Let’s improve our governance forum with three proposals.app feature integrations

Abstract

proposals.app proposes a formal collaboration with Arbitrum DAO to enhance the usability of this governance forum, so that delegates, tokenholders, and forum readers can have more context and information about our DAO proposals. We propose designing, developing, testing, and deploying three feature integrations in this governance forum, as well as maintaining and hosting them for a period of one year, for a total of $60,000 USD.

Motivation

Currently, DAO governance remains a disjointed, messy, and confusing experience for delegates and tokenholders. We believe that one of the main reasons for this is the clear lack of foundational DAO tooling that prioritizes true composability and aggregates data from multiple (even competing) offchain and onchain sources, thereby providing a more comprehensive and enjoyable user experience for DAO delegates and tokenholders. We believe that to achieve this, DAO tools should be free and open-source, operate under a non-profit entity that ideally has public financial records of its operations. At proposals.app, we strive to uphold these beliefs.

Andrei and I have been building DAO tools since mid-2023, starting with Senate, where we previously piloted two forum integrations (one with Uniswap, and another with Aave), and more recently, we’ve been working on proposals.app, where we’ve developed dedicated tooling for Arbitrum DAO’s governance needs that was funded through a questbook grant last October. More specifically, we’ve designed and developed a unified governance aggregator that brings together, under the same platform, the discourse forum comments and both offchain and onchain votes, so that delegates can access the complete history of every proposal in Arbitrum DAO. We launched it publicly on April 5ᵗʰ at ETH Bucharest 2025, and you can check it out at arbitrum.proposals.app and share your thoughts about it with us in our telegram chat.

We’re now proposing a formal collaboration with Arbitrum DAO to bring some of the exclusive proposals.app features we have in our app, to this governance forum. We propose designing, developing, testing, and deploying three feature integrations in this governance forum, as well as maintaining and hosting them for a period of 12 months.

We believe that these three features will enhance usability and accessibility in this governance forum for all users, regardless of their level of maturity.

These three features, as demonstrated above, are:

1. Live Votes – Show the live or latest vote at the top of the page for each forum topic in the proposals category
2. Voting Power Tags – Show the voting power of each delegate, under their username, for every comment on the forum
3. Proposal Notification Emails – Provide a way for forum visitors to subscribe to email notifications, receiving an email every time a new discussion is started, when an offchain or onchain vote begins, and when its voting period is nearing completion.

With these three proposals.app feature integrations in this forum, we believe will see bigger governance participation and better engagement in discussions, from a more diverse set of delegates and tokenholders, who will have more context about who is commenting on what, about when proposals are up to a vote and where and when to vote in each moment of the proposal lifecycle.

We shared a short demo of proposals.app and these three proposed feature integrations on the Open Governance Call on June 3rd, and you can see the recording of that demo and presentation, as well as some Q&A, in this video.

Rationale

Constantly improving and caring for the governance processes in Arbitrum DAO is essential to maintain a healthy, engaged, resilient, and decentralized DAO. In Arbitrum DAO’s case, where tokenholders and delegates actually have on-chain control over protocol upgrades and treasury spending, it becomes even more critical that they vote with as much context and information as possible in each and every vote.

Additionally, in token-weighted voting DAOs, not all voices carry the same weight. Powerful delegates commenting and giving feedback on proposals are crucial signals of support. On the other hand, newly created forum accounts with no voting power, which are becoming more prevalent in the age of AI, make way more noise than signal and disrupt the discussion flow. Proposers and readers should be able to distinguish between the two and everything in between, much more easily.

As stated in The Amended Constitution of the Arbitrum DAO, we should strive to follow our stated Community Values, and specifically:

Neutral and open: Arbitrum governance should not pick winners and losers, but should foster open innovation, interoperation, user choice, and healthy competition on Arbitrum chains.

We believe it’s essential for Arbitrum DAO to have multiple governance platforms available to its tokenholders, delegates, and voters, so that we can attract more and better delegates and voters by providing them with tools that suit their particular needs and help them engage in governance in an easier and clearer way.

We also strongly believe that at least one of those front-ends should be fully open-source. Regarding the obvious matter of the resilience of Arbitrum’s DAO governance, we believe there should be a fully open-source front-end for Arbitrum’s DAO governance that would allow delegates and voters to continue participating in governance permissionlessly. proposals.app is fully open source and will continue to be. proposals.app and its future developments can also be self-hosted by anyone (like we’re doing now) under a new domain name, at any time, by anybody in the world.

Specifications

To implement these three forum feature integrations described above, we will create three distinct Discourse theme components, rather than Discourse plugins.

This way, admins of Discourse hosted instances (like the one for the Arbitrum DAO forum) can easily install each one of these feature integrations from a GitHub repo link (where the code will be fully open-source and auditable, of course) and manage the updates for each feature integration independently, as we evolve and maintain them after the initial deployment.

As mentioned above, this is how we previously integrated with the Uniswap and Aave governance forums, in the past.

Steps to Implement

We will design, develop, test, and deploy these 3 Discourse forum proposals.app feature integrations, in the following order:

1. Voting Power Tags – Showing discourse users’ voting power alongside their usernames in every topic and post in the Arbitrum DAO governance forum. To achieve this, we must retrieve all previous delegation data for the $ARB token and maintain a mapping between the top discourse users and voting wallets on Arbitrum DAO. This voting power tag will always display the current voting power of each delegate by default. Upon clicking on it, the delegate's voting power at the time the comment was posted will be displayed instead.

2. Live Votes – In every proposal posted in the Arbitrum DAO governance forum, which goes up for an offchain or onchain vote, we will display a component at the top of the forum proposal page, which shows that there i

... please visit link below to view full proposal

https://snapshot.org/#/arbitrumfoundation.eth/proposal/0x38663c36b26252acff6c6ca43663167858f51f960235dc0441bd2ad4a8f66fb1