Voted FOR.
I believe in paying good people — they tend to exceed expectations. Paulo and his team are exactly that. Also think that these tools, while simple, add great context and accessibility.
5 Likes
We believe that anything that improves how people engage on the forums until an OpCo is fully established is a net positive for the ecosystem. All three proposed features are valuable live voting, voting power tags, and proposal notification emails.
Paulo has been a long-time contributor to the DAO and previously received a Questbook grant for the Proposals app.
That said, while these features would be very helpful, we have a few concerns. The email notifications could become a bit noisy over time, and the overall cost for building and maintaining these features feels too high. We agree with AF’s suggestion that payments should be made in stages not all upfront to ensure accountability.
We also see Paulo has reduced down the cost significantly which is a positive signal!
4 Likes
We’re supportive of this proposal with the cost revisions and agree that these integrations can meaningfully improve forum usability.
We’d just like to clarify a few points on ongoing support:
– What’s the expected SLA in terms of uptime and response time for bug reports?
– If Discourse rolls out breaking changes, are patches to restore functionality included as part of the 12-month maintenance?
Looking forward to your response.
5 Likes
Hello and thank you for your support! I’ll jump in on this question since it is a more technical one.
The simple answer to this question is our current uptime is 98.5%, as shown in our status page here - https://status.proposals.app.
We are not only self-hosting instead of using PaaS or cloud providers, but we choose to do it the hard way, on our own physical servers. This decision was part of our resiliency philosophy, and the main reason behind it is if we build it to run on a machine under a desk, and it is open source, then anyone will be able to run it on a machine under their desk if necessary. We are not fully there yet, but are committed to this goal. That comes with a cost though; getting four nines uptime with these constraints is incredibly difficult.
We had downtime in the past and we improved our infrastructure to mitigate it in the future by adding a VPS in the mix and changing the workloads orchestration. All the workloads can automatically migrate between any of the 3 servers we have in case one of them goes down. Our database cluster has replicas spread on all 3 servers and any of them can become a leader in case one of the servers goes down. We have hourly local backups of all VMs on fast storage, local archival backups in 2 locations, and daily database backups in an R2 bucket. There is always space to improve, but the problem with infrastructure resilience is you can only plan so much; there will be problems you didn’t think of and you only figure it out when things go down.
When it comes to these specific forum integration features, as a fallback, we will make sure in case our APIs go down, they do not break anything in the forum and fail silently, in a way which is not visually impacting.
As for the response time, both Paulo and I are working full time on this, or more generally in the governance space, as is Paulo’s case, also working as a delegate. If we are awake and have access to the internet, we will respond to any bug reports as soon as possible. Fun fact, we had a bug yesterday which sent a couple hundred duplicated emails, stopped it ASAP, and pushed a fix one hour later with guardrails to hopefully never have that problem again - wip · proposals-app/proposalsapp@895b712 · GitHub
Absolutely, no questions asked.
6 Likes
I voted yes on the snapshot. Its really not that much money for the amount of dev work involved and if it increases coordination a bit its worth it. It’s kind of nice to have multiple backup interfaces for voting and tracking data. worth it IMO.
6 Likes
…with more than 3% quorum, right?
for the onchain vote, yes. just as the Arbitrum Treasury governor smart contract specifies.
1 Like
I will be voting FOR this proposal after the costs adjustment. I believe the overall costs of ~$60k are extremely small compared to the total amounts of funds that were waisted by the STIP, LTIPP and other efforts that have not amounted in anything of value for Arbitrum overall.
PS. Paulo and Andrei have proved multiple times they are value aligned and have done many things for Arbitrum.
4 Likes
Hey @paulofonseca, thanks for putting this proposal together and for all the effort behind it. Sharing some thoughts after going through it:
- I see the value in the features and definitely respect the intention to improve the governance experience. However, I’m not fully convinced this is the right solution to a problem.
- To me, this feels like a nice-to-have rather than a must-have — especially at this price point. The forum itself feels outdated and would really benefit from a more fundamental rework. For example, I often struggle with basics like finding out which proposals are live, when voting starts or ends, and which ones have already closed. Navigation and structure are weak, and I think those are the core UX issues we should address first.
- Two of the proposed features — voting power and live voting results — are already easily accessible with the tools I use today. It only takes a few clicks, so I don’t see a major improvement in my experience from integrating them into the forum.
- This also feels like a subscription model, which I’m not a big fan of — especially for a forum that’s already lagging behind. Personally, I’d prefer one-off investments that give the DAO/Arbitrum long-term control and ownership.
