# Dramatic Anarchic Organizations - Paulo Fonseca | proposals.app - Speakers: [Paulo Fonseca](https://streameth.org/speakers/paulo-fonseca) - Channel: [ETH Belgrade Community](https://streameth.org/eth-belgrade-community) - Date: 2025-10-07 - Duration: 18:58 - Watch: https://streameth.org/watch/yt-a2fmf73ku6s - YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a2fmf73ku6s ## Description Dramatic Anarchic Organizations - Paulo Fonseca | proposals.app ## Transcript Um hello everybody. Um my talk is called dramatic anarchctic organizations. I hope most of you here have got the pun right. It's not decentralized autonomous organizations is more like dramatic and anarchctic and not organized at all. Um but what it actually is about is about governance and how we um should look at governance as the endgame issue and problem that our species should try to solve. Um governance is messy. Sometimes we're all together and something shocking happens and then everybody freaks out. Politics is messy. Coordination is messy. Collaboration is also messy. Sometimes we bite. Sometimes we lick each other. And cooperation is also messy. Sometimes we cannot cooperate enough to get our way. And of course, conflict is messy as well. Governance is a messy, chaotic, sloppy, turbulent business. And in my opinion, it is the game. It is the endgame for our species. If we don't figure out how to govern ourselves, we're pretty much especially in the age of AI, especially in the age of nuclear power proliferating and uh wars and so on and so forth. So yeah, governance is the end game for humanity. Um I've been living in Romania for a year now. This past year in Romania has been pretty fun in terms of politics. Not sure if you're aware, but the presidential election was canceled in December. Uh when the second round was already kind of underway, it the election was repeated in May, last May, a few weeks ago. Um but um Romania democracy has been framed internationally as something that's not very healthy at the moment and the beginning of Europe's democratic backsliding. There's also elections in Poland recently last weekend and Serbia itself is also in a bit of a mess if I should say so. I'm sure you've heard about this quote. Democracy is the worst form of government except for all the others by the big boss and maybe culprit of all our troubles around nowadays especially in the Middle East. Um so yeah, governance is the end game for humanity and Dow governance in my opinion is the best experimental test bed that we have to try things out. Um this is Ricardo from Arbitum Foundation. He tweeted this a few weeks ago. Arbitrum DAO is a test net for democracy. Arbum DAO right now is one of the biggest Dows out there by number of people engaging in voting and the amount of resources and money that it controls and um it is a mess of a DA and it has been changing a lot and there's real governance happening and there's real conflict happening and there's stakes uh things at stake and humans trying to figure it out how to govern that whole And in my opinion, we should stress test these governance systems because if they're going to break, they should break on the DAO world, not in the real world. Otherwise, we don't learn how to govern ourselves better in this day and age with the technology that we could use to do that. I'm Paulo Fona. I'm a designer by trade. Um, I design tools for DAO people and I've been building proposals app with my co-founder Andre and I'm also an arbitum dow delegates since uh eight or nine months ago that people say that I asked too many questions by the way. Um, who here has joined the DA? Okay. Who here has voted on an onchain dow proposal? All right. Who here has created, published, or passed the DO proposal? Yes. Okay. Good. So, three, two. Okay. Who here has created a DAO governance framework? Exactly as expected. Three people, two people, one people. Yes, exactly. Um, what is governance really? Um, this weird word, governance, right? The structures, process, and traditions that determine how we uh our power is exercised, stakeholders have their say, decisions are made, and decision makers are held accountable hopefully. Uh but if you try to figure out how power is exercised and stakeholders have their say and all this, you also have to decide how all this happens, right? So governance is really how decisions are made. in a group of people. Um, and this is a interesting distinction because when we are trying to govern ourselves for ourselves and the decisions that we do only impact ourselves, we also have to engage in governance and decide stuff about our life. Um and we usually have to uh manage the tension and the the conflict between um within ourselves, right? But in a group of people, we need to do it with everybody else and that becomes really messy. when we're by ourselves, we only have to, you know, usually um follow our brain or follow our heart. And there's a governance exercise between those two maybe most of the times for men is a bit different because there's another but that's doesn't matter now. Um but this is really this is really tricky to uh manage for our own life for our own