Aragon Team Update: November 2017

Nov 28, 2017 7 min read

Written reviews of what the team members have been up to

Recently in our Aragon Governance Proposal AGP7: Merge Aragon HQ and Community meetings it was proposed and decided that our previous Aragon HQ and Community Meetings would merge into one monthly meeting.

With this update came also the change to move away from doing presentations in the meeting about what each team member has been up to in the past month, into a new written review form of monthly updates. These write-ups will be published in our Wiki and blog so the community can have a chance to review the progress before we do the Community Meeting and the audience can ask questions from the team members.

Team members will produce a write-up of the most important things they have worked on since last Community Meeting, the problems they have found and what they plan to do in the next weeks (that can be a bit blurry, and that's fine). These write-ups will be published as a blog post for the community to review on Monday before Friday's meeting.

Okay, today is Tuesday, sorry, we're still getting used to this new process, but the Community Meeting 06 will take place on Friday December 1st at 4PM CET / 10AM EDT, the livestream and recording of the meeting can be found at https://www.youtube.com/c/AragonProject

Aragon Community Meeting 06 Write-Ups of November 2017

Brett --- (New!) EVM/Solidity/*

Aragon ID (@aragon/aragon-id)

Basic identity system via ENS for v0.5 (<your-name>.aragonid.ethregistration coming soon to you!)
Provides a generic set of contracts for verifiably secure ENS subdomain registrations

Aragon Apps / UI (@aragon/aragon-apps, @aragon/aragon-ui)

Moved reusable components from Group app to @aragon/aragon-ui

Towards v0.5

Collaborate with @izqui, @onbjerg, @bpierre on organizing roadmap to 0.5
Help @bpierre with lifting off the dust in @aragon/aragon
Build as many @aragon/aragon-app frontends (and their associated components in @aragon/aragon-ui) as possible

John --- (New!) Community Lead

New website copy

Reviewed and edited in collaboration with Luis and Tatu on refining the copy.

Aragon Meetup in Helsinki

Attended the meetup with Luis and Tatu. Helped welcome people, serve food and drink, pass out Aragon swag.

Wiki review

Opened 12 issues during a review of the Aragon Wiki with Tatu.

Updates to #Frontline

Worked with Tatu to learn about the Frontline program's history and start charting a course for the future.

Begin planning transition to community governance

Had a discussion with Luis and Tatu about the future of the Aragon Foundation and the Core team after the transition to community governance via DAO.

Team interview post

Sent answers to Tatu along with a photo to use for the post.

Aragon Network deep-dive

Learned more about the Aragon Network, ANT use-cases, and Aragon Network Services from Luis and Tatu.

Complete onboarding

Finish reading through all community documentation, past meeting notes, and other docs.

Start 2018 Community Strategy doc

Begin planning for community growth and engagement in 2018, especially around taking advantage of the impact the mainnet launch will have on public interest.

Team bonding

Continue getting to know members of the team better so we can help each other achieve great things together.

Organizing the organization

Review team organization processes and provide feedback wherever it's needed. Help the core team operations run smoothly.

Jorge --- Tech Lead

Security Audits

The first security audits for aragonOS and aragon-apps were completed
No major issues were found, though it triggered some changes
Audit report will be made public soon

AragonID (credits to @Brett)

Basic identity system for v0.5 release
Secure ENS subdomain registrars by minimizing trust until main registrar update

Devcon talk

Spoke at Ethereum Foundation's developers conference about Aragon's approach to smart contract upgradeability
Video and slides can be found here

Towards v0.5 release

When all smart contracts are integrated into the client, start final security audits
Public bug bounty program for all v0.5 contracts
Finalize deployment pipeline work

Organization

Improve goal setting and deadlines management
Clear roadmap for next releases
Improve documentation and overall experience for external contributors

Luis --- Project Lead

Hiring

Helped hiring for

EVM/Solidity: Welcome, Brett!

Community Lead: Welcome, John!