- I also want to flag some discomfort with comments suggesting that voting power tags will help filter out “noise” from low-VP delegates. That kind of thinking risks moving us away from the open, inclusive governance we’re aiming for. I like to read through all comments — not just the top delegates — and form my own opinion. We want to increase participation across the board, not just amplify a few voices. I know this view didn’t come from the proposal itself, but some replies went in that direction, and I think it’s worth calling out.
- I usually align with your thinking, Paulo, and I really respect the work you’re doing — but in this case, I’m not convinced this is the right direction or the best use of DAO resources. So for now, I will be voting against.
Thanks again for the effort.
2 Likes
I just voted FOR this proposal. As crypto goes mainstream it’s critical to make DAO participation accessible. For newcomers unfamiliar with crypto, like an RWA player for instance, navigating the Arbitrum DAO is challenging due to fragmented information across platforms like the Forum, Snapshot, and Tally.
This proposal effectively streamlines the process, consolidates resources, and significantly enhances the user experience for anyone looking to engage with the Arbitrum DAO.
@paulofonseca is a dedicated Arbitrum builder focused on the DAO’s long-term success. I appreciate how the proposal’s timeline and budget were adjusted based on delegate feedback. With fierce competition among L2 DAOs, Arbitrum cannot afford to miss this opportunity to improve its governance flow.
2 Likes
The following reflects the views of the Lampros DAO governance team, composed of Chain_L (@Blueweb) and @Euphoria, based on our combined research, analysis, and ideation.
We are voting FOR this proposal in the Snapshot voting.
First, we want to thank @paulofonseca and the team for putting forward this thoughtful proposal and for always working to improve the user and delegate experience in Arbitrum DAO.
As stated in the proposal:
Most of us who have been active in the DAO for some time are already used to switching between different platforms, the forum for discussion, Snapshot for off-chain voting, and Tally for on-chain voting. While this works for experienced delegates, for new users and delegates joining governance in the future, having key information like live voting status visible directly in the forum could make participation smoother and timelier. We believe this can help grow voter participation over time.
Regarding the Voting Power Tags, we echo the point raised by @Curia. We agree that exploring alternative indicators, like badges, to show a delegate’s activity might be more balanced and avoid unintentional bias.
On the Proposal Notification Emails, we note the proposal says:
Personally, I use the existing notifications on Discourse, Snapshot, and Tally, and they have been working well for me. It would be helpful to know if the team has done any surveys or has data on how many delegates feel this additional email feature is needed. If the usage is likely to be low, the DAO should reconsider funding this part at the proposed cost.
For the budget, while we appreciate the cost revision and the open-source commitment, we would be happy to see the payment structured in milestones instead of a single upfront amount. Each feature could be delivered as a milestone with payment on completion, and the 12-month maintenance could be split into quarterly payments. This helps the DAO track progress easily and keeps delivery transparent.
Overall, we believe in the team and trust they will deliver at their best. Our vote is in favour because we see these improvements helping new contributors and delegates by lowering barriers and encouraging wider participation. We encourage the team to work on milestone-based payments rather than upfront payments and to revisit the voter tag feature and proposal notification emails with clear data on delegate demand to justify its cost before the tally voting.
2 Likes
Thank you Paulo for putting up this proposal.
We have voted Abstain in Snapshot to reflect our dual stance on this proposal:
In favour:
- We love the features you are proposing. Proposals.app is great and as delegates that check forum and voting platforms daily we think it’s a valuable tool to continue optimizing delegate activities.
- You are a valuable and committed member of the Arbitrum ecosystem, which the DAO should support into building useful tools like this one.
- The pricing of the proposal has dropped significantly following delegate feedback which shows great commitment to align with the community.
Against:
While we believe the scope of this proposal is valuable, we also recognize that it remains narrow in comparison to the wider set of governance infrastructure needs facing Arbitrum DAO. Recently, the Arbitrum Foundation has outlined a broader vision where high-level governance infrastructure, such as governance tooling, would eventually fall under the oversight and coordination of Arbitrum Aligned Entities (AAEs). We fully support this direction, and encourage that proposals like this one be considered as part of a more comprehensive governance tooling initiative. This would allow the DAO to better assess interdependencies, ensure long-term maintenance and alignment, and avoid fragmented tooling developments across isolated efforts.
We would like to request Paulo with further clarity on the team’s long-term vision for governance tooling in order to decide on a final decision for the eventual onchain proposal.
2 Likes
Thanks team for putting this proposal forward and for the effort to improve the governance experience.
I agree that jumping between Discourse, Snapshot, and Tally isn’t ideal. That said, I actually like that they’re separate, as it helps keep each stage of governance clear, and don’t see myself wasting much time because of it. I played around with the current proposals.app product and found the UX a bit confusing, especially as someone already familiar with the existing setup. I’d be more likely to use it if there were clearer distinctions between forum discussions, offchain voting, and onchain voting.
