A PPI DAO: Discussion

The following proposal was prepared by Joe Charlesworth from Aragon, following meetings and correspondence with PPI Board members. [Upon review and consultations] we might not require statute changes. We ask the community to assist [with the discussion]. I paste the exact proposal as presented.

Key Requirements Understanding

  • Set up a PPI DAO to be able to accept payments in cryptocurrencies from PPI members.

  • Allow payments from this DAO to be transparently accessible

  • Don’t incur huge gas fees associated with payment transactions

  • Enable PPI members to be able to vote on proposals (financial or non-financial)

  • Test the use of DAOs for eventual adoption by other PPI members in their respective organisations.

DAO Implementation Proposal

a) Use an Aragon DAO, powered by Aragon Govern. This is an optimistic governance framework meaning that you can specify in advance which actors are allowed to do certain actions, such as making payments. This avoids members having to vote on every proposal which can lead to governance fatigue. I’d like to point out that Aragon Govern is our latest DAO technology, still experimental and not Ethereum Mainnet battle tested unlike Aragon Client. If you would like to inspect the source code for this technology, you can find the Github repo here.

b) This DAO can be used to collect payments in cryptocurrency from members. This would however be limited to ERC20 tokens (so ETH, USDC, DAI, USDT etc).

c) The PPI DAO would have it’s own token. This can be a voting only token and need not have a monetary value. Delegate voting is also an option.

d) Depending on your exact requirements and timeframe, we can probably help you build a custom interface for your DAO hosted at dao.pp-international.net that will enable members to undertake key actions such as paying membership fees or voting on PPI proposals. A payment page could also be added to this sub-domain so that members can pay their yearly membership fee in crypto. We’d have to put a monetary cap on this support of $2.5k worth of development time and the scope of work would need to therefore be clearly defined.

Whilst we don’t usually offer this perk to other organisations, in this particular case, we’re keen to support PPI with the development of a user friendly DAO and think having professional expertise on-hand that is familiar with the Aragon stack would help accelerate the development.

If you want members to continue being able to pay with credit/debit card, Transak or another on-ramp provider could potentially be used for collecting fiat funds and automatically convert them into crypto before forwarding them on to the PPI DAO. This ensures that all membership fees coming in and out are publicly viewable and inspectable by the PPI community.

e) To avoid the PPI community of members from having to spend hundreds / thousands of dollars on Ethereum transactions, the DAO would ideally be setup on one of the Ethereum sidechains, such as xDAI, Polygon, Arbitrum, Optimism or BSC. The result should be a few cents/dollars to process a DAO transaction (NB - voting is free for members if using Aragon Voice). It should be noted that these sidechains are not as secure as Ethereum, nor as decentralised. They do however tend to be much more affordable and practical for your specific use case.

Lastly, to manage expectations, DAO technology is still experimental and it may not yet be suitable for the whole PPI community, especially members which are less technologically inclined. I firmly believe however it will become an increasingly important tool for organisations such as PPI & network Pirate Parties around the world to leverage and it’s exciting to be pushing the boundaries of what’s possible together.

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The following are the suggestions of PPIL Israel:

Statute Amendment: Statutes of PPI
Motion: Membership Token
Section: ### III. Membership[edit]

Proposal: Each Ordinary PPI member party will receive a governance voting token with no monetary value equivalent to its voting rights for the GA. This token can be used to make proposals and vote on them in the PPI DAO. Voting rules remain the same as the rules of procedure for the GA, whereby motions are decided “by a simple majority of the Ordinary Members present or represented and voting” (Art. 1.8 and Art. 6.5) and statute amendment motions “shall be passed by a two thirds majority of the votes cast” (Art. 6.6). Abstentions are not taken into account. All votes are transparent. Voting options are “yes”, “no”, or “abstention”. DAO attendance abides by the same rules as GA attendance. The presence of one third of Ordinary Members’ total voting power is required to constitute a DAO quorum (PPI Statute IX.5). Each DAO motion requires at least one month of voting time before a decision is reached. Motions may be given longer voting time if the author chooses. All motions must thus be announced at least a month ahead of the voting deadline by being sent to the board, pp-leaders, and posted on the PPI website. The board will declare the motion invalid if the rules of procedure were not followed correctly. Any member can also protest a decision to the CoA to examine whether the rules of procedure were followed correctly. Motions that are passed by the DAO will be presented to the PPI Board for approval at its next board meeting. Motions that require GA approval will be voted on again at the next GA, according to the current voting rules. The Board or the GA may reject the concurrent proposal and request revisions from the DAO.

