SG 0.1b - Building the Scaffold for a VitaDAO Member Portal

Seasonal Governance Community Proposals
1

SG 0.1b - Building the Scaffold for a VitaDAO Member Portal

Summary

This proposal defines the scope and timeline for the start of a Member Portal, which includes user-friendly authentication and the ability for both non-custodial members to participate in governance.

Relevance to Strategic Plan

This proposal addresses Goal 0.1 - Increasing Community Size and the focus Building a non-web3 friendly login experience for the online VitaDAO community portal.

Budget

This proposal was spec’ed to the meet the $10k budget. It details the work that can be done realistically given the budget, timeline, and our state of knowledge pending results from the market research.

Motivation

VitaDAO members and contributors come from diverse backgrounds, many without familiarity with web3 tools and concepts. The DAO is built on web3 infrastructure and therefore we have been using many off-the-shelves tools developed for a web3 audience. This has limited our ability to keep the community engaged and make participation less accessible. To mitigate this, we should build our new tools to 1) bridge the web2/web3 world and 2) facilitate features specific to VitaDAO.

Specification

  • Team:
    • Cat (developer): fullstack web developer for several years, now freelance developer with projects in smart contracts and custom wallets
    • Si (designer): designed the VitaDAO website, the Longevity Prize website and many other sties in DeSci

We will start a member portal scaffold, where additional features can be built on top of. The application will be open source on Github to facilitate permissionless community PRs, and deployed via Netlify. The VitaDAO website can link to this page via a “Portal” option in the menu bar.

The portal is web3 agnostic: we use web2 tools if they’re the best tools for the job; and we make interfaces with web3 tools as accessible as possible.

Purpose

The purpose and future set to be built into the portal will depend on the results of future market research. While waiting for the research, our purpose this season is to build out necessary infrastructure for authentication and governance participation.

Target User Group

  • Members: People who signed up for the membership, to be able to participate in governance
  • Strategic Members: members who have $VITA holding in custodial services, to be able to participate in governance
  • Core, contributors, stewards: these contributor groups are out of scope for the season, but our vision is also making the portal a place where contributors can go to manage their tasks, documents, and DAO-related tools
  • Longevity / dealflow group contributors: these contributor groups are out of scope for the season, but our vision also includes building out tools to improve their document access and workflow
  • Other Token Holders: we won’t build any additional services to support general token holders this season, but we would like to include more token related tools in the future

Features

  • A base UI consistent with VitaDAO branding and design (will work with Si to ensure this)
  • User-friendly web2/web3 authentication through a third party auth service (to be researched)
  • A user-friendly account onboarding experience
  • A homepage that show Members and Strategic Members information about their $VITA holding; or show everyone else with an existing wallet the $VITA holding in their wallet
  • Ability to votes on proposals for Members who signed up for the Membership
  • Ability to be notified of outstanding proposal and directed to the snapshot link to vote, for users who connect through their own wallet

Implementation

  • Success Metrics: whether the portal scaffold is deployed and running on production, with all of the features listed at the end of the season
  • Timeline
    • April 10: design finalized
    • May 8: Base UI with authentication integrated for both web2 and web3 users
    • May 29: Account onboarding experience + home page showing $VITA balance for all user groups
    • June 12: Ability to view outstanding proposals and vote on them for all user groups
  • Agree
  • Revisions Requested (Detail in Comments)
  • Disagree

0 voters

2 Likes
2

It would be helpful to compare and contrast your solution to what is currently done.

From a PI perspective, learning any new technology or web process is a nuisance, whether it is called web2 or web3. Just go for the kill and onboard to web3. As long as it is in easy to follow steps with screenshots, people can do it. Can do how-to videos for the younger folks who like that better.

Catch is that people have to want to do it. I check discourse and sometimes the discord. I’m not convinced that I need another website/another login to mess with. Adding a link to snapshot from the proposal here would be enough for me.

‘Connect Wallet’ is 10000x better than having to remember passwords for every site. The people at ORCID should be forced to program React and Solidity until they can implement ‘connect wallet’ for all their integrations in their sleep.

1 Like
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I think we have a different perspective on the web3 adoption (your they have to onboard to web3 vs. my we have to meet them where they are). That said, I think that is a very small part of what the portal is about. So instead of discussing this difference, I can expand on the strategic vision for this portal and this seasonal goal.

In scope for this proposal, you can see that beside authentication there’s also governance. We have a lot of types of different “members” (in quote so we don’t confuse it with the membership – maybe we need a different name…), some of them has the right to participate in governance, like voting, but they don’t have custody of their own tokens and currently no off-the-shelf tool can allow them, as is the case with the membership members. And even for us who can participate in governance, current tools are poorly suited for the needs. To give one example out of very many: we have been wanting anonymous votes for forever – not shield votes that will be revealed after, just votes that will remain forever anonymous. But no current tool can provide this. So after hours spent debating and researching tools to solve this and similar problems, we think it’s just better to build our own.

Mobile is another issue too. As a web3 native, even I have terrible mobile experience. I don’t use my main wallet on my phone (terrible opsec imo) and so if we token gate discord or anything I won’t even be able to do work on my phone on the go.

