We just got a smaller questbook grant approved to build this same scope of functionality over the next 4 months for a total of 43,000.00 USD. We will use this thread to record the progress of it and to report on the project milestones. Thank you all for your feedback along the way
Arbitrum Proposals App
Non-Constitutional
Challenge Statement:
Right now, DAO delegates want to understand proposals efficiently and accurately, but proposal information is scattered all over the place (tweets, Discord servers, Telegram chats, discourse posts, offchain proposals [on snapshot], onchain proposals [on tally], etc.). This is a serious issue because it leads to unnecessary friction and inaccessibility in governance participation and, ultimately, poor decision-making for the Arbitrum DAO.
Track Name at GovHack Brussels: GovTech
Team Number at GovHack Brussels: 16
Members: andreiv.eth + paulofonseca.eth
Team Lead: Paulo Fonseca – @paulofonseca1987 on Telegram or @paulofonseca__ on Twitter
2 minute Pitch: Posted on Youtube
Low Fidelity Design Prototype: (this is unfinished and in-progress work, since it was started during the GovHack itself) arbitrum.proposals.app
Abstract
To fund the design and development of an Arbitrum-focused responsive web app that shows all Arbitrum proposals across different stages in their lifecycle and aggregates information from Discourse, Snapshot, and the Arbitrum Onchain Governor contracts so that voters and delegates can more efficiently and accurately understand the context and the whole lifecycle of each proposal they should be voting on.
Motivation
The current governance state-of-the-art is quite messy. This is not just an Arbitrum DAO problem but it affects Arbitrum DAO governance quite a lot. Still to this day, most governance processes in most big DAOs are spread across multiple platforms and systems, from messaging apps like Discord, Telegram and Twitter, to Discourse forums, to offchain voting platforms like Snapshot and then to onchain voting front-ends like Tally.
In each of these platforms, delegates need to keep themselves up to date, review information about proposals coming to vote in the DAO and form their opinions about whether they should support a particular proposal. Delegates are also expected to actively share their concerns and provide feedback on proposals throughout the lifecycle of a proposal so that the proposal can advance through the several stages of the governance process successfully.
For a delegate, even to the most competent ones, to keep up with all of this information scattered around different sources is… overwhelming, to say the least. 
As an example, this is roughly what happens when a delegate (or anybody else for that matter) tries to understand the context and form an opinion about an important Arbitrum proposal like the Gaming Catalyst Program that just recently passed.
Full video can be seen here.
If we expect more and better delegates to keep up with governance proposals adequately, we should invest in appropriate tooling to make their jobs much easier than they currently are.
Rationale
This proposal aligns with Arbitrum’s mission and community values by making the Arbitrum DAO more innovative, open, accessible, and inclusive to delegates and voters by allowing them another choice as users of Arbitrum’s DAO governance.
More specifically, the last community value in The Amended Constitution of the Arbitrum DAO, but to us, one of the most important community values, the one of attempting to be:
Neutral and open: Arbitrum governance should not pick winners and losers, but should foster open innovation, interoperation, user choice, and healthy competition on Arbitrum chains.
We know Tally has a great partnership with the Arbitrum DAO, and we are grateful for all the work the Tally team has done over more than a year to support the governance of Arbitrum DAO. We support their developments and future roadmap and are open to collaborating in any way to improve the user experience of delegates and voters in their day-to-day.
We also believe it is important for the Arbitrum DAO not to be vendor-locked in. More specifically, on the front end it offers its delegates and voters that allows them to participate in Arbitrum DAO’s onchain governance.
We believe there should be multiple front-ends to Arbitrum DAO’s onchain governance, so that we can attract more and better delegates and voters by providing them tools that suit their particular needs.
We also strongly believe that at least one of those front-ends should be fully open-source. For the obvious matters of the resilience of Arbitrum’s DAO governance, we believe there should be a fully open-source front-end for Arbitrum’s DAO on-chain governance that would allow delegates and voters to continue to participate in governance permissionlessly. proposals.app is fully open source and will continue to be. proposals.app and its future developments can also be self-hosted by anyone (like we’re doing now) under a new domain name, at any time.
Specifications
How might we enable DAO delegates, to get a more complete picture of how a proposal has evolved and what other people think about it, so that they can make a more informed voting decision, resulting in higher quality governance outcomes for the DAO?
This guiding question and a bunch of conversations and user research with DAO Delegates both in GovHack and previously when we were building Senate, has led us to believe that there is a need for a unified view of a canonical DAO proposal page that covers the whole proposal lifecycle, or at the very least, from the “initial Discourse forum post” stage to the “onchain execution” stage, obviously including temperature check poll on Snapshot, and onchain voting.
At proposals.app we already fetch Arbitrum’s DAO offchain and onchain proposals, and we also offer free email notifications to anybody that subscribes on the site. Everytime there is a new Arbitrum DAO proposal available, delegates and voters that have subscribed to proposals.app notifications, will get a fresh email in their inbox that looks like this.
