This is a temperature check on a funding proposal to create an Allo.Capital community on Gardens. The request would be for 4 ETH from the Allo ProtoDAO.
The deliverables for the proposal:
A community on Gardens with a Covenant and an erc20 Allo governance token.
Signaling pools for network priorities and to elect community admin.
A Funding pool for work on the Allo Protocol, funded through this proposal.
Expected timeline to complete is 4 weeks.
Milestones
Draft a Community Covenant. Host 1 or more community workshops to compose a document of Allo.Capital’s shared vision, values, and cultural norms, leveraging tools for this like CommunityRule and Community Canvas.
Issue a Governance Token. Collaborate on params and distribution for an erc20 governance token (explicitly not attached to any financial upside) to allow for richer community signaling, using either a basic OpenZeppelin contract or a platform like Juicebox.
Launch Community on Gardens. Collaborate on settings and params for governance token registration stake, community admin, signaling & funding pools, and deploy to gardens.fund.
Rationale
Allo.Capital has experimented with conviction voting on Gardens with the Allo Builder’s Fund with some success already. By launching a dedicated community on Gardens for Allo.Capital, the Allo community can expand on this, sourcing decisions collectively on how to best grow as a network of capital allocation projects and builders.
given the demonstrated value created by gardens in live experiments, im leaning in favor of this proposal. i think this can take the place of the protodao mechansims that didnt pan out.
it’s inspiring to see your activism in this community! Thanks a lot to take leadership willing to move things forward. I have some things to add and comment about this proposal:
TL;DR; let’s move forward with it, let’s just use an erc20 minted and distributed with Collabberry in order to assure a fair innitial and continued distribution based on the intersubjective value contributors are bringing to Allo.Capital. This would imply an expected timeline of 2-3 weeks (might run in parallel with your suggested 4 weeks) for mapping stakeholders, choosing an initial distribution, agreeing on a process for continues distribution according to the value brought by contributors and the design and deployment (I don’t see the need of development) of a mechanism that provides sense-making (if necessary) to the funding pool of work (still need to understand what you having in mind there) in your proposal. Requested budget TBD, but it shouldn’t be more than 1 ETH
I’ve been following Gardens and Conviction Voting (CV) since it very beginning, while I was a fan back in the days, I have to admit that one thing that I haven’t like is how token distribution has been proposed. I understand that current Gardens version suggest communities to bring their own tokens, this is good in the sense that there’s not direct influences anymore towards token distributions that has leaded communities towards some problems that I find important to speak about before deciding to move forward with your proposal.
Commons Stack (conceptual and practical experimentation)
bringing the following learnings:
1. Low Engagement & Fatigue in Continuous Governance
Even though CV is designed to reduce the intensity of “snapshot voting”, communities still suffered from participation drop-offs, especially over long proposal queues and limited clarity on proposal outcomes.
TEC and 1Hive both reported governance fatigue and a need for greater UX simplicity in interacting with CV mechanisms.
2. Proposal Flooding & Signal Dilution
Without effective curation mechanisms, too many proposals accumulated conviction slowly, causing gridlock.
In Gardens.fund experiments, participants found it hard to navigate through dozens of underfunded or slow-moving proposals.
3. Social Trust & Off-Chain Coordination Remain Crucial
CV only reflects aggregated conviction; it doesn’t capture social deliberation, qualitative context, or nuance.
Communities often relied on informal off-chain discussions (Discord, forums) to make sense of decisions, suggesting CV must be paired with deliberative structures.
4. Wealth Concentration & “Silent Influence”
While CV softens immediate whale voting, it still allows large token holders to dominate slowly over time by locking tokens in early or long-term.
There’s no penalty for passive staking or low-quality conviction, which can skew funding towards better-marketed proposals over high-impact ones.
5. Disconnection Between Governance and Delivery
In TEC and Gardens-based experiments, there was often no follow-up mechanism after funding approval to track project delivery, traction, or community value.
CV lacked retroactive accountability, leading to a sense of drift or disconnected funding outcomes.
Positive Outcomes Noted
CV encouraged a less adversarial and more fluid funding process compared to yes/no voting.
It provided space for smaller contributors to build influence over time, especially in more closely aligned, community-native DAOs (like early TEC).
The model introduced valuable experimentation in real-time decision systems that move at the pace of engagement.