You seem to be concerned with returns for the cost (a really good thing to be concerned about!), so I’d like to make the case that it’s a good investment in terms of cost too. Given how many hours from how many people we’ve spent collectively discussing limitations of existing tools, discussing trade-offs between solutions that are all poor fit, and individual hours spent trying out different tools and solutions – I believe we will save money (and save the DAO attention) just building the thing. I don’t say this lightly because software development and maintenance is a lot of work, including on-going work! And still with my experience so far, I still believe that it would both save money and also allow the DAO to have tools and processes better for our needs.

4

Also I should add, if you want to log in to the portal with your wallet instead of username/password and remain in custody of your wallet, you can. Most user friendly wallet solutions now allow that :slight_smile:

5

For me, the web3 adoption is about minimizing the number of changes and new things someone has to learn. The older I get, the more frustrating it is to hunt around for a button that moved or is no longer there because the software updated.

Anonymous voting and mobile-friendly weren’t on the initial list of features. It may strengthen the proposal to focus it more cleanly on ‘here’s problem X that prevents us from doing Y.’ Propose member portal scaffold that will let us do Y. Options on A, B, C in the future.

The other part is pitfalls. 3rd party auth service (to be researched) does not inspire confidence. What if it’s no bueno? Why haven’t these tools been built out by others already? Lack of need, or hard?

6

They aren’t on the initial list of features because this proposal responds to the goal for the season, which scopes it to only starting the basis from which to build such a platform with these features. In fact it goes beyond scope, adding governance features into the mix. But that is good feedback in terms of proposal presentation, I will make those edits a bit later.

The third party auth landscape has evolved really quickly. Solutions that exist today didn’t exist just a few months ago. Full disclosure, I did freelance software engineering for one such project – custodial user-friendly wallet solutions, where you can use email/password if you want, or import seed phrases if you want, or connect metamask if you want etc. I can’t disclose which due to client confidentiality but also to ease concerns about conflicts of interest, I’m no longer working on that project and it’s not really my first choice for auth anyway. So I know that good solutions do exist, and IMO the fact that there will be some research to see which one best fits our needs should inspire confidence rather than discourage it.

As to why aren’t those tools being built already, it’s hard to go into specifics without specifying which tools. But there are two main categories of reasons: 1) the web3 tooling world doesn’t see a need to build it because the people they’re serving are still mostly web3 natives, and 2) solutions they’d like to build emphasize properties that we don’t need and de-emphasize those that we do. As an example of the latter, we really just need a way for members to indicate how they’d like to vote, it doesn’t need to be on chain or verifiable or anything like that – the transparency is sufficient from a trust perspective. But web3 solutions will want to do this on-chain or do some zk with it, making it a hard problem (that’s unnecessary hard for our use case).

1 Like
7

I wonder why majority of voters disagree with this reasonable request but have not commented on why they disagree with this!

Maybe you can breakdown the 10K ask into milestones based on your timeline @catthu ?

1 Like
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Target User Group

Members: People who signed up for the membership, to be able to participate in governance

→ Sound like a good idea if they can vote without a wallet.

Strategic Members: members who have $VITA holding in custodial services, to be able to participate in governance

→ I was assuming they could already, they should definitely be able to participate of course.

Core, contributors, stewards: these contributor groups are out of scope for the season, but our vision is also making the portal a place where contributors can go to manage their tasks, documents, and DAO-related tools

→ But, is it the same / should it be the same. We are talking about a public facing portal vs an internal tool for contributors own management. But as you say, it’s not on the initial list of features.

Longevity / dealflow group contributors: these contributor groups are out of scope for the season, but our vision also includes building out tools to improve their document access and workflow

→ Same comment.

Other Token Holders: we won’t build any additional services to support general token holders this season, but we would like to include more token related tools in the future

→ Considering they are the vast majority, it’s a bit annoying to dev something that concerns only a small percentage of people (at least for now).

User-friendly web2/web3 authentication through a third party auth service (to be researched)

→ Yes if you don’t already have a wallet authentification possible, but (personally) I don’t want another yet another login/password, redundant, and I’m tired of having dozens of them.

A homepage that show Members and Strategic Members information about their $VITA holding; or show everyone else with an existing wallet the $VITA holding in their wallet

→ Could integrate an Eth explorer/tool rather than reinventing the wheel, same thing for vita information and different stats? (But I like this very much when you can see stats about your holding or a project easily, transparency)

Ability to be notified of outstanding proposal and directed to the snapshot link to vote, for users who connect through their own wallet

→ Having my email stored and login with my wallet is ok except for privacy concerns I guess

To give one example out of very many: we have been wanting anonymous votes for forever – not shield votes that will be revealed after, just votes that will remain forever anonymous. But no current tool can provide this. So after hours spent debating and researching tools to solve this and similar problems, we think it’s just better to build our own.

→ Yes, but isn’t it what blockchain is all about, transparency?

we really just need a way for members to indicate how they’d like to vote, it doesn’t need to be on chain or verifiable or anything like that

→ Agreed that voting must be as easy as possible.

1 Like
9

Do you have any numbers on how many individuals are currently signed up for VitaDAO’s membership?

10

Sorry for the late reply @sarahfriday ! We have about 5-6 people who paid for the membership – this is without any advertisement and any promised benefits. We’ve reached out to them but haven’t gotten responses yet, and it’s not clear how to keep engaging them.

11

This proposal did not pass phase 2 and will not be implemented by the DAO