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XIII. Functions of the Board[edit]

Motion: Add line to (1) The functions of the Board are: to vote on any motions approved by the DAO.

Revise link XI. Voting[edit] (4) A permanent online e-Democracy system allowing for decision making of General Assembly between its meetings shall be put in place where issues can be raised, initiatives started, suggestions made, and progress checked until a final vote can be cast.

Motion: Clarify that the DAO and its voting tool is the online e-Democracy system.

XVI. Affiliation Fees[edit]

Motion: <This section of the motion still needs work, and we may need to let this discussion happen within the DAO.> Add line that affiliation fees will be used to pay for PPI tokens. (Up to 100% of the affiliation fee tokens can be returned to the organization. Up to 100% of the affiliation fee tokens can be donated to PPIHQ.) <Further details should be added to this proposal to ensure that we have a fluid financial system that is not for profit, and can be used to support our activities.>

Motion: <To be decided within the DAO, as we need to do research: One of the first proposals of the DAO should entail amounts that we as an organization are willing to support in specific blockchains, keeping x% of our funds stored in y chain, etc. Aragon works on Eth chains, and we will thus initially need to accommodate funds to those tokens. However, we will also need to have a certain significant portion of our funds stored as stable coins or currency that we can access immediately through a credit card or bank to maintain the spending needs of the party.>

The DAO proposal should include an additional clarification about how to accommodate individual Pirate parties to organize their finances and governance. We should clarify that individual parties can use the PPI DAO independently with the ability to modify governance rules. We should also clarify whether individual parties can issue unique governance and membership support tokens.

On behalf of Aragon, I would like to clarify several parts of the proposal above:

a) The DAO built for PPI will be a reusable code base. Each Pirate Party will be able to fork it and start a DAO with minimal effort. Each fork will have its own governance token and independent finance. Yet upgrades to the PPI DAO can be brought to the local PP DAOs.

b) Aragon Govern supports both Code and Natural language rules. This implies that Pirate Parties that would like to alter governance model can do so without too much effort.

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A future proposal may need to expand the DAO to a separate branch with a separate governance token for individual members.

We should collect more information if we could create NFT governance tokens for each party and individual member.

A further proposal will also be necessary for any type of reputation token, if one would be adopted.

For the current GA, I think a limited PPI DAO proposal is necessary to get things started. The DAO can be used to make these additional decisions.

I don’t think a GA decision is needed for forking DAOs to separate branches for each member party. If PPI is maintaining a DAO that can be branched to serve individual member parties, and as long as decisions and votes made within separate/forked DAO/member parties - PPI is not liable or binded to these decisions, it would be a useful service for member parties for voting and decision-making, as well as implementing new models of voting and representation.

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I think we may also need a DAO for PPI individual and observer members, meaning a separate voting apparatus for those who contribute to PPI aside from the Ordinary Members to present motions to the PPI board, GA, and Ordinary Member DAO. The DAO for individual member parties is indeed a separate discussion, for which PPI would not be liable.

Why does thist need to be done through Statute change? Cant we just try it without the change statutes hustle?

Why shoud we specify in the what particular technology we use to do stuff?

Im not against the idea in general, i don understand why do we need to put it in the Statutes. (The e-Domacracy thing is there for years and not much has happended.)

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I agree with you. I can rescind the motion, so we can implement it and vote on it at a later date. In the May 12 board meeting it was decided that we would form a SCURVY Committee to work on it, and the board indicated that it felt that the GA would need to vote on statute amendments. You are correct that we do not need any statute amendments at this point, as we already have prior decisions about e-democracy that enable us to do this. I will present the motion again to the board, and we can move this issue to AOB for the GA.

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I am attaching a presentation with a prototype of the DAO app that we received from Aragon. I am attaching that here. They also provided instructions for using it, but it includes functions that are under construction and thus will be shared later.

PPI DAO-compressed2_Page_1

PPI DAO-compressed2_Page_2c

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PPI DAO-compressed2_Page_5

PPI DAO-compressed2_Page_6

PPI DAO-compressed2_Page_7

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The presentation of the prototype is awesome. Please keep me informed, eg. the thread updated, when you start/forming a working group to testdrive/setup an Aragon DAO.