Helped setting up a shared inbox for hiring

Strategy

Worked alongside with Maria, Jorge and third parties on this. Thought about ways VCs interested into the Aragon ecosystem can invest funds into developing it
Also thought of how to invest some of the token sale funds into the ecosystem without much friction/without becoming VCs (that's not our focus)

Dev

Worked on the new website
Some fixes for aragon-ui

Design

Created a design challenge for the Design opening
Created some visual assets

Events

devcon!
Interviewed multiple key people for some interviews and a video that will come out soon
Talked at the Aragon Helsinki meetup

Internal

Continued token buyback
Legal stuff

Community

AGP7

Hiring

Fill Operations Assistant position
Make progress on filling the Design Lead opening
Make progress on hiring a Frontend Dev

Internal

Review Q4 goals for newly onboarded

Strategy

Oversee new announcements

Community

Release the signaling app

Luke --- Research Lead

Aragon Research Project

Planning and Project definition
Researched and engaged with projects that would be good fit for participation

Research

Off-chain tabulation of votes (Ongoing)
Secure/Private voting mechanism using sMPC and group signatures (Ongoing)
Governance over inflationary token supplies (Ongoing)
Token curated registries (Ongoing)
Cryptoeconomics of Aragon Network services (Ongoing)

Aragon Research Project

Create repo and documentation for Aragon Research Project community contributions
Confirm initial batch of project participants
Establish project roadmap and timelines

Research

Continue ongoing research efforts
Experiment with Signaling/CarbonFeedback dapp
Document research in Aragon Research Project repo and/or blog posts

Maria --- Strategy and Ops Lead

Strategy

Helped plan and research the general structures and definitions of upcoming programs/projects
Started working with key lawyers that will potentially assist us on one of the projects

Operations

Accounting: we started working with EY as the Aragon foundation's accountants
Hiring: helped with the initial candidates screening for several positions
Events: helped with the logistics and coordination for the production of a video about the why of Aragon. For this video we did a couple of interviews to key people in Cancun (devcon3)

Strategy:

Continue developing the different initiatives/projects mentioned above

Operations:

Assist our accountants on the closing of the fiscal year
Fill operations assistant positions

Oliver --- Glue

Workshop in Madrid

I went to Madrid to work with Brett, Luis and Jorge on identity. I also got time to work on aragon-dev-cli.

aragon-dev-cli

Added scaffolding support, so it is now possible to create projects faster

Also created two templates (react and bare).

Started doing a big refactor of the CLI internals which will give the CLI a new look and feel, but also make it easier to implement new features
Started working a bit on a new command: playground. It spins up a development environment with APM set up and a DAO for testing purposes.

natspec lite (radspec)

The way natspec works now is insecure, since any valid JavaScript goes.

The current library simply evaluates the JavaScript expressions, which is a threat to dapps, since comments in code could potentially alter the UI and trick the user.

Since we rely on natspec for describing transactions in Aragon, we started working on a stripped-down version.

The basic syntax is down
AST traversal is done
The parser is almost complete

This project will be released in December.

General planning

I've worked closely with Jorge to identify potential issues and new features, such as a governance layer for APM repositories.

aragon-dev-cli

Finish refactor
Finish playground command

node-aragon

Split the library and rename the two new parts to @aragon/wrapper and @aragon/clientrespectively
Finish transaction pathing
Start work on remaining RPC calls

Pierre --- UI & Interaction Developer

Aragon UI

Aragon UI ported to React (0.3)
New components:
DropDown
AragonApp
Card
SideBar
The way Aragon UI is imported in a project is better (but not ideal yet: we are still thinking about it and it will probably change in the next version).

Aragon Apps

Groups (UI)

Web

New aragon.one

Aragon UI

More components
Keep improving the following:
Accessibility
Performances
Visual consistency
API consistency
Blog post to introduce Aragon UI

Aragon Apps

Settings
Permissions
More apps

Web

Improve aragon.one: accessibility, perceived performances

Tatu --- Community / Communications Lead

New website copy

Worked on writing the initial new copy of the new website, reviewed and edited in collaboration with Luis and John on refining the copy.

Aragon Meetup in Helsinki

Contacting people for presenting at the event, talking to people and booking the venue for the event, planning, organizing, preparing and executing the Aragon Meetup Helsinki event on 23rd of November 2017.

Updates to Aragon Chat

Create #governance channel
Assign people permissions
Post updates to #announcements
General talking to people and welcoming them

Updates with Wachsman PR

Monthly update call
Q&A with their team

AGP7: Merge Aragon HQ and Community meetings

Discuss details of the proposal
Write the changes to Community Governance Model and close the issue in Github

More wiki updates

Continue working on improving the wiki

Continue working on overall communication strategy

Continue on helping and growing the community

That's it for the month of November, as we move forward, these new Community Meetings and Write-Ups will become a monthly thing, so let us know what you think of this new format and do join us at the Meeting livestream to ask questions and discuss everything that has been going on!

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