[Non-Constitutional] Let’s improve our governance forum with three proposals.app feature integrations

[paulofonseca]

[Non-Constitutional] Let’s improve our governance forum with three proposals.app feature integrations

Abstract

proposals.app proposes a formal collaboration with Arbitrum DAO to enhance the usability of this governance forum, so that delegates, tokenholders, and forum readers can have more context and information about our DAO proposals. We propose designing, developing, testing, and deploying three feature integrations in this governance forum, as well as maintaining and hosting them for a period of one year, for a total of $60,000 USD.

Motivation

Currently, DAO governance remains a disjointed, messy, and confusing experience for delegates and tokenholders. We believe that one of the main reasons for this is the clear lack of foundational DAO tooling that prioritizes true composability and aggregates data from multiple (even competing) offchain and onchain sources, thereby providing a more comprehensive and enjoyable user experience for DAO delegates and tokenholders. We believe that to achieve this, DAO tools should be free and open-source, operate under a non-profit entity that ideally has public financial records of its operations. At proposals.app, we strive to uphold these beliefs.

Andrei and I have been building DAO tools since mid-2023, starting with Senate, where we previously piloted two forum integrations (one with Uniswap, and another with Aave), and more recently, we’ve been working on proposals.app, where we’ve developed dedicated tooling for Arbitrum DAO’s governance needs that was funded through a questbook grant last October. More specifically, we’ve designed and developed a unified governance aggregator that brings together, under the same platform, the discourse forum comments and both offchain and onchain votes, so that delegates can access the complete history of every proposal in Arbitrum DAO. We launched it publicly on April 5ᵗʰ at ETH Bucharest 2025, and you can check it out at arbitrum.proposals.app and share your thoughts about it with us in our telegram chat.

We’re now proposing a formal collaboration with Arbitrum DAO to bring some of the exclusive proposals.app features we have in our app, to this governance forum. We propose designing, developing, testing, and deploying three feature integrations in this governance forum, as well as maintaining and hosting them for a period of 12 months.

We believe that these three features will enhance usability and accessibility in this governance forum for all users, regardless of their level of maturity.

These three features, as demonstrated above, are:

1. Live Votes – Show the live or latest vote at the top of the page for each forum topic in the proposals category
2. Voting Power Tags – Show the voting power of each delegate, under their username, for every comment on the forum
3. Proposal Notification Emails – Provide a way for forum visitors to subscribe to email notifications, receiving an email every time a new discussion is started, when an offchain or onchain vote begins, and when its voting period is nearing completion.

With these three proposals.app feature integrations in this forum, we believe will see bigger governance participation and better engagement in discussions, from a more diverse set of delegates and tokenholders, who will have more context about who is commenting on what, about when proposals are up to a vote and where and when to vote in each moment of the proposal lifecycle.

We shared a short demo of proposals.app and these three proposed feature integrations on the Open Governance Call on June 3rd, and you can see the recording of that demo and presentation, as well as some Q&A, in the video below:

proposals.app demo and presentation of forum integrations for Arbitrum DAO forum

Rationale

Constantly improving and caring for the governance processes in Arbitrum DAO is essential to maintain a healthy, engaged, resilient, and decentralized DAO. In Arbitrum DAO’s case, where tokenholders and delegates actually have on-chain control over protocol upgrades and treasury spending, it becomes even more critical that they vote with as much context and information as possible in each and every vote.

Additionally, in token-weighted voting DAOs, not all voices carry the same weight. Powerful delegates commenting and giving feedback on proposals are crucial signals of support. On the other hand, newly created forum accounts with no voting power, which are becoming more prevalent in the age of AI, make way more noise than signal and disrupt the discussion flow. Proposers and readers should be able to distinguish between the two and everything in between, much more easily.

As stated in The Amended Constitution of the Arbitrum DAO, we should strive to follow our stated Community Values, and specifically:

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 believe it’s essential for Arbitrum DAO to have multiple governance platforms available to its tokenholders, delegates, and voters, so that we can attract more and better delegates and voters by providing them with tools that suit their particular needs and help them engage in governance in an easier and clearer way.

