The Aragon Foundation and Giveth are proud to announce the launch of Aragon DAC, a Decentralized Altruistic Community on the Giveth platform that will work on building out core Aragon infrastructure from the end user's perspective.

Decentralizing Aragon the Giveth Way

You might know by now that Aragon is decentralizing its development: the first step was the introduction of Aragon One, the next step was announcing the onboarding of more teams to work on core infrastructure, in the near future. Well, the future is today!

The second team that will be working on the Aragon stack is a community focused effort led by the Giveth community: the Aragon DAC will kick off with two specific projects or 'Campaigns': one focusing purely on development, the other on experimentation with the Aragon stack. Experienced members of Giveth and Aragon One will help kickstart the Aragon DAC initiatives on a voluntary and part-time basis, with the clear goal of steering the DAC towards full independence.

The Development Campaign is staffed with full-time and part-time people that create and tackle issues in the full Aragon Stack and is managed in a semi-decentralized way, while collaborating heavily with the Aragon One team and the R&D Campaign. This Campaign is spearheaded by Quazia, Social Coding Circle Lead at Giveth, who's already very familiar with Aragon through his work on an open-source planning app (which was awarded a Nest Grant) and by Chris Remus, who is (and remains) Product Manager at Aragon One, and brings inspiring product and project management skills to the team (check out some of his posts on this topic!)

The Community R&D Campaign will focus on helping end users (=non-developers) experiment with using the Aragon Stack. #Dogfooding is the name of the game! This team is stewarded by Griff Green, Giveth's Governance Circle Lead, who brings loads of community management experience to the table (see initiatives such as an open block explorer, scaling and governance of the Ethereum ecosystem) and Luke Duncan, Research Lead at Aragon One who adds some serious R&D to the mix, through his current role and overall passion for and experience with decentralized organizations. The Community R&D team will also keep you, the community, up-to-date on all progress of the Aragon DAC with the help of communication leads Tatu Kärki (Aragon One) and Kris Decoodt (Giveth).

Both of these Campaigns will be very transparent, collaborative, and community-focused. They will implement a non-hierarchical and teal-based structure and will use Aragon, Giveth, and other blockchain-based tools to build their organization.

Our hiring process will be adaptive, focusing on a fluid labor sourcing via incentivization mechanisms. We hope to target gaps in the Aragon One and Giveth teams skill set and available resources. Once these gaps have been identified, we can onboard more committed team members in a way that cultivates synergies with the Aragon One team. This should allow both teams to focus on their strengths in a complementary way.

More Campaigns will likely be created once these initial ones are up and running, and we have built a team of 8 to 10 people dedicated to working on this DAC as their primary focus. More details on these two initial Campaigns in the notes from our kickoff meeting in July.

Some of the Aragon and Giveth teams in Toronto during EDCON 2018

Aragon onboards Giveth onboards Aragon

The collaboration between the Aragon Foundation (which leads the onboarding of new teams) and the Giveth DAC (the primordial user of the Giveth DApp) makes a lot of sense to all individuals involved, as it is a logical next step in the evolution and scaling of both projects, and is reinforced by a strongly connected mission and deeply shared values.

Aragon was born to bring transparency and independent governance to the forefront of managing an organization. Giveth focuses on using blockchain technology for good and is building a completely free, open-source platform for DACs, to drastically increase transparency and accountability.

The Giveth DApp, Giveth's flagship project is currently in closed beta and is ready to onboard its first Communities (DACs) who live and breathe Ethereum (the 'early adopters') to further guide the development of the platform, before opening up to a larger audience.

The Aragon Foundation from its side wants DAOs to conquer the world as soon as possible and is ready to increase its bandwidth.

Aragon is making this a reality by kicking off a close collaboration with Giveth through the funding of a DAC/Community on the Giveth platform, that will work on the Aragon Project, making this a solid win for both parties.

Eagles and Unicorns Unite!

The initial priorities of the Aragon DAC are first off to bridge the communication channels, bridging Aragon's Rocket Chat rooms with Giveth's Riot Chat rooms—join us here or here—and to set up common tools and regular meetings. For the Development Campaign there is the Aragon All Core Devs call (every other week) plus daily stand-up meetings, while the Community R&D Campaign has a bi-weekly call and mainly communicates through a github repo with zenhub boards.

Next to the legal and financial set-up we also started to actually build this Community by initiating the recruitment process, and for this we need you!

Come talk to us on Riot or Rocket Chat, and tell us how you can help us build Unstoppable Organizations.

Warm regards,

Aragon & Giveth