Currently, we are linking each offchain or onchain proposal to their respective Snapshot.org or Tally.xyz links so delegates and voters can easily exercise their governance rights.
With this project we will build a Unified Proposal Lifecycle page, that merges the information of offchain and onchain votes for the same proposal, so that delegates and voters can have easier access to all of the information of a proposal in a single place.
This Unified Proposal Lifecycle page will show information from the proposal’s Discourse post, from the Snapshot temperature check poll, and from the onchain vote.
The challenge to be able to achieve this is to include all relevant information in the right way, at the right time, so delegates and voters don’t feel overwhelmed by it.
We’ve been mapping the proposal elements across several platforms and feel confident we have a model that captures a proposal standard that is able to show the proposal lifecycle and how the proposal has evolved, and that will help delegates and voters get more transparency into the journey of a proposal and the context it’s current or final state.
We will need to also manually map the discourse posts to the Snapshot polls and then to the onchain votes. Which is something that is not trivial to do for all past Arbitrum DAO’s proposals, but we will create a backoffice where a governance analyst can links all data sources of a proposal, to be shown in the Unified Proposal Lifecycle page.
Steps to Implement
We have a 2 part plan for this project:
- Design and Develop V1 of the Unified Proposal Lifecycle Page, which will include data and the mapping between Snapshot proposal data and Onchain proposal data.
- Design and Develop the V2 of the Unified Proposal Lifecycle Page that would add Discourse Post data.
Alongside this main plan, we need to create a mechanism to map discourse posts to Snapshot polls and then to onchain votes, so that eventually that mapping doesn’t need to be done manually for every proposal.
We are talking to @amanwithwings to move forward a daoURI standard in the Arbitrum DAO that could be extended so that Arbitrum DAO onchain proposals would include the link to their Discourse post in the onchain proposal metadata.
Once that standard would be adopted by the Arbitrum DAO, we would be able to automate the mapping of data for a single proposal. Until then, we will do it manually and very deliberately. 
Timeline
We will deliver the complete solution described above within a maximum of four months of the project’s kick-off.
The project kick-off is on October 15th, 2024, and we commit to deliver the completed project with all it’s Milestones and deliverables by February 14th, 2025.
Milestone #1
Deadline: 30 days after project kick-off
Deliverables: Create the back-end discourse indexing system and mapping backoffice to map discourse data to snapshot and onchain proposals + Setup of self-hosted infrastructure with a real-time status page monitoring
Milestone #2
Deadline: 60 days after project kick-off, 30 days after Milestone #1
Deliverables: Interactive Design Prototype Deliverable
Milestone #3
Deadline: 90 days after project kick-off, 30 days after Milestone #2
Deliverables: Development of a responsive Unified Proposal Lifecycle webpage
Milestone #4
Deadline: 120 days after project kick-off, 30 days after Milestone #3
Deliverables: Testing, Quality Assurance and Data Validation of all past proposals data
After completing the project, we commit to maintaining and ensuring the resilient hosting of the web app for at least 24 months from the project kick-off date.
Overall Cost
The overall cost for this 4 month long project totals $43,000 USD
| Monthly Amount | Duration | Total Amount | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Designer | $5,000 USD | 3 months | $15,000 USD |
| Developer | $5,000 USD | 3 months | $15,000 USD |
| Governance Analyst | $1,000 USD | 1 month | $1,000 USD |
| Servers and Hosting | $500 USD | 24 months | $12,000 USD |
During these four months, we will ship 4 deliverables, the first at Milestone #1 at the 30 day mark, the second at Milestone #2 at the 60 day mark, the third at Milestone #3 at the 90 day mark and the fourth at Milestone #4 at the 120 day mark.
The kick-off stage marks the beginning of the project after a successful acceptance of the questbook grant.
We believe in performance-based compensation, so we will only be compensated upon value delivery after successfully delivering each of the Milestones.
Payment schedule
| Kick-off | Milestone #1 | Milestone #2 | Milestone #3 | Milestone #4 | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Deadline | Day 1 | Day 30 | Day 60 | Day 90 | Day 120 |
| Payment | $0 USD | $10,000 USD | $15,000 USD | $15,000 USD | $3,000 USD |
For the multisig, we will use a Gnosis Safe multisig on Arbitrum One which has andreiv.eth and paulofonseca.eth as signers. From that multisig, all contributors and expenses will be paid at our discretion, but still fully transparently and, of course, onchain. 
Thank you for reading this proposal until the end, and please give us your honest and harshest feedback. We know we need it, and we truly welcome it! 
Also, special thanks to @DisruptionJoe, @hiringdevs.eth, @cliffton.eth, @JoJo and anybody else who provided valuable feedback on this proposal during GovHack Brussels and afterwards!