We also strongly believe that at least one of those front-ends should be fully open-source. Regarding the obvious matter of the resilience of Arbitrum’s DAO governance, we believe there should be a fully open-source front-end for Arbitrum’s DAO governance that would allow delegates and voters to continue participating 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, by anybody in the world.

Specifications

To implement these three forum feature integrations described above, we will create three distinct Discourse theme components, rather than Discourse plugins.

This way, admins of Discourse hosted instances (like the one for the Arbitrum DAO forum) can easily install each one of these feature integrations from a GitHub repo link (where the code will be fully open-source and auditable, of course) and manage the updates for each feature integration independently, as we evolve and maintain them after the initial deployment.

As mentioned above, this is how we previously integrated with the Uniswap and Aave governance forums, in the past.

Steps to Implement

We will design, develop, test, and deploy these 3 Discourse forum proposals.app feature integrations, in the following order:

1. Voting Power Tags – Showing discourse users’ voting power alongside their usernames in every topic and post in the Arbitrum DAO governance forum. To achieve this, we must retrieve all previous delegation data for the $ARB token and maintain a mapping between the top discourse users and voting wallets on Arbitrum DAO. This voting power tag will always display the current voting power of each delegate by default. Upon clicking on it, the delegate’s voting power at the time the comment was posted will be displayed instead.
   

   

2. Live Votes – In every proposal posted in the Arbitrum DAO governance forum, which goes up for an offchain or onchain vote, we will display a component at the top of the forum proposal page, which shows that there is an active offchain or onchain vote, the current live results of that offchain or onchain vote, and a link to vote on it. To achieve this, we must map all forum proposals and their respective Snapshot votes and onchain votes, as well as index all voting data from either Snapshot’s API or the onchain Arbitrum DAO Governors (both the non-constitutional Arbitrum Treasury governor and the constitutional Arbitrum Core governor).
   

   

3. Proposal Notification Emails – In the Arbitrum DAO governance forum homepage, we will display a “Setup Proposal Notifications” button, which will open a modal for forum users to subscribe to email notifications, so that they can receive timely emails whenever a new proposal discussion is posted on the forum, when an offchain or onchain vote starts, and when an offchain or onchain vote is about to end. To achieve this, we need to maintain a GDPR-compliant list of emails and newsletters, as well as a dedicated subdomain and address to send email notifications from, ensuring optimal email deliverability for those email notifications.
   

   

Timeline

Following the successful approval of this proposal and the initial onchain transfer, we will hold a project kickoff call and begin building the first integration, the Voting Power Tags, which we can deploy and deliver within one month. Then we will work on the Live Votes integration, which we can also deploy and deliver within one month. Finally, we will work on the Proposal Notification Emails integration, which we will also deploy and deliver within one month.

In total, it will take us 1 month to deliver these three feature integrations to the Arbitrum DAO after the project kickoff call, which should happen after a successful onchain vote. During this time, we will work with all Arbitrum DAO delegates to gather feedback on this functionality and improve it to meet your needs. After deploying all these integrations, we will maintain and host them for a period of 12 months.

We plan to put this proposal up for a temperature check offchain vote on Thursday, June 12th. After a successful offchain vote, we will move this proposal and publish an onchain vote on Monday, June 23rd, to start the voting period on Thursday, June 26th.
After a successful onchain vote, we can kick off this work and start the timeline proposed above, as early as July 15th.
This would mean that we could deliver all of the proposed scope, 1 month later, on August 15th.

Overall Cost

We propose to build, maintain, and host these three feature integrations for Arbitrum for a minimum of 12 months. The total cost to the Arbitrum DAO, is $60,000 USD.