decisions as well. And so imagine to do that within you know all this mess within everybody as individuals most of the time we cannot even decide what we want to do for ourselves right so when we try to do that as a group of course it's going to be messy. So, how do we entangle this mess or we help ease this mess nowadays? If you want to figure out what happened in the DAO proposal, um, you have to go to a governance platform. You have to see who voted for what. You have to read the proposal. You have to go to another voting platform and read the proposal there. You have to go to the forum and read the comments there. Um, in 30 seconds you have 30 tabs open trying to figure out what happened with a single D proposal. This is a proposal on arbitum um that has 204 comments on the forum. Thousands of votes on chain thousands of votes off chain. So, it's very messy to try to figure this out as a Dow delegate and to figure out how you should vote or how people voted this way and why and why the result of the proposal is this. So, what should you do about it? Um, I'm a designer and I was like, okay, we should design better tools to manage all this. And um in June we went on an hackathon for arbitrum and we came up with this concept of well crazy idea let's put all of this information about the proposal in the same place. Uh the forum discussion the onchain votes the offshain votes all in the same place where people can see everything in the same place without having to um go back and forth. So we created proposal.app app where you can have all the versions of the proposal text on the forum offshane and onchain. You can see all the comments. You can filter the comments by the voting power of each person. You can see all the votes as well, the offshane and onchain ones. Um you can see how much voting power each person has on each comment. And um you can also obviously see the results of every vote. So for this proposal specifically, there was an offshane vote on May 23 where you can see how everybody voted. You can search for proposals. Um, and one neat little thing is that you can also see when the post was deleted from the forum. Our goal with proposals on app and trying to collect all the information about the proposal in a single place is also to bring more transparency to the governance processes uh of Dows. And in this particular proposal, which was very controversial, that didn't even went to a vote. As you can see, there's no vote here, but it was being discussed in the forum with 69 comments. There was some comments that were deleted. There were some comments that were censored. And if you go to the forum right now, you cannot see that. But at least in proposal app, you can see that in that part of the conversation, there was a comment that's not there anymore. We don't show why it's not there. We don't show the contents of the comment. We don't show who posted the comment, but at least you can see that there was something there that went away. And we launched this in book rest a few weeks ago uh for arbitrum and we realized that the because we have uh so much data in here and all the information in here, we can do uh this cool features, right? where we show the voting power alongside each person that votes and so on. And we uh instead of trying to convince delegates to come to proposal app and use proposal app instead of the normal um platforms that they already use, we're going to do the opposite. And we just submitted the proposal on arbitum to do uh three forum integrations with the arbitum forum which is where the delegates already live and uh read proposals where we will be able to show the voting power on the each uh on each forum user and for each proposal we will be able to show the live results of the proposal in the forum as well and also we allow we will allow people to subscribe to email notifications. so that they can get emails to uh know when there's new proposals on average from DAO and that they have to vote and then don't forget to vote. So the current state of DA governance is that we're trying to manage ourselves and billions of dollars in a plethora of random platforms and softwares all disconnected, all disjointed. And what I've been trying to do uh and my co-founder for the last few months is to okay, let's at least organize this a little bit better. Let's untangle this mess a little bit more and put everything in the same place and design a unified experience to show everything in the same place and then bring that additional information to the forum as well. So that's it. That's proposals on app. Um and you can check it out on the domain and um thank you questions. [Applause] Hello >> see proposals.app more as an accountability tool or an information like for voting like what's the long-term view like looking at delegates making like transparent how it happened or support more of making it happen more smoothly. >> Yeah both both things. So we will allow people to vote on proposals on app very soon on both off-chain and onchain proposals which is already you know instead of going to Snapchat and going to tally or agora you can do it all in the same place. Um and