Societal Web3 Grant Application

[gfox1]

Project Abstract

Societal is an all-in-one DAO creation and management platform. Societal allows all types of groups or communities to build their own online, transparent, and decentralized organization. Societal bundles all of the tools required to create and manage a DAO in one place.

Utilizing Polkdaot’s layer-0 infrastructure and ecosystem, Societal will provide DAOs with both maximum functionality and a cohesive user experience. With features including agnostic token compatibility, zero gas fees, a freemium entry point, and a SaaS-based membership pricing, Societal combines best-in-class features into one vertically integrated product. With integrations into DeFi, privacy, and identity protocols, Societal will enable web3 organizations to seamlessly transition and manage their DAOs into the future.

For which grant level are you applying?

• Level 1: Up to $10,000, 2 approvals
• Level 2: Up to $50,000, 3 approvals
• Level 3: Unlimited, 5 approvals (for > $100k Web3 Foundation Council approval)

Application Checklist

• The application template has been copied, renamed ( project_name.md) and updated.
• I have read and understood the FAQs, application guidelines and announcement guidelines.
• A BTC or Ethereum (DAI/USDT) address for the payment of the milestones is provided inside the application.
• I have read and acknowledge the terms and conditions.
• The software delivered for this grant will be released under an open-source license specified in the application.
• The initial PR contains only one commit (squash and force-push if needed).
• The grant will only be announced once the first milestone has been accepted.
• I prefer the discussion of this application to be in a private Element/Matrix channel. My username is: @_______

How Did You Hear About our grants program?

• Social Media
• Hackathon
• Personal Recommendation
• Substrate Builders Program
• Investor/VC
• Online Search
• Other: _______

[CLAassistant]

All committers have signed the CLA.

[semuelle]

Thanks for the application, @gfox1! It looks interesting. A couple of questions/issues:

• The mockup image links don't seem to work (I get a redirect to accounts.google.com/ServiceLogin and then Bad Request), could you check those?
• Could you list all the pallets and functions you are planning to build as part of deliverable 1.2? Deliverable specs should be verifiable, to reduce possibility of misunderstanding.
• Have you done any research into existing projects similar to yours, either in the Substrate ecosystem or others, that you could leverage or learn from? Just found that information in your doc.
• What do you mean by the existing governance pallet?
• Why do you want to charge DAOs for certain functions? Where would these funds go to? Do you already know how to implement this?

[gfox1]

Hi @semuelle, thanks for the quick response! Here are the answers to your questions:

• The mockup image links don't seem to work (I get a redirect to accounts.google.com/ServiceLogin and then Bad Request), could you check those?

  • Here is the link to the google album. This link should be fine. I will also upload the images to github and use those new links in the updated application.

• Could you list all the pallets and functions you are planning to build as part of deliverable 1.2? Deliverable specs should be verifiable, to reduce possibility of misunderstanding.

  • Based on the MVP that I would like to make, I believe we would need the following pallets to support all of the features: System, Support, Executive, Assets, Authority Discovery, BABE, Balances, Democracy, Elections, Referenda, GRANDPA, Indices, Membership, Multisig, Nicks, Proxy, Scheduler, Transaction Payment, Treasury
  • The MVP Testnet Requirements docs that lists the pallets and features we are looking to make can be found here
  • I did not include an initial list of pallets in the application as these are the pallets that I believe I will require from my research. However, I may be missing some pallets that need to be added later or some of these pallets may need to be removed

• What do you mean by the existing governance pallet?

  • Sorry, I meant to say "existing governance pallets", by which I am referring to the democracy, elections, and referenda pallets.
  • I would like to make a pallet that allows the DAOs on the Societal platform to execute a smart contract on Moonbeam, after an approved referendum
  • I believe that this should be a separate a pallet, apposed to being being a modification of the democracy, elections or referenda pallets

• Why do you want to charge DAOs for certain functions? Where would these funds go to? Do you already know how to implement this?

  • I want to charge DAOs a monthly fee as payment for advanced functions on the platform or if they have more than 10 members of their DAO. I have created a list of different subscription tiers that the DAOs can select from, if they would like advanced functions or more than 10 users. Please note that not all of those features listed in the different tiers will be availble in the initial product and represent a future state of the application.
  • The funds that are collected would go to the Societal treasury, which would be used to fund future parachain slots, community approved initiatives and project operations
  • User transactions on the platform will be free, so the subscription model is Societal's source of revenue
  • In regards to implementation, to make this work I believe I would have to set transactions to zero on the Transactions Payment Pallet. Then I would have to create a separate pallet that does two things; First, it checks how many members are in the DAO via how many holders there are of the DAO token. Second, it would have to check if the DAO has made a monthly payment from one of its wallets to the Societal subscriptions wallet. Based on the answer to these questions, the UI would display certain functions to the DAO users on their dashboard.

I hope this answers your questions.

[semuelle]

Thanks for the update, @gfox1, and sorry for the late reply. Could you put your questions into the application document? That way it'll be easier to revisit during milestone review. The list of pallets doesn't have to be exhaustive, we just need a rough understanding of what's involved in implementing this.

Lastly: making transactions free makes the chain susceptible to DDOS attacks. Have you thought about how to counter this?

[gfox1]

Hi @semuelle, no problem at all!

Yes, I can put my list of questions into the application document. I will put a list under each milestone. I will also put in the list of pallets in the document.