Here is the cost breakdown:

Item	Amount
Maintenance 1 year (1 day of Design + 1 day of Development + 1 day of Testing, per month)	$48,000 USD
Hosting 1 year (3 Servers, DNS, and Emails)	$12,000 USD
Total	$60,000 USD

The Maintenance fee includes 1 day per month of Design, 1 day per month of Development, and 1 day per month of Testing, to ensure we maintain these features with an up-to-date user experience and quality of service, and that we can incorporate the delegates’ future feedback on these proposals.app feature integrations.

The Hosting fee includes the monthly costs for all the infrastructure we use, which can be live-monitored on status.proposals.app.

We propose that the payment be done as a one-time payment of $60,000 USD.

After a successful onchain vote, the funds should be transferred either to the MSS or the Arbitrum Foundation (depending on the outcome of the current Wind Down the MSS proposal), which would certify the delivery of the three feature integrations and release the payment after a successful deployment.

Pledge

Andrei and Paulo pledge to continually work towards a future where DAO governance tools are genuinely credibly neutral. Therefore, our work is public, fully open-source, and happens with transparent financials. Additionally, proposals.app will soon be established as a non-profit entity, and we pledge never to accept venture capital funding. Until now, proposals.app has only received a $43,000 USD grant from Arbitrum DAO via Season 2 of the Domain Allocator grants on Questbook, as well as $6,000 USD for the first-place prize in the Arbitrum GovHack at ETHcc Brussels. No other funding, from any other source, was received, as shown in our multisig.

Thank you

Thank you for taking the time to read this proposal through to the end. Please provide us with your honest and most critical feedback. We know we need it, and we genuinely welcome it!

Also, a very special thanks to @Sinkas from L2BEAT, Denys from @lobbyfi, Tnorm from Gauntlet, Sam from @Entropy, @MinistroDolar from Seedgov, Yambette, @jameskbh, @pedrob, @Juanrah, @KlausBrave, @ana.vc from Farstar, and Raam and Patrick from the @Arbitrum Foundation, who were kind enough to make their time available to us, to try out and test the arbitrum.proposals.app and collectively gave us over 250 user insights and pieces of feedback. And also a huge thank you to everybody else who reached out to us with feedback, bug reports, and suggestions.
We sincerely appreciate you and look forward to hearing more from you as we launch new features to serve you better and better.

[paulofonseca]

You can also reach to me on Telegram, where my handle is @paulofonseca1987, if you prefer to give us private feedback about this proposal. Thank you!

[GFXlabs]

Thank you, Paulo for this proposal!

GFX believes these features would be incredibly useful and well worth the spend.

Voting power tags will help delegates know quickly when a commenter is entrusted with significant voting power, is a minor delegate, or is an outside observer.

Live voting with a quick link to the appropriate voting venue should hopefully increase the timeliness and participation for votes. As it stands now, a casual observer may have difficulty knowing when a vote has begun and tracking its outcome. Having an easy user flow from the parent forum thread to the vote is an upgrade with no down side.

We want to simultaneously highlight the email notifications as well as disclose that PaperImperium, who is the governance lead at GFX Labs, did previously have a small investment in Senate (which wound down), which this development team were part of. The email notifications in particular are a simple thing that makes for a lot of time savings and improved response time, which we can attest to from the days that Senate was operating similar notifications. We felt the loss of that, and our daily routine to get up to speed on forum discussions and proposals is longer than it was when those notifications were available.

Overall, these are all pure quality-of-life upgrades for delegates and forum observers (like reporters and academic researchers). $100k/year will easily pay for itself in time saved, and hopefully increased and more timely participation as well.

We support this proposal.

[danielo]

These features feel useful and I can see myself using them. But I have concerns with the proposal:

• Contract length: Will Arbitrum keep having significant proposal flow? Org design wise I know some of the largest delegates are aligned on moving more decisions to units and keeping the DAO more high-level. As such, a 2 year contract feels unnecessarily long for something that might change quite a bit soon. 1 year should be plenty.
• Cost: 200k for this is quite a bit. Having built multiple apps, items like the proposal email notification are maybe at 5x the cost. I see teams that have received a grant deliver the equivalent in new features for $25k. The proposal cost should be 1/3 - 1/4.