I also appreciate the open-source, non-profit approach. But in my experience, open-source tools run by non-profits often struggle to match the quality of those run by for-profit ones – mostly because they can’t pay top engineers and don’t face the same market-driven pressure to iterate, ship fast, stay reliable. Over time, that usually leads to lower usage and eventual shutdown, which makes me cautious about funding this initiative.
This raises the question: is proposals.app aiming to replace existing tools, or simply serve as a fallback in case they go down? I do see some value in the latter, especially after incidents like the recent Safe outage. But if that’s the goal, the focus should be on core reliability, not on extra features like email notifications (which delegates already get from other tools).
Lastly, proposals.app already got a $43K grant from the DAO via Questbook Season 2. Why isn’t this follow-on work going through the same grants process instead of a governance vote?
2 Likes
I’m voting AGAINST
The new price point is reasonable and the features could be useful for delegates. That being said, delegates voting is likely to become a lot less significant as more and more decisions move to operational units. As such, I believe now is not the right time to invest in delegate tooling.
1 Like
Agree! Our email notifications solve this issue without users even needing to come to the forum. We will also propose some forum customizations to improve the forum accessibility, design and findability. Also, our proposed Live Votes feature helps with this issue.
This should be framed as in, it will help filter out feedback from forum users with 0 Voting Power, and not small delegates. Small delegates, let’s say, the one that have more than 50K ARB, are usually the most active ones in the forum.
Also, just wanted to point out that our proposal doesn’t include any kind of filtering or censoring or comments. Just adding more contextual information to each comment, by showing the Voting Power of each delegate in the forum.
It’s not a subscription model because the proposal says that the DAO will only pay for 1 year of maintenance. After that year is up, the DAO will continue to have access to this feature, for free, but without maintenance. The payment for the maintenance is what guarantees that we can evolve these features for them to become more and more useful over time.
We indeed reduced the cost significantly, from $206k USD to $60k USD, and now we are only charging for maintenance to evolve these features according to Arbitrum DAO delegates needs, over the course of 1 year.
Thank you for this feedback @Jose_StableLab I think you really hit the main issue in here
As we’ve said before, in our opinion, governance tooling has no viable and sustainable business model by itself. So the best way to ensure governance tools are resilient and will be here for the long term, is to make them fuly open-source, so that if and when a particular team stops maintaining those tools for any reason, any other team can swoop in and continue the work.
This forces governance tooling projects to either raise VC money and burn it without giving their investor the returns they were expecting, or go towards the open-source, charge for maintenance path of sustainability.
proposals.app will continue to exist, and evolve, and add more and more features that help delegates and tokenholders lives. we aim to become the first fully open-source, all-in-one governance tool for DAOs. and to be the only app delegates need to use to do their jobs.
Thank you @Federico for your feedback!
this is good feedback and we will be improving this soon. We also got this feedback from other delegates. thank you!
as I pointed out before, we believe that being fully open-source is the only way to guarantee that software continues to be available after a particular team shut down their operations. that’s why we are fully open-source and don’t get VC money.
Also, I hope we can prove that a non-profit, open-source project like proposals.app can deliver even better quality, higher resilience, and ship faster than VC backed projects. as pointed out previously, this case can be seen as an example of exactly that.
Thank you for your feedback @Curia
We’ve received contradictory feedback from delegates on this point, which is usually a sign that it should exist and we should experiment launching it and get real user feedback from real usage.
We also think that, as you suggest, that feature could have other tags, that bring even more context about each delegate. So thank you for this suggestion, we will maybe implement it as part of the maintenance plan we are proposing.
Yes, the Live Votes feature will always show the result of the latest vote for each proposal, and a link to its results. Also, I’ve been talking to @raam about this issue of tagging proposal posts in the forum according to their status, but that’s not an easy problem to solve automatically and I believe Raam does it manually every few weeks by moving “closed” proposal posts to the Finalized AIPs forum subcategory.
Also, as detailed here, we’ve reduced the cost of this proposal significantly, from $206K USD to $60K USD.
Thank you for pointing this out @Gianluca
But I don’t think this is correct. We need to include the fixed costs being paid to SeedGov and Karma for operating and building tooling for the DIP. Also, picking a 3 months time frame for the average is cherry picking data, since the DIP was spending above $200K USD a month for its first 3 months, and before the Voting Power penalization rule was put into place.
To be fair, Entropy used the DIP as an example of a current DAO expenditure that should cater for this problem, not us. I was just pointing out that the discrepancy in price between what we were proposing and what the DAO is currently spending is quite big.
Either way, we reduced the cost of this proposal quite significantly from $206K USD to $60K USD for 1 year of maintenance, as detailed here.
1 Like