House of Nouns v2 (revised)

This is a shortened version of our proposal. Read the full proposal and Q&A here.

Tl;dr

We’re seeking 95 ETH of funding to continue developing House of Nouns for the next five months. Our goal is to expand House of Nouns from an MVP for voting into a full suite of tools that enables proposers and voters with an ideas board, drafts, feedback, Nounish integrations, and more places for discussion.

Most importantly: We will open source the end product, so anyone can host, build on top of, and monetize the deliverables in this proposal. Nouns will have permanent access to House of Nouns via the open source infrastructure.

This is our third and final revision for House of Nouns. We have reduced the original budget by ~60% in USD, from 340 ETH ($420,000) to 95 ETH ($160,000). Read the full proposal.

Visit houseofnouns.wtf to view our current MVP.

Mission

Improve Nouns governance by empowering Nouns to contribute, find consensus before going onchain, and vote confidently.

Why open source?

Primarily, open source ensures that House of Nouns will always be able to exist, regardless of any future funding. This creates public infrastructure for DAO governance that can be used by anyone, forever, funded by Nouns.

Additionally, there is no centralized value capture for Collective (the company building House of Nouns) or anyone else. Anyone and everyone can build on top of it.

We believe the open-source, permissionless approach is inline with the ethos of Nouns, versus the alternative of closed-source, licensing of the product, subscriptions, or advertising.

With 20 ETH from Prop House, we’ve…

• Created an MVP used by ~26% of Nouns (incl. holders, proposers, & delegates)
• Over 100% month-over-month growth (MAUs & views)
• Fostered proposal discussion that is nowhere else
• Become a go-to client for voting and discussion

Deliverables

These are the deliverables we’ll guarantee to build over the next five months. We move quickly, and we’re excited to go above-and-beyond where applicable.

Pre-proposal Drafts Client

• Goal: Makes the pre-proposal process public and collaborative.
• Proposal drafts & versions, saving time with tedious markdown editing & feedback
• Proposal templates
• Inline commenting with ETH identities
• Public revisions
• One-click promote to onchain

Ideas Client

• Goal: Post early stage ideas, generate support, and promote to a draft.
• Reddit-like platform for voting on ideas
• Upvoting and commenting tied to ETH identities
• One-click promote to draft or “looking for sponsor”

Open-source Infrastructure

• Goal: Eliminate barriers to building on Nouns governance, and allow anyone to self-host
• API for all governance, discussion, profiles, etc.
• Open source repository
• Technical docs

Public good for all Nounish DAOs

• Feed for activity across your DAOs
• See to-dos and notifications across DAOs
• Support for all Nouns forks

Integration of Nounish tools

• We will use building blocks from the Nouns ecosystem where possible
• Some ideas include but are not limited to:
• Prop House voting
• Agora delegate profiles
• Federation DAO-to-DAO governance
• Nouns AI pod summaries & context
• Nouns Atlas search

Budget

We’re requesting 95 ETH for 5 months for full-time development work from a team of four developers — or ~5 ETH/developer/month. After revising our proposal and speaking with numerous members of the community, we believe this is fair and in line with standard service development costs.

We believe this budget is easily justified for deliverables that will positively impact decentralization, participation, and decision-making.

Team

• dadkins: longtime crypto hacker
• Wojciech Kocjan: frontend & design engineer
• Jamal Hashim: ex-Amazon, blockchain engineer
• John Cairns: longtime crypto builder, ex-Gemini

This is a condensed version of the proposal. View the full proposal and more Q&A here.

Send any and all questions to @houseofnouns on Twitter.