Ask Ape: Enhancing Ape Coin DAO Decision-Making

PROPOSAL NAME:

Ask Ape: Enhancing Ape Coin DAO Decision-Making

TEAM DESCRIPTION:

Our team, the DAO Masons, is a group of dedicated Web3 professionals focused on advancing decentralized ecosystems. Our expertise spans project management, software engineering, UI/UX design, and community engagement.

Name Roles Relevant Experience Contact
Chris (Boiler) Outreach, BizDev BizDev and Community DAO Masons. Contributor at DAOhaus (Public HAUS), Metacartel, and Public Nouns. 20+ years experience in construction and Nuclear Industry projects @boilerrat
Jord Product Manager, Engineering Lead Lead developer and founder at DAO Masons, web3 developer at DAOhaus, Raid Guild Member, Builder Nouns, 5 years of Web3 Development @Jordeth
Matt (UI369) Operations Lead Operations manager and founder at DAO Masons & DAOhaus (Public HAUS), former organizational design partner at HolacracyOne, 11 years of professional software development experience @UI369
Open Position Community Manager We will be looking for a community manager from the pool of deeply embedded Ape ecosystem members, capable of helping us set up test polls that are of value to the community.

We initially collaborated as core members of DAOhaus, driven by a shared passion for DAOs and effective governance design. Our mission at DAO Masons is to “help DAOs win” by providing the tools and infrastructure necessary for robust and effective governance.

PROPOSAL DESCRIPTION:

Ask Ape: Enhancing ApeCoin Community Decision-Making is a proposal to build a user-friendly tool designed for on-chain multi-choice voting, polling, and surveying within the ApeCoin ecosystem. Ask Ape aims to enhance and improve Ape Coin DAO governance by providing a platform for gathering and acting upon community signals. It will enable active participation of members in DAO activities and decisions, reinforcing the use case of ApeCoin as a governance tool for the DAO.

This proposal is born out of our active participation in ApeCoin community calls, where we observed a clear need for a streamlined and effective tool to facilitate decentralized decision-making. The goal of this proposal is to make it easier for the DAO to make informed decisions in a timely, transparent manner.

Why Ask Ape?

ApeCoin DAO currently relies heavily on Snapshot.org for significant decisions, which involves a lengthy and formal process. While effective for AIPs, this process is slow and cumbersome for day-to-day decisions or issues that still require community input. Ask Ape addresses this gap by providing an agile, efficient, and user-friendly platform for on-chain multi-choice voting.

Key Features:

  1. On-Chain Multi-Choice Voting:

    • In App Multi-Choice Voting: Ask Ape offers multi-choice on-chain voting capabilities directly, ensuring transparency and trust in every decision made.
  2. User-Friendly Interface:

    • Real-Time Updates: Leveraging tools like Envio for real-time chain indexing, Ask Ape provides live updates on voting results without the need for page refreshes.
    • Comprehensive Content Display: The interface will include all the reasoning and content surrounding each decision, enhancing the voting experience and engagement.
  3. Customizable Voting Modules:

    • Built on the Stem voting contracts, Ask Ape allows extensive customization of the voting process, including choices, points, votes, and execution modules.

Objective:

Signal Voting App:

  • Description: Develop a signal voting app tailored for the ApeCoin ecosystem.
    • Objectives:
      • Conduct several test signal sessions to gather data and feedback.
      • Refine and improve the app based on test session results.
      • Ensure the app can handle both short-term votes for community calls and long-term votes for strong signal polling.
      • Enable users to create on-chain polls, contests, and surveys quickly and efficiently.
      • Build out new voting modules based on community feedback.

BENEFIT TO APECOIN ECOSYSTEM:

Problem

Ape Coin currently has limited community governance opportunities or ways to gather signal for basic day to day decisions in an officail capacity. The DAO has entrusted it’s working groups to perform most of these administrative duties, however there are many instances where gathering community signal would be beneficial.

Ape Coin uses snapshot.org to make the DAO wide decisions, in the form of AIPs. To get an AIP through, is a lengthy, formal process, with various bottle-necks along the way. While this is a good process for AIPs it leaves no room for day to day DAO involvement beyond taking part in group discussions.

In many cases, a complete AIP is not needed. The AIP process is simply to slow for smaller decisions or decisions that do not effect the overall well being or direction of the DAO, nor would they require one of the working groups to decide.

Solutions

Enhanced Governance Experience (GX):

  • Ease of Use: Any member of the ApeCoin DAO, regardless of technical capabilities, will be able to create a multi-choice vote and gather signal from the community in under two minutes.
  • Community Engagement: The platform will foster engagement by having an easy voting process and presenting clear, informative interfaces for decision-making.
  • Content-Rich Interface: The interface will be content-rich and include the reasoning behind each user’s decision, if they choose to provide one. By building a real-time interface, we can capture the liveness seen in apps like pump.fun and friend.tech and apply it to voting.