[DonOfDAOs]

I haven’t reviewed deeply enough to comment on budget one way or another.

But, what I can say is the notion of completely at-cost build is reductionist to the advancement of the DAO. Builders (such as Paulo) who have shown extreme commitment to the ecosystem and have delivered quality products do deserve to be respected as a service provider, not a bounty shop.

I’d be completely comfortable with some built in premium as it retains good builders and, good builders in turn reinvest their efforts back into the ecosystem. This is superior to a bargain basement race to the bottom of grant bounty hunters just to undercut ten thousand here or there off total cost. Especially when they then take the money and leave. It’s not always about pm’ing grants for the cheapest solution

Investing in builders, (especially for non-exorbitant amounts) is worth the extra bit.

[Oni]

I appreciate the intention to improve the forum environment, but I have concerns about the proportionality between the proposed features and the budget requested. I would also like to comment on the features.

@paulofonseca

These three features, as demonstrated above, are:

1. Live Votes – Show the live or latest vote at the top of the page for each forum topic in the proposals category
2. Voting Power Tags – Show the voting power of each delegate, under their username, for every comment on the forum
3. Proposal Notification Emails – Provide a way for forum visitors to subscribe to email notifications, receiving an email every time a new discussion is started, when an offchain or onchain vote begins, and when its voting period is nearing completion.

As someone with a UX/UI perspective, I recognize that displaying “Live Votes” results could add real functional value by making it easier to track proposals and better understand the governance process. On the other hand, while “Proposal Notification Emails” aren’t essential, they could still be helpful for certain users (myself included) as reminders to stay updated on new proposals and key voting stages.

However, the “Voting Power Tags” feature doesn’t seem to address a critical need or provide a clear benefit to the user experience. In my opinion, such tags could unintentionally introduce bias into discussions by conditioning the perception of comments based on the voting power, rather than the content itself.

Therefore, the total budget of $206,400 USD should be considered, with $120,000 for maintenance and hosting only, as I consider this to be a little high given the scope of the improvements. It is not that these features do not add value, but the proposed cost is high for a change that does not fundamentally transform participation or address urgent problems in the system.

I think a more reasonable alternative would be to prioritize the visibility of the most impactful feature, “Live Votes” and evaluate its adoption before moving forward with the others. This would allow for a more data-driven and cost-effective approach.

I value you effort to improve the DAO, but in this case, moving forward with the full proposal doesn’t seem like the most efficient path. A more gradual, focused rollout with a leaner budget might deliver better results. In addition, @paulofonseca I would like to share some ideas that came to me while I was writing.

[paulofonseca]

Hey @danielo thank you for reading our proposal and for the positive words about the features we proposed.

Addressing your concerns:

• Regarding the contract length, I agree with you that maybe the proposal flow in Arbitrum DAO will decrease given the proposed new vision (I pointed that out myself last month here) but we still don’t know for sure what is going to happen regarding that. The fact is that in April we had less proposals and votes than the last 6 months, but it feels to me like it picked up a little bit more in May. Also, the reason we proposed a 2 year contract for Arbitrum DAO is so that Arbitrum can lock down this $60,000 USD a year maintenance + hosting price, for the next 2 years. One year from now, the price for these features will most likely be higher than what we are proposing now, so by committing to a 2 year contract, Arbitrum DAO would actually be getting a better deal than committing to a 1 year contract only.

• Regarding the overall cost, it is very reductive to evaluate the cost for these features based solely on the 3 actual features we propose. The reality is that these features only work, and are only reliable, if there is a back-end platform that correctly indexes data and processes this data. This back-end needs to be constantly improved and is actually quite costly to run. We’ve spent the last 9 months developing that back-end under the scope of proposals.app and the last 3 years if we include the scope of Senate as well. This back-end is what powers the currently available arbitrum.proposals.app platform launched in April, and it will power all of these proposed features.