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DAO First Meeting
Sunday July 18 at 12:00 UTC

Preliminary White Paper

-The PPI DAO Sailing Paper-

:Draft September 2021

  • *The Pirates

:The Pirate Parties International (PPI) is a multinational NGO that supports freedom of information and digital rights. Our members are political parties, non-profit organizations, and individuals. We are a member of the UN ECOSOC Committee and other international bodies. We host the The Think Twice Conference (TT), The Pirate Security Conference (PSC), General Assemblies (GA), and organize a variety of working groups and events. All of our meetings are transparent, and a record is kept online.

  • *The Ship

:The PPI Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO) is a governance forum that utilizes blockchain to enable individuals and organizations to identify their membership in PPI, create proposals for the organization, and collaborate in decision-making with other members. The DAO is hosted on Aragon Govern, Client, and Voice. The DAO’s raison d’etre is to provide a platform for Pirate organizations and their activities that cannot be shut down. It can be used as a decision making platform for campaigning, fundraising, grantmaking, sponsoring, voting, and activism. Our aim is to increase members and membership engagement. The DAO may be copied and used freely by any organizations that want to create their own ships.

  • *The Booty

:The Pirate Party Token (PPT) is the governance token for the PPI DAO. Each token will be issued with a 12 month validity period. There is not a hard cap on the number of tokens that can be issued, but the DAO may decide to issue a hardcap. There is not a limit on the number of proposals that a token holder may create, but the DAO may decide to issue limitations and other requirements for voting. A total voting power of 1/10 of all tokens and a greater than 1/2 majority is needed for ordinary motions to pass, and a total voting power of 1/3 of all tokens issued and a 2/3 majority is needed for rule change motions to pass. Before any transaction is initiated, ordinary decisions will be reviewed by the Board and rule change decisions will be reviewed by the GA. The Board or the GA may reject a decision and request revisions and a revote from the DAO. Currently, individual members receive 1 token. Ordinary members receive 100 tokens, or the proportion of 100 tokens that is commensurate with their GA voting rights. Observer members may apply for 10 tokens. Observer and ordinary members may delegate their tokens to individuals by issuing a token with a time limit. A total of 1 minimum token is necessary to vote.

  • *The Deck

:Any member with one PPT token can make a proposal. Two types of proposals are possible: ordinary proposals and rule change proposals. Each proposal requires at least one month of voting time before a decision is reached. Motions may be given longer voting time if the author chooses. Proposals may be made that are real-time (vote is displayed during the voting) or encrypted (vote is displayed after the voting), as well as anonymous (wallet address is hidden) or identified (wallet address is shown). The deck will publish online all current proposals, decisions, and the member wallet addresses, if identification was requested. Further innovations to the deck are intended, such as the incorporation of NFTs to document memberships and a tradable rewards token to incentivize proposal creation, voting, and other forms of participation. Members are responsible for spearheading innovations. The DAO will operate on Ethereum sidechains in order to reduce transaction costs. The DAO will continue to experiment with innovative uses of blockchain and will not be limited to any single technology.

  • *Boarding

:Membership must be renewed annually, and the fees are negotiable. The suggested price for a one-year individual membership is currently (Sept. 22, 2021) 10 euros (.00024 BTC). Exemptions and reductions of fees may be requested, and preference will be given to those who provide volunteer services for the organization or are active participants. No one should be prevented from boarding the ship due to a lack of funds. Members may remain anonymous. All individual members must be accepted based on an application that is accepted by the Board. All observer and ordinary members must be accepted based on an application that is accepted by the GA.

**Individuals interested in becoming members, please click here:

https://pp-international.net/join-in/application-for-individual-membership/

**Organizations interested in becoming members, please click here:

https://wiki.pp-international.net/wiki/index.php?title=Membership_application

  • *The Crew

:The Board utilizes a multi-sig wallet to initiate decisions to receive and send tokens. The 9 members of the board hold unique keys for the multi-sig wallet, with 3 member keys needed to initiate a transaction. The 3 alternate members will also hold keys. The board will review all ordinary decisions at its board meeting, and the GA will review all rule change decisions.

  • *The Plank

:The Board may decide to slash an individual user’s tokens if a user violates rules. Tokens that are slashed from a delegate will become invalid for the original member as well. The GA may decide to slash the entirety of an observer or ordinary member’s tokens if the organization fails to pay its membership fees, fails to request an exemption, or has its membership revoked.

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Very nice :star_struck: have you shared this with Marco already?