Super-Charged Voting:

  • Customizable Voting Modules: Built on the Stem voting contracts, Ask Ape allows for extensive customization of the voting process, including:
    • Choices Module: This module decides how choices (the things we vote on) are created, who gets to create them, and how these choices are managed. You can also program in on-chain rewards or reputation for adding choices.
    • Points Module: Determines how many votes each address can cast. Our first implementation will use the Ape Coin holders / delegate weighted voting, but in the future, we can integrate reputational scores or participation scores (more voting weight for past participation). It can also factor in staked or vested token balances.
    • Votes Module: Decides what happens when a user votes for a choice. This can incorporate voting schemas like quadratic or donation voting. This contract could also include on-chain rewards for voting.
    • Execution Module: Specifies what happens as a result of a vote. This allows the contracts to autonomously perform any transaction based on the voting results, whether that’s sending funds to the top-rated choices, managing voting thresholds and quorums, or creating new rounds of Grant Ships with the results. While the execution module is not part of this proposal, as the testing required to ensure safety of automated transactions does not fall within the timeline to implement this version of Ask Ape, it is something that can be considered for future versions.
  • Cross-Chain Compatibility: A massive feature of Ask Ape is the ability to use tokens that are on different networks. This is a key differentiator from competitors like Snapshot and JokeRace. If someone has tokens on Mainnet, Arbitrum, and ApeChain, they will be able to vote as if it were all on one chain, making the voting process seamless and inclusive for all token holders.

Trust and Transparency:

  • On-Chain Trust: All actions and votes are recorded on-chain, ensuring transparency and trust in the decision-making process.

Enhanced User Experience

  • Real-Time Updates: Utilizing tools like Envio for real-time chain indexing, the app will provide live updates without the need for page refreshes.

Use Cases

  • Quick decision during a community call.
  • Fine tune details of an AIP, before it goes live.
  • Determine funding levels for recurring programs such as grants.
  • Voting on event planning details (where are we meeting for beers tonight?)
  • Emergency decisions. (where are we meeting for beers tonight?)
  • Elections, other than official working group elections, which has it’s own process.
  • Creating contests.

DEFINITIONS:

  • Envio: A tool for efficient real-time blockchain indexing.
  • Quadratic Voting: Uses mathematical algorithms to increase the “cost” of voting per vote. This technique encourages splitting votes amongst different options, as in a TCR vote.
  • Signal Voting: A voting mechanism designed to quickly gather community preferences and opinions.
  • Stem Voting Contracts: Modular solidity contracts that allow for flexible and customizable voting processes.
  • TCR: A registry, or list, of choices created by token holders. Voters are able to split their votes amongst their preference of choices.

STEPS TO IMPLEMENT:

  1. Development (6 Weeks):

    • Refine Voting Contracts: Improve UX based on user feedback.
    • Factory Contracts: Simplify the creation of voting modules.
    • Real-Time Indexer (Envio): Implement for faster chain indexing.
    • Real-Time Interface: Develop an intuitive interface for displaying voting results.
  2. Testing and Feedback (4 Weeks):

    • Conduct test sessions and gather user feedback.
    • Refine the app based on test results.
  3. Launch and Adoption (6 Weeks):

    • Promote the app within the ApeCoin community.
    • Provide training and support for first-time users.

REPORTING EXPECTATIONS:

  • Weekly Updates: Provide regular progress reports to the community.
  • User Feedback Sessions: Conduct periodic sessions to gather and incorporate user feedback.

OVERALL COST:

Total amount requested from the ApeCoin Ecosystem Fund = 50,000 $APE.

  • Development Costs: 30,000 $APE
  • Operations, Testing and Support: 10,000 $APE
  • Marketing and Community Engagement: 10,000 $APE

This budget will cover all aspects of development, testing, and initial launch, ensuring a smooth rollout and adoption within the ApeCoin community.

Our DAO doesn’t do any of the above. Everything we currently do, goes through the AIP process. At least the transparent ones.

And the closest we ever get to “emergency decisions” is us yelling at them on X.

For contests, we have ThankApe.

2 Likes

Appreciate your comments,
This is different than Thank Ape, in that anyone can whip it up in two minutes and it has potential to enable various voting “modifiers” such as quadratic voting or reputation weighted voting. We haven’t included it in this proposal but we will also be working on executing ANY onchain action with the results of a vote. That’s the power that voting onchain brings.
Not doing something one way is not a reason not to do it right, that’s why it’s an “improvement proposal.” So hopefully you can see this proposal is to benefit the DAO and improve the governance footprint with a tool the whole DAO can use.
This is actually an improvement on snapshot itself if we really wanted to go that far, in that it brings the voting onchain, which snapshot does not. I don’t think we are interested in disrupting that process if it is working.

I’m very well aware of Thank Ape and Thrive Coin. We work with them… a lot.
Something like this complements that program very well. Example the DAO could have a “contest” to create a TCR for what the next season’s theme for Thank Ape could be, or narrowing down on the choices for tasks for the season.