Implications for Allo,Capital Garden
These insights suggest that CV is best used as a signal aggregation and prioritization layer, not as a standalone governance or funding or token allocation system. Still, even after sharing these insights, I consider your proposal a “good for now, safe enough to try”, although I’d like to bring some suggestions in order to avoid the past pitfalls other communities have suffered:
Even after sharing these insights, I consider your proposal a “good for now, safe enough to try”. Let’s just add
I’d suggest to take a commitment towards exploring tools to function on deliberation and contextual filters (e.g., AI-assisted consensus) to include in the governance proposal. See section II. Governance Design for Allo DAO in G.S. Allo DAO Design
Can you please @paul ellaborate further what do you mean by “A Funding pool for work on the Allo Protocol”? Is it to launch it on a platform like platform like Juicebox? Do you see Collabberry covering the needs of what you intend by a "funding pool for work?
I’d be happy to jump on a call Paul if you want to dig deeper here and work together towards greater alignment.
We have a call scheduled next week - generally quite excited to find out how we can use Collabberry - both in the context of this proposal and for other Gardens stuff too.
To add to Gus’s comments, Here is our own internal Gardens v1 feedback from 2024 that guided the development of the Gardens v2 app as it exists today. This came from contributors at 1Hive - the DAO with the most extensive experience with conviction voting to date:
[Gardens v1 retro from January 2024]
In the 2.5 years since Gardens launched, we’ve learned an enormous amount about Conviction Voting, web3 governance, community-owned economies and the nature of cryptocurrency’s underlying technology and infrastructure of cryptocurrency as a whole.
In assessing how the Gardens platform has performed, we’ve looked at the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly.
THE GOOD
Security. The platform has proven remarkably secure given the level of decentralization and amount of new technology it introduced. Common Pools of Gardens have held as much as $38M in combined token value, and in an era rife with hacks and abuse in web3, Gardens has had no hacks or malicious proposals executed.
Community Ownership. The vast majority of tokens held by DAOs outside of Gardens today are in multi-sigs. Gardens has proven that it’s possible to hold and allocate funding from token treasuries with no central ownership, no roles, no permissions, and no gatekeeping, and for active community participants of all levels to have real decision making power in how funding is allocated.
Organizational Health and Longevity. The vast majority of DAOs that existed in 2021 are defunct today with no active contributors and little to no funds. The Gardens platform launched with 4 communities - 1Hive, BrightID, Giveth, and the Token Engineering Commons - all of which are still active today. While many factors outside Gardens made this possible, it shows the Gardens platform is capable of sustaining healthy communities in the long term.
THE BAD
No New Communities, No Growth. The Gardens platform has effectively had 0 growth beyond the communities it initially launched with, and even for those communities, Gardens has been ineffective at helping grow value in their Common Pools. Today there’s less than $1 million of token value in Gardens Common Pools - a 97% decrease from its peak in January 2022. This decline is far beyond what would be expected from the market conditions and lack of community adoption of the Gnosis Chain network over that time.
Overly Complex. Nearly everyone that attempts to use Gardens - both as a DAO participant and DAO creator - complains about how hard it is to understand and use. Gardens is not intuitive enough to be useful for most public goods funding organizations.
No Web3 Adoption of Conviction Voting. When the concept of Conviction Voting was introduced in 2019 it stirred a lot of excitement as a useful new way of allocating funding to the Commons. Since then, Gardens has been unable to spark the adoption of Conviction Voting beyond a small and very niche group of users.
THE UGLY
Gardens team has been slow / nonresponsive with support
Bug patches and feature requests are not addressed adequately
Service is unreliable
UI is confusing, sometimes actively encouraging unintended behavior (i.e. the too-attractive Challenge button)
Gardens still runs on original Aragon contracts that are now 5 years old
These findings have driven our approach to rebuilding the Gardens platform as well as restructuring our organizational processes within the Gardens swarm.
I want to highlight a few things based on your response quickly too - both for emphasis and accuracy. It was a bit hard for me to parse which feedback was for Gardens v1 vs. v2, and which came from Felix’s paper vs. other sources - so just wanna make sure these are clear:
Gardens is a tool for gathering signal to source collective decisions and allocate resources only. Like you pointed out it’s just one tool in the broader community stack and should be paired with other platforms for communication, token issuance, accountability, etc for a healthy community setup.