@paulofonseca

For more detailed and in-depth information on these costs, please refer to the accompanying spreadsheet.

This spreadsheet offers more fine-grained detail on the costs, which show how we arrived at the $206,400 USD final amount.

Having worked in user research, ux design, and software development myself for the last 15 years, while running companies that provide these services, and having designed and delivered dozens of apps for different industries all over the world, I feel these costs are actually very reasonable for a quality and reliable product.

[paulofonseca]

Hey @Oni Thank you for reading and giving feedback!

Please really do reach out to me on telegram to share those ideas that came up!

Addressing your feedback:

• Regarding the features, we actually feel like the Voting Power Tags is the more interesting feature of the 3, in the sense that it is the most novel, experimental, and therefore the one from which we could learn the most. As an anecdote for context, I gave a talk yesterday at ETH Belgrade where I talked about DAO governance and how proposals.app aims to help with our typical messy governance in DAOs, and I showed the demo of these features in the talk as examples of something that could help untangle the mess a little bit. One of the attendees (who works at the Ethereum Foundation) asked a question precisely about the bias that these Voting Power tags could introduce in the discourse and deliberation phase of proposals in a DAO and we then talked at length after the talk about the pros and cons of it. We came to the conclusion that there is more downside to not knowing who is commenting on a forum, then the potential bias it introduces by showing the voting power. Another feedback we had from some other delegates in private about this feature, is that it could show more info other than the voting power, like the delegate karma score, number of proposals published, etc.

• Regarding the cost concerns, as replied above, we think the total $206,400 USD cost should be evaluated from a point of view that the $60,000 USD a year maintenance + hosting cost is also required for the whole back-end platform that powers these features, not just the actual three proposed features themselves.

Also, as a general note, and echoing what fellow builder @DonOfDAOs says above, we believe Arbitrum DAO should invest in builders and products that are aligned with the DAO, not from a at-cost perspective, but from an empowering and future proofing perspective.

@DonOfDAOs

the notion of completely at-cost build is reductionist to the advancement of the DAO

@DonOfDAOs

Investing in builders, (especially for non-exorbitant amounts) is worth the extra bit.

The Arbitrum DAO should not expect to pay dedicated service providers with track record and commitment to the DAO, in feature by feature fashion, and get a good quality result out of it.

[cp0x]

Thanks for the offer

I have used this application and I want to say that the first two functions are very convenient and would definitely be useful for Arbitrum.
The third function for mailing seems to me to duplicate the existing mailings from the forum a little, although in a more convenient format

Among the disadvantages, I see the cost. For crypto, any amount can be presented as small lately.
However, for each item of the estimate, I have a feeling that the cost is too high, especially for Maintenance + Hosting (2 years) $120,000 USD (for example, I rent a server for my site, which costs me $5-10 per month, I don’t understand where this cost comes from)

There is probably more than one solution here, but if Paulo considers this a fair price for all items, then he has the opportunity to distribute this cost between different forums of other projects. Due to this, we will get improvements for reasonable money.

[GozmanGonzalez]

This is exactly the kind of upgrade DAO governance needs.

From live vote visibility to contextual delegate power and real-time email alerts, these integrations by @proposals.appcould be game-changers for Arbitrum’s governance forum.

Too often, critical proposals are buried in comment threads, and delegates lack the signal-to-noise clarity needed for real participation. These tools directly address that, making it easier to vote, engage, and understand who’s saying what and why it matters.

Open-source, community-aligned, and transparently priced, this is a solid step toward more accessible, composable, and resilient DAO infrastructure.

Looking forward to seeing the adoption and even more excited to see the impact.