Yes, I get that particular use case, but the reality is that our DAO community isn’t that engaged to the extent that a competition - of any kind - would rally the troops. Heck, we can’t even get them on Discourse - let alone to vote. And even so, we’re more in tune with ThankApe for things like that because that’s been the go-to platform.

While I understand the premise of your proposal, I don’t see the DAO voting for a $30K spend on something that nobody is likely to use. There has to be USP for something like this, and even with your list, I am having trouble finding a tangible USP that would make this an attractive proposal. But that’s just my personal opinion, as I don’t speak for the community.

Something new that has come up, as a way of validating the product we are building. We have also proposed this app to Arbitrum as “Ask Arb.” We found out today we have received a firestarter grant from Thrive Coin to build it for Arbitrum.
Thrive Coin is the company behind Thank Arb and Thank Ape. Clearly they see our product as not competitive with their own product and as I said, it complements that program very well. Also keep in mind, this is not just about running contests, this is onchain modular governance. We can plug it into reputation systems or other voting modifiers such as quadratic.
There’s a contract protocol behind Ask Ape called Stem Protocol Click the link and check out the contracts, if you’re into reading contracts.

Congrats on the Arb grant. Do you have a link to it?

Anyway, the Arb community are way more engaged in their ecosystem than ours. And so, it makes sense that they would see the value in your idea. Perhaps you should let the Thrive Coin people know that you would like to deploy it here on ApeCoin as well.

As you can already see from this thread, there is no engagement. I expect that unless there’s a tangible use case, this proposal will struggle to pass a community vote.

As I mentioned previously, this is similar to a temp check which, now that I think about it, could very well be used in a manner that I described in this proposal Delegated ApeCoin Community Voting Wallet

My thought is that we can already use Snapshot for things like temp checks, so what’s the use case benefit for AskApe? e.g. what could it possiblly do that we can’t do with Snapshot or even Tally (which Arbitrum uses for temp checks).

Hi @boiler ,

The community feedback period for your proposal would be ending in roughly 24 hours.

  • If you’re content with the feedback received, your next steps are to finalize your proposal using the AIP Draft Template.

  • A moderator will reach out to the author to finalize the AIP Draft. Upon receipt of the final Draft, we will review and provide instructions on the next steps.

  • Are you ready to proceed to the next phase or do you wish to extend community discussion for another 7 days?

We look forward to hearing from you.

-@Facilitators

Hi ApeCoin DAO Community,

@boiler has requested to extend the community discussion period for this AIP idea. This topic will automatically close a further 7 days from now. We encourage the community to continue to engage in thoughtful discussions through constructive criticism, honest feedback, and helpful suggestions.

Follow this Topic as further updates will be posted here in the comments.

-@Facilitators

No link on that yet, we have email confirmation, when Thrive makes the winners public, I will share a link.

We’ve decided to extend the idea discussion another week. Certainly appreciate your comments @SmartAPE
We are very aware of voter apathy and building habits is difficult, so we don’t disagree with the difficulty in getting people to use something new. We can certainly help to build these habits and we will make changes in the proposal to reflect our intentions to spend the time required in the community to build these habits, such as engaging with the community to use Ask.Ape in community calls to hold polls during calls.
We also feel there is a taste for improving the governance process at Ape Coin DAO
GWG x LiveFast: Historical AIP Voting Analysis With Alternate Strategies - General - ApeCoin DAO Ask.Ape could be just the tool needed for this purpose.
Personally, I feel the report that @AllCityBAYC posted, points to the possibility that a single voting solution may not be the best option and in fact a plurality of options is desirable, dependent on the situation and importance of the vote.

Hi @boiler ,

The community feedback period for your proposal would be ending in less than 24 hours.

  • If you’re content with the feedback received, your next steps are to finalize your proposal using the AIP Draft Template.
  • A moderator will reach out to the author to finalize the AIP Draft. Upon receipt of the final Draft, we will review and provide instructions on the next steps.
  • Are you ready to proceed to the next phase or do you wish to extend community discussion for another 7 days?

We look forward to hearing from you.

-@Facilitators

Hi @boiler ,
Thank you for your ideas [and the ApeCoin DAO community for the insightful discussions].

A moderator will reach out to the author to finalize the AIP Draft using the appropriate template.

  • Once the AIP Draft is confirmed by the author and meets all DAO-approved guidelines, it will receive an AIP ID number and move forward for Draft Analysis Review.
  • @boiler please see your messages for the next steps.

Follow this Topic as further updates will be posted here in the comments. In accordance with DAO-approved guidelines, if the author does not respond within 30 days, the proposal will be automatically transferred to the Withdrawn category, and the author can re-submit the idea.

-@Facilitators

1 Like

This topic was automatically closed after 14 days. New replies are no longer allowed.

Hi ApeCoin DAO Community,

@boiler has requested to withdraw their application. This AIP will be moved to and remain in the Withdrawn AIPs category.

Kind Regards,

-@Facilitators