To counter act the DDOS attacks, the main methods I have thought of are:

• Proposal Generation: You will only be able to create one proposal per DAO at a time. You will have to wait for your proposal to be accepted or rejected to until you can create a new proposal
• Voting: You will only be able to vote on a proposal if you have the community token and only one vote for proposal
• DAO creation: I have not found the best way to prevent people from creating multiple DAOs and swarming the network if there is not cost to generate them. As well, I would like to use the Statemint parachain to create all of the assets, which I from my understanding uses DOT for transactions. So right now I believe I will have to get the user to pay for the initial DAO creation.
  • Until I can find the best method to do this, I believe I will have to limit the initial MVP to only allow for free transactions for proposal creation and voting. Then role out free transaction for user profile updates and DAO creation.

I will list my assumptions in the application, as well change milestone 3 to only include free proposal creation and governance voting.

[gfox1]

Hey @semuelle, I was wondering if there was any update on this with the new information that I provided in the application? Or if you need anything else from my side?

[gfox1]

Hey @semuelle, I just wanted to follow up here again to see if there was anything else you need from my side to have this application approved? Hope you have a good weekend!

[semuelle]

Hey @gfox1, very sorry for the late reply. I have been out of office for almost two weeks. I will continue the review in the next few days.

[semuelle]

Hey @gfox1. Again, sorry for the delay. The application looks good. I will share it with the rest of the team.

Some follow-up questions from me:

• What was this other Polkadot project you were involved in where you found the DAO tooling to be lacking?
• Are you planning to reuse any code from previous/ongoing projects? Payroll, job boards, mobile applications all have come up quite often in the past.
• Your whitepaper lists several possible partnerships, if I see correctly. Do you already have any ongoing partnerships or partner ship talk you can share?
• Can you expand what functionality will be included in "governance and treasury management" in the first milestone?

[gfox1]

Hey @semuelle, no problem at all. I hope you had a good time away. I am glad to hear you think the application looks good and thanks for sharing it with the rest of the team!

Here are the answers to your follow up questions:

What was this other Polkadot project you were involved in where you found the DAO tooling to be lacking?

• My co-founders and I were at Ruby Protocol, prior to starting Societal. The idea for Ruby was to transition into a DAO, so while searching for DAO tooling in the ecosystem we did not find many options as compared to the Ethereum ecosystem. We did not find a good place for communities to come and create / manage their DAO, so we decided to build it.

Are you planning to reuse any code from previous/ongoing projects? Payroll, job boards, mobile applications all have come up quite often in the past.

• At this time we are not looking to reuse any code.

Your whitepaper lists several possible partnerships, if I see correctly. Do you already have any ongoing partnerships or partner ship talk you can share?

Yes, I have been in communication with Moonbeam about opening an HRMP channel between our chains and they seem very interested. We just have some development work to do on our side before we are able to formally pursue this. I have also applied for grant from Acala for an AUSD integration to be the main stable coin for our DAOs.

Can you expand what functionality will be included in "governance and treasury management" in the first milestone?

• For the first milestone, the treasury board will include the following details: Display information for what is kept in the DAOs wallets, who owns what percentage of the DAO (on-chain cap table) , and they will also be able to manage the DAOs multi-sig wallets. From the governance board, it will display the type of governance model they have selected for their DAO upon creation, the ability create and vote on governance proposals and keep track of the outstanding / executed proposals.

[Noc2]

Thanks for the grant application. This looks really interesting and the UI looks nice. I have a few questions:

• Will the UI of the first milestone be based on the UI Mockups, which you shared? Which programming language/framework are you going to use for the UI?
• Are you also going to update the UI with each new pallet (Milestone 2 and 3)? If so feel free to integrate this into the deliveries?
• Did you already take a look at the tech stack: https://github.com/w3f/Grants-Program/blob/master/docs/polkadot_stack.md and other Governance/DAO projects?

[Noc2]

Btw. sorry for the delay here. We will try to speed this up now. A lot of the team is/was ooo for various reasons.

[gfox1]

Hi @Noc2, no problem. Glad to hear that you like the UI!

Here are the answers to your questions:

1. Yes, the UI will be based on the mockups provided. We will only change the UI if at the time of development we believe that it is better to go with a different style to display all of the product features correctly. However, as of right now it will be based on the images. As for the UI language/framework, we will use React.

2. Yes, the UI will probably be updated with each pallet update. Ideally minor updates to allow for use of the milestone features. I can add this to the deliverables.

3. Yes, I have looked at the tech stack document and other governance/DAO projects in the Polkadot Ecosystem. The Societal whitepaper goes into the difference between our platform and others in the Polkadot ecosystem. https://docsend.com/view/2gte2fd8wc4jp4rg

No problem about the delay and appreciate you speeding up the process!

[Noc2]

Thanks for the update. I’m happy to go ahead with it and will share it again with the rest of the team.

[gfox1]

I resolved the conversation. Comments on resolution.

[gfox1]

@Noc2 - Thanks, great to hear it!

@gautamdhameja Thanks for approving the changes.

Let me know if there is anything else you need!

[github-actions]

Congratulations and welcome to the Web3 Foundation Grants Program! Please refer to our Milestone Delivery repository for instructions on how to submit milestones and invoices, our FAQ for frequently asked questions and the support section of our README for more ways to find answers to your questions.

Before you start, take a moment to read through our announcement guidelines for all communications related to the grant or make them known to the right person in your organisation. In particular, please don't announce the grant publicly before at least the first milestone of your project has been approved. At that point or shortly before, you can get in touch with us at grantsPR@web3.foundation and we'll be happy to collaborate on an announcement about the work you’re doing.

Lastly, please remember to let us know in case you run into any delays or deviate from the deliverables in your application. You can either leave a comment here or directly request to amend your application via PR. We wish you luck with your project! 🚀

[gfox1]

Thanks for accepting my application. Looking forward to building the Societal platform and milestones!