[itugov]

Thanks for your proposal. It is obvious that the integration of the mentioned features into the forum will be very useful for delegates and tokenholders. Especially the proposal notification emails are really nice for tracking the proposals. However, there are some points that we are uncomfortable with. We think that most of the features are entry-level functionality and similar services can be provided at low costs. In addition, some of the mentioned features can already be controlled through other sites. (For example: Karma Dashboad for live voting, Snapshot and Tally for voting). We are aware that you want to create a better and more efficient user experience by integrating them into the forum and we appreciate your effort, but when the requested budget is compared to the suggested features, we think that this cost is too high. We think that especially the Maintenance and Hosting fee should be explained with a more detailed spending plan. We can say that we will approach the proposal positively if the requested budget is reduced to a more reasonable level.

ITU Governance, @harryvors

[paulofonseca]

Hey @cp0x thank you for reading and giving feedback!

Just to clarify that the third feature, of Proposal Emails Notifications notifies not just when new forum proposals are available but also, when new offchain (snapshot) and onchain votes start and are about to end.

The email notification currently look like this, and you can go to arbitrum.proposals.app/profile to subscribe to them. What we are offering here is an easier way for users of these forum to subscribe to these email notifications.

Regarding the cost concerns, especially regarding the maintenance + hosting cost, allow me to offer a bit more context for those amounts.

The hosting cost is $1,000 USD per month, for 2 years. This includes all server costs, and software to run the whole infrastructure of proposals.app that is dedicated to Arbitrum DAO. This includes 2 hosting servers, 1 AI server, the email deliverability service, DNS service, and the DevOps cost to maintain all of the infrastructure working properly and reliably. You can see an overview of all our back-end services and servers uptime in status.proposals.app.

The maintenance cost is $4,000 USD per month, for 2 years. This includes 1 day of Design, 1 day of Development and 1 day of Testing per month. This allows us to offer a dedicated support to Arbitrum DAO, to fix any bugs that are found, as soon as possible and to even improve the features we are offering here with more functionality. As we keep building the core product of proposals.app with more features, these 3 feature integrations in the forum will become better and richer over time. We already got some feedback in private of how these feature integrations could evolve and offer an even better experience for delegates, tokenholders, and users in this forum.

You can see the details of the cost breakdown in this spreadsheet linked in the proposal above.

[paulofonseca]

Hey @itugov thank you for reading and giving your feedback!

In the comment above I just detailed the costs for the Maintenance + Hosting cost a bit further.

@paulofonseca

The hosting cost is $1,000 USD per month, for 2 years. This includes all server costs, and software to run the whole infrastructure of proposals.app that is dedicated to Arbitrum DAO. This includes 2 hosting servers, 1 AI server, the email deliverability service, DNS service, and the DevOps cost to maintain all of the infrastructure working properly and reliably. You can see an overview of all our back-end services and servers uptime in status.proposals.app.

The maintenance cost is $4,000 USD per month, for 2 years. This includes 1 day of Design, 1 day of Development and 1 day of Testing per month. This allows us to offer a dedicated support to Arbitrum DAO, to fix any bugs that are found, as soon as possible and to even improve the features we are offering here with more functionality. As we keep building the core product of proposals.app with more features, these 3 feature integrations in the forum will become better and richer over time. We already got some feedback in private of how these feature integrations could evolve and offer an even better experience for delegates, tokenholders, and users in this forum.

Let me know if that brings more clarity into it.

Also, I would like to point out that proposals.app is not VC backed, and will be operating as a public goods funded, non-profit entity. Meaning that the costs are not being subsidized by investors hoping to get a return on their investment. As we say in the proposal above, we deeply believe that DAO tooling should be fully open-source, credibly neutral and funded in a public goods fashion. That usually implies that open-source driven organizations need to rely on maintenance subscriptions to maintain their products up to par and to offer the best possible experience to their users.

[ostanescu.eth]

This is a strong step forward for improving governance UX. The integrations are practical, composable, and well-scoped. LFG

[Maets23]

I know i’ m not a delegate, but I love this thing. Price seems right too being it is a custom software integration.

I’d buy this in a flash based on the cost value ratio.