Gardens v1 only had 1 token = 1 vote setup, but v2 allows for quadratic and Fixed voting weight like we have in the Allo Builder’s Fund, so power consolidation is no longer an embedded issue.
Proposal flooding generally wasn’t an issue in the v1 Gardens researched by Felix. I couldn’t find this reference in Felix’s paper for more context, but Giveth, TEC, and BrightID tended to have the opposite problem - not enough proposals, making the conviction mechanism less useful since often there weren’t multiple proposals to compare. In both Gardens v1 and v2, good solutions for proposal flooding are to increase the collateral deposit for creating a proposal, or to reduce the scope of a governance pool to make it more manageable to govern.
Half upfront / half on delivery milestone-based funding like we have in the Allo Builders Fund goes a long way in making sure work on proposals follows through.
Our v2 solution to governance fatigue is the Activate / Deactivate governance function, making all governance effectively optional. We thought about further discouraging passive participation by having a collateral deposit when you activate governance - this could be implemented if this turns out to be an issue, but it hasn’t been reported yet in v2.
This is a reference to my 1-pager on an Allo Protocol exit-to-community which inspired this proposal. Given the potential sunsetting of dev work on the Allo Protocol, a Gardens funding pool could be used to fund ongoing builds and maintenance at a way lower cost than with full time salaried devs.
@GoodStuff I’m especially excited to talk about governance token distribution with you since this is a need for us at Gardens and sounds like something Collabberry does well! I’ve heard multiple people call it a big improvement on Coordinape, a tool we’ve used for Gardens contributors and have loved, but also noticed shortcomings.
Thanks for sharing the proposal, @paul. We talked this past Friday, and I know there will be more discussions ahead. I’d also love to engage with @GoodStuff on the Collabberry model.
To be brief, the current proposals focus primarily on Allo Capital, but what really prompted this conversation was the need for stewardship of the Allo Protocol. The protocol itself consists of code, documentation, a website, and some infrastructure (an indexer) to query the protocol. Stewarding this can be managed through well-established structures for maintaining and handling open source software.
Expanding the scope of the proposals beyond the protocol adds complexity in defining the core maintainers and how governance power would be distributed.
I believe proposals should be technically focused on specific functionalities of the Allo Protocol that require maintenance or improvement such as the registry and then create a structure to support that development. If this approach succeeds, the structure can be expanded and more concretely connected to Allo Capital over time.
At this stage, there isn’t a pressing need for formal governance around the protocol. What matters most is achieving alignment on product roadmaps and priorities that will effectively advance the registry and other key protocol components, thereby enabling meaningful progress on tools built with the protocol. Ideally, funding should be made available to support the implementation and ongoing maintenance of a lightweight aspect of the protocol. Collabberry appears to be a very useful tool for tracking contributions and work; my only concern is that its current scope of application feels too broad.
Looking forward to diving deeper into this in our discussions this week.
I recognize that. And actually, I was amazed by this proposal jumping already on 3 levels of complexity:
Milestones
Draft a Community Covenant.
Issue a Governance Token.
Launch Community on Gardens.
I have to express my concerns about the randomness on issuing a token with Juicebox, or standard OZ ERC20 contract, without proper nor explicit distribution principles nor guidelines for generating and distributing the Governance Token of this DAO. In the way that I’m used to handle complexities, having a Covenant should be a prerequisite for then deciding both Token(omics) structure and governance platform/mechanism.
So following your own suggestion for reducing complexity, I would propose then to reduce the scope to only the Covenant, so the community can have an explicit cultural anchor, with defined principles that then would lead us to decide on both how to distribute the token and how to stablish the governance framework. Makes sense?
can you please expand more on feeling a broad scope of application? I don’t understand what you mean.
Agree would add on the token part that any contributions to Allo Protocol should be weighted by the output it generates in advancing Allo builds that have product market fit. This Garden can also be viewed as ephemeral and only need to last for a couple months or quarters. A token will be needed and I say we just use GTC it is the mother of Allo Capital and it needs support/utility.
