Incubation post
Ideation post
Summary
Proposal to migrate the DAO’s current forum and ideation process to a new platform, Metaforo.
Abstract
Since genesis in July 2021, the DAO’s forum has been powered by Discourse
Discourse has served its purpose adequately, but it wasn’t built for DAOs, and it leaves much to be desired.
Metaforo is a new web3-native platform focused on providing the ultimate communication hub for decentralized communities. They offer most of the same functionality as Discourse as well as many features that Discourse doesn’t, including token-weighted voting on polls (aka Ideation) and the ability for the DAO’s treasury to be admin. If this proposal passes, it would override SCP-97 and migrate Ideation from SnapShot to Metaforo.
Check out the DAO’s test Metaforo space to get a feel for what our new forum would look like. You’ll see that all of our Discourse content as of a few weeks ago has been migrated, and if you sign in with the same email that you use for Discourse, your forum history will be linked to your Metaforo account.
Motivation
The forum and governance process are integral to the DAO’s operation, and since inception we have acknowledged that Discourse would likely not be the ideal long-term solution. We’ve been waiting for a solution like Metaforo to be developed, and their team has delivered. The results from the Incubation poll demonstrated that the community agrees that Metaforo’s current offering is already as good or better than Discourse.
Specification
If this proposal passes, the following steps will be taken:
- Appoint @Giantkin (0xff75E131c711e4310C045317779d39B3B4f718C4) as admin for the ShapeShift Metaforo space, and delegate authority to appoint new moderators to the Moderation Workstream Leader (currently @giantkin)
- Appoint the DAO Treasury as the ShapeShift Metaforo space owner (0x90A48D5CF7343B08dA12E067680B4C6dbfE551Be)
- Migrate all Discourse content to the ShapeShift Metaforo space
- Complete one final round of testing to confirm all foxducks are in a row
- Point forum.shapeshift.com to the Metaforo space
- Update the governance process to reflect the new Ideation process, which will mimic the prior Ideation process in Discourse but require polls to calculate voting power with SnapShot
- DAO it 🚀
Optional: It could also make sense to publish a blog post about the migration and link to the blog post from Metaforo to minimize potential confusion from active forum participants.
Benefits
Quick comparison of Discourse vs. Metaforo on a few key factors:
Hosting/storage: Centralized servers and databases vs. Data is stored on Arweave
DAO ownership: No clear path vs. Gnosis Safe can own (ownership is not stored on-chain yet, but Metaforo is committed to full decentralization)
Token-weighted voting (Ideation!): No support vs. Supports token-gated polls & calculating voting power with SnapShot Strategies
Display SnapShot strategies: No support, forum and governance are fragmented vs. Supported, forum and governance live under one roof
Sign up options: Email only vs. Wallet and/or Email
Cost: $100/mo on current plan vs. Free! 🔥
And this is just what they’ve built in their first few months! Metaforo’s entire roadmap is focused on building the best forum for decentralized communities, and they’re eager to hear our feedback on what to build next.
Drawbacks
- Metaforo is a new and innovative platform, and things may break
- While all of the content stored on Arweave should be permanently accessible, it could require technical lift to migrate to another forum platform in the future (Metaforo team confirmed that they are working on a tool to easily be able to migrate data from Arweave to other forums)
- There are some features that Discourse offers that Metaforo does not yet, such as Recent Topics. Fortunately they have been quick to implement every feature we’ve requested, and Recent Topics should be live before we migrate.
- The user experience of Metaforo is similar, but different to Discourse’s. It’s possible some users will be confused by the migration which could decrease forum participation