also you can write a reason that you know it's the same reason in both places and so on. Um so that operational part yes as well but we're more interested on the accountability and transparency angle. Um, proposal app is open source. Uh, we will be setting up a nonprofit to uh, manage the software and we will not be visibly [Music] neutral and be the transparency platform of DAO information for DO proposals. Uh one of the things that we want to do alongside the showing the deleted post for example is to allow people to comment anonymously but verify verifying that they have certain voting power for that comment. This is already happening in arbitrum da for some controversial proposals people create another forum account they put an avatar and they put a funny name and then they comment anonymously criticizing the proposal because they don't feel safe enough to do it in under their own name. But people dismiss that comment because they don't know if it comes from a big delegate or a small delegate. Right? It would be cool to provably verify that that comment comes from a group of delegates that represent 60 million ARB in voting power or whatever. So that's one of the things that we're going to be trying to do next because we've seen that behavior occurring naturally, but it has this downside of, you know, you don't know how much voting power this person has at saying that. Um and also the next thing which I think is the ultimate fir uh tool to bring accountability to Dowos is a proper whistleblowing program with bounties where people that submit evidence that has not been disclosed yet about certain things that happened in the DAO they can get rewarded for that evidence. Arbitum Dow I think is one of the first Dows that actually has kind of a whistleblowing program. I don't really agree with how it's being done and proposed right now, but it passed the proposal, so it's going to happen. It's called the watchdog program where if anybody in the world finds out that someone that got a grant from Arbitrum didn't spend that money properly, they can get a reward for reporting that. But it's only for grants. Uh a proper whistleblowing program should be for everything that happens in the DA. And uh it would be useful if the evidence that people submit in those whistleblowing reports would be also verifiable evidence that it's actually real. So that's the next step to answer your question. More accountability. Yes, of course. More questions. So I guess it's very popular for people to delegate votes and you would probably show the vote voting power including all the delegated votes to that one individual, right? >> Yeah. >> And what if somebody is new to the DA and doesn't have like a lot of weight and stuff like that? H how like I assume it's very like this is not really related to the platform but more like in general the DA like is it that comments of those people like easily dismissible or like I I I see a potential risk of somebody who has a lot of power would be maybe perceived and people would listen to that regardless if they kind of like agree on it like it is I I I can see that showing the voting power might introduce bias of how people interpret it. >> Um so any comments on that? Yeah. So there's bias both ways, right? So um right now the big delegates um recuse themselves from commenting on proposals because they know that if they say they agree, everybody respects them, they have a lot of voting power, everybody would vote yes, right? So big delegates usually don't offer feedback on proposals, which is bad. And they vote last minute on the voting period as well, uh so that nobody else copies their vote kind of, right? Um but it is useful to see that this proposal has had this comments but not from big delegates. So you actually don't know what's going to happen in the vote when they actually have to vote right for smaller. So that's bias on one side for smaller uh delegates or for people that have no voting power. We have another problem right now which is we have bot accounts that get created and summarize the proposal and comment with GPT gibberish. uh and people that are not aware of who that person is, they still read the comments like oh this is JTV doesn't matter. So it would be helpful to show it has zero voting power or uh some other tag for example. And also there's a another um issue which is the forum moderators are usually from the foundation and when they comment on something it has a lot of weight because you know they're from the foundation and right now that's not identified at all. they look like uh random. So they should also have a tag that says forum admin at least and or from the arbiter foundation in this case to bring more context about who they are. But we are mindful that introducing the voting power on the discourse uh thread with all the comments will change how people comment and will change how people perceive comments and will change how people will like comments as well. Um and um we're going to experiment and see and if it breaks then we'll learn something. Yeah, that's the take >> anymore. And thank you once twice. >> Thank you very much for listening.