Meant current scope of application for Allo capital. I thought you were proposing Collabberry for managing Allo Capital contributions after a 2nd read I don’t think you were.
that makes sense, still, that’s really subjective and hard to measure. Yes, we can have OKRs and KPIs and reward contributors based deterministic reach of those outcomes. Still, not everything is deterministic when we are pondering the value of contributors. e.g. weavers, project managers, Public Relationships, community leading, researchers… Lot of the value produced in any organization is subjective and stochastic, and Collabberry does provide a p2p compensation algorithm for outputting an objective metric from the intersubjective considerantions of value from a team of contributors (similar to the mechanisms that markets use to bring a price as an objective measure of value).
A token will be needed, yes, and again, deciding on an arbitrary one (e.g. GTC) can bring externalities that would cause missalignments between the purpose of Allo and the way decisions are being made. And this is precisely the problem we solve at Collabberry, we do align distribution with the merits that buiders build on themselves regarding their alignment with the project and its goals. If you have the time, Afo, please read this research paper on Compensation in early-stage teams (this is the motivation for Collabberry to exist), I trust you will see the benefits in placing using Collabberry as the protocol for minting co-ownsership/governance tokens. I do have the hypothesis (and I suspect @paul might be understanding this as well) that using Collabberry in conjunction with Gardens will solve many (if not all) of the challenges I mentioned about Conviction Voting learnings from the past.
to be precise, Collabberry won’t be managing Allo Capital contributions, that’s up to the contributors themself and to the governance they decide to follow; the scope of Collabberry is to continuously mint and distribute erc20 tokens for rewarding contributors. Think of it as a Dynamic Sweat Equity Allocation protocol (while also monetary compensations in stables or bluechip tokens when needed). This demo might bring further clarifications.
Collabberry don’t do governance, we provide a solution for minting governance tokens based on the socially validated value of contributors.
Do we want to bring GTC to value within the community? It actually makes sense, not as the sole primitive tho, we can design and develop the proper market mechanisms to bring GTC (e.g.) as another primitive for getting our own $ALLO, but that’s a degree of complexity I’m not kind to bring to this conversation now.
Hey here, following up this thread, looking forward to activate actions towards the Allo protoDAO.
After conversations with both @paul and @afo I went into a deeper understanding on what are the possibilities to start deploying this protoDAO, so I’d like to bring them here for collective clarity, coherence while targeting also community alignment (and @owocki 's feedback as well).
In practice we have 3 needs:
Cultural / Constitutional: This is covered by the Covenant proposition above
Economic Distribution: few propositions has been placed in this thread:
a. Standard ERC20 with market dynamics distribution, understanding that a reserve rate for Allo contributors would be mantain for avoiding money based (plutocratic) dominance.
b. Collabberry Allo ERC20: this would bring main focus to distributing merit to contributors and allocating them tokens that represent the value they have brought and will bring to the community. A couple of workshops with the community might be needed to reach agreements on how to account for past contributions, as well to set proper expectations for further allocation according to the value contributors will be willing to bring to Allo.Capital
c. Setting $GTC and its distribution as the Allo.Capital (interim?) governance token. This might bring simplicity and speed of deployment while might also bring undesired externalities (maybe good enough for now, safe enought to try?) related to delegate Allo.Capital governance to the Gitcoin DAO and losing autonomy.
Governance mechanism: there seems to be indeed enought support (or at least none counter-proposals) to launch an Allo.Capital community on Gardens and make use of their Conviction Voting Mechanism.
In my personal view, and considering the different options for a Governance Token distributions (and even the combination among them. e.g. Launching a JuiceBox token, assign a considerable amount of this token to a community treasury, while then distributing these with the Collabberry protocol), __my suggestion is to start planning the Covenant workshop while including there the discovery of Design Community Principles (in case there are none yet) that would guide us in setting the proper priorities about how to design a Token Distribution and select the right tool/protocol to begin with while also giving us a north star on what kind of token (distribution) we will like to have for our protoDAO.
Appreciate having the highlights of this convo laid out clearly here, thanks Gus!
+1 on the 3 needs as you outlined them.
I share the hesitation on using $GTC as an interim governance token for Allo… it has wide distribution already to people who aren’t necessarily connected to this community, and I don’t think driving adoption of $GTC should be a goal for Allo, especially if it comes at the expense of Allo’s ability to source decisions.
Positive Outcomes Noted
Implications for Allo,Capital Garden