[daveytea]

This looks really cool and useful. It should be supported.

My 2 cents:

• I think the DAO should support multiple redundant ways to access information as it helps with decentralisation. So even if data is available on Karma/Tally/etc, having multiple ways to consume that same data is beneficial.
• Evaluating funding proposals by line items is the wrong approach, as someone can always do it cheaper somewhere else in the world. Additionally, there is a lot more work being done than just what is expensed via line items. Funding proposals should be evaluated by their perceived impact, rather than trying to optimise costs. So in this case, if the DAO receives more than $200k worth of value over 2 years, it should be an easy decision. A quick example calculation might be if 100 delegates become 10% more effective because of this, and the DAO currently spends $1,000 p/month on delegate incentives for each of them, then its about $10k p/month of impact provided.

[jameskbh]

Thanks for this proposal!

As one able to test some of those features in your app, I must say I find them useful. Some more, and some, not so much. Each person has their own flow, and that reflects how they value the features proposed here. I have a question/suggestion:

How are you planning to put this up for a vote? Yes/No/Abstain for the whole package? Is it possible to breakdown the costs so we can have a modular approach to it and have the voting options to reflect that?

Thanks in advance!

[Tane]

We appreciate the effort that the proposals.app team has put into mapping the fragmented governance journey and trying to stitch the experience together in one place. As active delegates we constantly bounce between the forum, Snapshot, Tally, block explorers, and a swarm of dashboards; that cognitive overhead is real, so a unified front-end that lowers the “where do I click next?” friction is directionally attractive.

@Oni

It is not that these features do not add value, but the proposed cost is high for a change that does not fundamentally transform participation or address urgent problems in the system.

However, in line with @Oni’s observation, the quoted $200 k over two years feels steep for three stand-alone features. Live vote surfacing is the clear standout: it connects the conversation layer to the decision layer, giving readers an at-a-glance pulse of what actually matters right now. By contrast, voting-power tags and extended email alerts strike us as nice-to-have embellishments whose marginal utility is harder to price at six figures. Several community members have already built comparable widgets at a fraction of the proposed cost, or even ourselves for internal purpose as well, so the premium needs stronger justification than we have seen so far.

@paulofonseca

You can see the details of the cost breakdown in this spreadsheet linked in the proposal above.

Looking at the cost breakdown, while it seems somewhat high, we don’t think it indicates a significant issue. Rather than suggesting the cost itself is unreasonable, we understand this as a type of problem where the benefits the DAO gains from solving the issue do not easily balance with the cost required for the solution.

Because we do see value in credibly neutral, open-source tooling, we would prefer a structure that lowers the cost for the DAO while still supporting the experiment.
One concrete suggestion would be Cost-sharing with other DAOs. If these integrations are broadly applicable, splitting hosting and maintenance across multiple communities would drop Arbitrum’s share to a level that better matches the incremental benefit.

@cp0x

There is probably more than one solution here, but if Paulo considers this a fair price for all items, then he has the opportunity to distribute this cost between different forums of other projects. Due to this, we will get improvements for reasonable money.

We could also narrow the scope and shorten the period to start smaller.

@Oni

I think a more reasonable alternative would be to prioritize the visibility of the most impactful feature, “Live Votes” and evaluate its adoption before moving forward with the others. This would allow for a more data-driven and cost-effective approach.

I value you effort to improve the DAO, but in this case, moving forward with the full proposal doesn’t seem like the most efficient path. A more gradual, focused rollout with a leaner budget might deliver better results. In addition, @paulofonseca I would like to share some ideas that came to me while I was writing.

With tighter scope, shorter runway, and shared overhead, we believe Arbitrum can support this initiative without over-committing treasury resources. We look forward to seeing a revised proposal that balances ambition with fiscal prudence and provides objective success metrics up front.

[paulofonseca]

Hey @jameskbh thank you for reading, for the continued interest and support, and for that suggestion!

