Summary
This proposal seeks to move our governance discussions and community forum back to Discourse (a reversal of SCP-101) due to the continued production issues and poor user experience with Metaforo.
Abstract
If approved, this proposal will enact two major changes: 1) The official forum platform of the Shapeshift DAO will be migrated back to Discourse and 2) due to the lack of support for FOX weighted voting Ideation votes will occur on Snapshot per the specification outlined in SCP-97
Motivation
Metaforo’s platform has been a constant source of governance user complaints since adoption in SCP-101. Support requests from our Moderation workstream have gone unanswered
for more than 3 months. Mobile browser issues, such as links not working, were reported to the team on Jan 3rd 2023 and are still presently an issue seven months later as of September 8th 2023.
Basic forum functionality, like the ability to quote a user, still isn’t available and currently the state of the text editor is unusable, with most contributors choosing to draft text in a separate application prior to pasting the information into Metaforo.
Shapeshift Governance passed SCP-101 in September of 2022, and the metaforo team has had an ample opportunity to retain us as users.
If passed, I will act as owner of the migration efforts to coordinate the move back to Discourse. There are some unknowns at the moment around our ability to export data from Metaforo into Discourse, but I believe we can work through them in parallel with getting this proposal kicked off. A minimum acceptable outcome would be an archive of all metaforo based discussions that is publicly available.
The DAO is facing a critical juncture in its existence and spending additional time struggling with basic communication on governance issues is a distraction that our community can easily remedy.
Specification
This proposal would kick off the following actions
A migration of our official forum platform to Discourse. The Fox Foundation is able to cover any additional costs of this migration that are unable to be absorbed by existing workstream budgets (for reference Discourse pricing available here and we expect the 100$/month tier to be sufficient)
Modify our DNS records to point forum.shapeshift.com to the Discourse based forum
If possible, resurrecting our previous Discourse build if not, creating a new Discourse build.
Export of Metaforo data into a historical, publicly accessible archive. To ensure that the exported data is never tampered with we can hash the data and provide this as proof of validity on the new discourse forum.
If technically possible this data will be imported into Discourse
Migration of all users to Discourse and deprecation of Metaforo
Benefits
Moves the Shapeshift DAO back to the de facto standard for DAO community forums. DAO participants from other communities will be familiar with our forum tooling and not encounter additional friction when interacting with an already complicated governance process.
Discourse is a mature open source platform with support, documentation, on-demand data dumps and several other features that should give us more confidence that our critical conversations on governance will persist into the future.
Removes user friction associated with the most basic interactions in our governance process.
Drawbacks
Switching may require users to re-register.
No token weighted polls available directly in discourse
Historical posts from Metaforo may not be available directly on our discourse forum, but will be available in some form for reference.
Updates since original Incubation post:
Metaforo has agreed to export our data for us, but so far hasn't been able to tell us when this would be available to us or in what format we should expect the data to be in. This means there is some uncertainty on how we will archive existing posts or potentially import back to discourse. If passed this proposal would explicitly delegate the authority to handle the technical aspects of the migration to me acting on behalf of the Fox Foundation. The community would be consulted, but no further governance steps would be required in order to make a decision on how our forum history from metaforo will be preserved. It is however a strict requirement that there will be a publicly available archive of our forum history.
