Aragon One has already completed 30% of its roadmap for 2019

In January 2019, ANT holders welcomed Aragon One as a Flock team. They approved our roadmap for 2019, which was recently updated. I'll provide a brief status update, and also provide a breakdown initiative by initiative.

Summary

I am extremely proud of the work that the team has been pulling off.

I estimate we have completed around 30% of what we promised. I know we should be around 50% by now. I think we will close that 20% gap soon, since work on many of those incomplete items has been already started.

We are also starting to see visible results from improving our product process. From design specifications to reviews and planning, we are operating more efficiently.

But if I need to highlight something, it is our product iteration velocity. We are now consistently shipping new minor releases every two weeks. I have to thank everyone in the team for making this possible.

My number one predictor of whether or not a company will find product-market fit: High shipping cadence. — Naval (@naval) May 14, 2019

For the next couple of months, we will still be heads down building some big items (Agent, notifications, caching...). That will change after 0.8, and we will focus more on smaller iterations and user feedback. And, of course, the Aragon Court, which we want to be our only big item for Q3.

This change in priorities represents the maturity of the Aragon client, which is what will allow us to focus on user adoption.

We couldn't be more excited about the rest of 2019!

PS: We are now strengthening our relations with Autark and Aragon Black since we are working on some initiatives together. They are both brilliant teams, and our experience working together has been seamless so far!

Product

Existing initiatives

01 – Identity experience

We shipped custom labels with Bella. Not only that, but we have also shipped rich ways to export them in a granular way. And also to share them easily using links.

In the next quarter, we will support Autark and their work on identity.

02 – Agent application

We released the smart contracts for Agent. Now, we will work on its UI and integration with Frame. This will allow you to easily interact on behalf of the organization on any Ethereum dapp. Then you will see all interactions right in the Agent app in the Aragon client.

03 – App Center experience

We shipped the ability to do app upgrades from the UI. Dozens of organizations have already upgraded their smart contracts and frontends.

It has been the first end-user-initiated on-chain smart contract upgrade that we know of on Ethereum.

We also dropped developer monetization, to focus first on user adoption.

04 – Flexible permissions

We will focus on bringing budgeting and recurrent payments to the Finance app.

05 – Responsive experience

Aragon now fully works on mobile! The only exception is the onboarding, which will be re-designed on 0.8. We will make sure that it works on mobile too.

We dropped building a native app to instead focus on responsiveness 100%.

06 – Blockchain abstraction

We have been working on meta-transactions to add support for them to aragonOS.

As part of the onboarding re-design for 0.8, we will also reduce the number of transactions for creating an organization from two to just one.

07 – New voting architecture

We have been doing research and implementation work on the smart contracts. We are thinking about a way in which users could vote by just signing a message. Yet we need to work more on the relayer since that'd be the piece that gets all those messages and submits the votes.

08 – Dispute resolution (Aragon Network)

We have been researching and also kickstarted prototyping designs and creating user journeys. The whitepaper has been updated to reflect the latest changes in the protocol, and the implementation of the smart contracts of the Aragon Court is underway.

New initiatives

These are new initiatives that we have added to our 2019 roadmap.

09 – Caching on the Aragon client

We want to focus on two areas:

- Making our current caching approach better. This will improve load times after the first load of any given organization.

- Experiment and implement centralized/decentralized hybrid solutions. Such as making the first load fully trusted, and then gradually syncing in a decentralized fashion.

10 – Email notifications

All actions on organizations are irreversible, and some of them may involve funds. Because of that, notifications become very important to an organization’s stakeholders.

We will work on a notification system built into the Aragon client.

11 – Aragon client re-design and general enhancements

We have been working on design guidelines for the whole Aragon platform that will really help developers when creating new Aragon apps.

We will also make sure all our apps adhere to the new guidelines.

As part of this re-design, we will also re-design the following items, based on user feedback:

The Permissions app

The Voting app

12 – Support Aragon Fundraising development

We will support Aragon Black in their efforts to create the Aragon Fundraising app.

This includes:

Designing the whole app

Doing code reviews

13 – Launch Aragon Payroll

Crypto-native payroll has sparked a lot of interest, and we are continuing Protofire's work on Aragon Payroll to finish it and start using it with early testers.

Other items

aragonOS global emergency failsafe

We have been working on an opt-in system so apps could be frozen in the event of critical bugs.

Improve developer experience

We have been reviewing the amazing work that the Aragon Mesh team has been doing on this.

New dev portal

We deployed the new Aragon Developer portal.

New website!

And it's amazing, isn't it?

Community

The Comms team has been faithfully delivering on the Community work as expected in Aragon One’s 2019 Flock proposal. Here is a summary of the work done so far

Responding to questions and requests for help across official community channels

Facilitating the AGP process for Aragon Network Vote #2

Keeping documentation up to date in the Aragon Wiki, including a User Guide 0.7 update

Maintaining community infrastructure, including assisting with a re-design of the forum

Upcoming work to be done this year

Re-design and re-organize the Wiki to integrate the design language of aragon.org

Facilitate Aragon Network Vote #3 and #4, continue improving AGP process

Assist in the implementation and roll-out of Help Scout for user support

Keep user documentation up to date with new product updates

Communications

The Comms team has also been busy with a variety of Communications related tasks

Planning events and meetups, fielding sponsorship and speaking requests

Communicating product, community, and strategy updates via the Aragon One and Aragon project blogs

Promoting our work through social media channels

Assisting with the release of new web pages to better communicate what we do

Publishing photos and videos from AraCon 2019

Upcoming work to be done this year

More events planning and coordination

More blog and social media posts sharing our work with the world

Begin building deeper relationships with press and media outlets to share our work with a broader audience

Research

The research team has been busy with several projects

Working on our implementation of the court

Worked on the specification for proposal agreements

Updated the whitepaper

Investigating meta-transaction support for Aragon

Investigating an opt-in mechanism for organizations to allow an external party to safely pause applications that have been reported as unsafe

Upcoming work to be done this year

Support product team in shipping the court and proposal agreements

Support documentation and communication efforts related to the Aragon Network

Work on implementation for proxy/delegate voting and the vote relay protocol

Ecosystem development

We have been working on

Managing the Aragon Nest and Flock programs. We supported the Aragon Association team on finding a new program manager and worked on the transfer of the management of these programs to the Aragon Association team.

Supporting the product team with work related to product and protocol/market fit: market segmentation, target user, underserved needs, value proposition, key features/applications.

Identifying, engaging (inbound and outbound), and executing on key use cases for Aragon.

Upcoming work to be done this year