate in governance in an engaging way.
Not familiar with House of Nouns? You can discuss proposals with the community, view important context, and vote all in one intuitive interface on https://houseofnouns.wtf.
Some data:
- MAUs - growing 100% month / month
- Working with Nouns, Lil Nouns, and Gnars. In talks with many more communities.
- https://houseoflilnouns.wtf
- https://gnars.house
- ~13.5% registered-user market penetration
- 170 registered users / 1263 total members in Nouns (delegates + Nouners + anyone who has voted or made a proposal on-chain or in Prop House)
Problems solved
- Proposal price discovery
- You don’t know the right price to ask for. Most price discovery (proposal asks) happens on chain through prop cancellations. This is a terrible experience for builders.
- Not enough discussion happening before going onchain to really get prop details hammered out
- this leads to ppl voting yes, even if they have some small issue with the prop, when they should really just be a no for now.
- Discussion is still extremely scattered across multiple platforms
- This is good for decentralization, but terrible for user experience and informed governance participation
As we’ve seen of late with prop cancellations and the difficulty around getting relevant feedback, we believe HoN is perfectly positioned to solve these problems.
Core vision and goals
Our vision is to make it easier for voters to participate in nounish governance by providing rich context, intuitive conversation tools, and seamless integrations with other nounish platforms. This will be built on top of an open source framework, empowering developers, and solving impactful problems specific to nounish governance.
To be transparent, we will focus the majority of our effort on solving deep problems specific to Nouns DAO governance. At the same time, we build infrastructure that can support all Nounish communities and DAOs built with nouns builder, enabling them to spin up decision-making hubs in a customized fashion.
We believe Nouns DAO governance is where we can have the biggest impact as it is the DAO with sufficient scale that is bumping against some friction. However, these upgrades will be made available to all other nounish DAOs.
In short, some upgrades that all nounish DAOs can expect to see on their decision-making hubs:
- Provide all context on proposals, voters, builders, and team members, and view all conversations from Discord, Twitter, and Discourse in one place.
- Build a custom forum client directly into all HoN clients that is backwards compatible w/Discourse, allowing users to create and discuss proposal drafts and get early feedback.
- Create the open source House of Nouns framework, serving core data displayed on the site through a GraphQL API, paired with a developer friendly SDK for building on top of House of Nouns infrastructure
- Build a suite of tools to help with the proposal feedback and soft-decision making process including Google doc esque commenting, reactions to different components of a proposal, proposal components etc.
- Enabling a pre-prop phase and/or being able to edit prop during the feedback period
Product deliverables
In order to enable the automatic creation of custom governance hubs for every nouns dao, we will build:
- An entry point to discover all nounish DAOs, including a place to view all proposals from across the nouniverse
- ingest normalized governance data from chain, served via API no matter the governance contract (nouns builder, custom Nouns forks etc.)
- the ability to switch between any governance client, all on houseofnouns.wtf, defaulting to a list of communities for which you own tokens
House of Nouns Framework
We are building an open source framework to give builders the tools they need to build custom governance and discussion experiences for their communities.
The main components of the framework are:
–Open access to core data displayed on the site through a GraphQL API.
–React SDK for developing on top of House of Nouns infrastructure, including hooks to access data, pre-built components etc.
This means that eventually nouns.build and every nounish DAO will have the ability to build their own custom experiences, tailor-made for their unique community.
Differentiation
Agora approaches the problem of low governance participation from the delegation perspective. Don’t want to vote? Delegate to someone to do it for you.
House of Nouns approaches it from the conversation and context-aggregation perspective. Empowering community members to vote independently and be empowered to think and make decisions for themselves.
Both approaches are valid and necessary for the ecosystem to grow. We will be working closely with Agora to ensure we don’t build the same things and otherwise waste valuable energy.
Funding Request
We request 25 ETH to fund development of infrastructure to support all nouns daos built with nouns builder, over the next 4 weeks.
• 25 ETH: 2 engineers (~12.5 ETH per mo./ person)
Team
We are a small startup (collective.xyz) that has been building for Nouns and won the governance client mandate round 3 months ago alongside Agora.
Team:
rocketman - 9 years in software, longtime crypto hacker, cofounder @collective.xyz
timmyg - full stack maestro, former head of engineering
Deliverables
House of Nouns clients for every nouns dao
The entire conversation and governance stack in one supercharged open source client for every nounish DAO.
You’ll be able to switch between different DAOs through a simple dropdown.
A central place to view all clients and proposals
A clean landing page to serve as an avenue to explore the decision making bazaar of all Nouns forks. View all communities and active Nouns proposals.
Testimonials
“congrats on HON, it has officially become my go to for governance” - @cryptoseneca
Happy to answer any questions on Twitter, on https://houseofnouns.wtf, or in the Nounish Builders Discord etc.
Stay nounish ⌐◨-◨