And yes, we are aiming of putting this up for a vote, as a whole package, with a basic voting type of For / Abstain / Against for the offchain vote on Snapshot and with the proposed whole-package price.

We could maybe use an approval vote type of vote, to gauge which features would be more popular among delegates, and then go to the onchain vote with a proposal that includes the features that had more than the 3% quorum of voting weight in the offchain vote, with a package price for that selection of features. To be honest, the final price tag wouldn’t be that much cheaper, proportionally per item, if we were to do just 1 or 2 of the 3 proposed features. So right now, this 3 feature package is probably the best deal we can offer to Arbitrum DAO.

In the opposite direction, we’ve got some feedback, in private, of some other additional features we could also do (not now, but in the near future) and if we would add a 4th feature, the whole package would become cheaper, in a per item basis.

And regarding this issue, we would also like to highlight and echo what fellow builder @daveytea says above:

@daveytea

Evaluating funding proposals by line items is the wrong approach, as someone can always do it cheaper somewhere else in the world. Additionally, there is a lot more work being done than just what is expensed via line items. Funding proposals should be evaluated by their perceived impact, rather than trying to optimise costs. So in this case, if the DAO receives more than $200k worth of value over 2 years, it should be an easy decision. A quick example calculation might be if 100 delegates become 10% more effective because of this, and the DAO currently spends $1,000 p/month on delegate incentives for each of them, then its about $10k p/month of impact provided.

We believe these three usability and accessibility improvements, in tandem, will bring a better experience to delegates in Arbitrum DAO. They will make delegates lives easier, minimize mistakes (there have been cases of delegates voting in one proposal with the reason for another proposal for example), improve voter participation (since delegates will get timely emails reminding them to vote), and bring more clarity overall about who is who in Arbitrum DAO (since everybody will be able to see the voting power of commenters in this forum).

[paulofonseca]

Hey @Tane thank you for reading, for the kind words, and for giving your feedback!

Addressing your feedback:

@Tane

Several community members have already built comparable widgets at a fraction of the proposed cost, or even ourselves for internal purpose as well, so the premium needs stronger justification than we have seen so far.

We don’t believe this is a fair comparison. Building an one-off widget or an internal tool requires a way lower level of commitment and maintenance that is totally different than what we are proposing here. The bulk of the cost in our proposal, pertains to the Maintenance + Hosting line item because it is actually the most valuable service we are proposing to offer to Arbitrum DAO.

On the other hand, with this proposal, we are guaranteeing that whatever happens, Arbitrum DAO will have these feature integrations up to date and reliably working on its governance forum. And everybody that has built quality reliable software before, especially in the DAO governance space, knows this is quite hard to pull off.

Especially when it comes to have reliable governance data. And specifically delegates voting power, which is a really hard thing to get constantly reliable data of.

For example, and I just checked this right now, you can see that @Plutus(0xbbe98d590d7eb99f4a236587f2441826396053d3) voting power is being reported as 954.28K ARB on Tally, but as 954.37K ARB on Karma.

The correct voting power, as per the ARB token contract, at 12:19pm today, aka. at the 22666976 ethereum block is 954.33K ARB (or 954328.938917807101820975 ARB to be more precise) and that’s what we have on the proposals.app back-end, as you can see in the screenshot below where it shows 954328.94 ARB at June 9, 2025, 12:18 PM (UTC)

And look, I’m not trying to put down other governance tools in this space with the example above, I’m just trying to highlight, that once you look close enough (and we’ve been doing that for quite a while) it is actually quite hard to index governance data reliably.

Our open-source, non-profit, public goods funded approach at proposals.app is the best way we can think of, of having a reliable, long-term infrastructure for this kind of thing, that can serve DAOs for the long run. That’s why we believe that relying on DAOs like Arbitrum to fund these development efforts instead of pursuing a VC backed approach, is the right strategy.

And that’s why we put up this proposal for Arbitrum DAO to fund these forum integrations and align the future of proposals.app with the Arbitrum DAO.