Vouching

New Feature: The Vouching System

The DAO landscape is founded on self management and contribution, and we often hear the question: how should new contributors be inducted into a Gift Circle? While the borders of DAO membership might be as simple as landing in a Discord server or collecting NFTs or tokens, the additional trust layer of joining a circle to GIVE or receive may have different considerations. This may be performed by consensus, self determination, admin decisions or a blend of the three. Coordinape leaves this up to you.

Up to now, the Coordinape application has only allowed circle access via admin controls. This will likely always be a useful option, and some circles may choose to maintain this practice alone in an ongoing fashion (which, of course, we will support).

However, just as DAOs often form by autonomy and osmosis, we wanted to include more decentralized options by which a circle can grow. Our new Vouching system allows members to onboard new collaborators through a simple and flexible consensus mechanism. With Vouching, circles may determine their porosity via threshold settings, and contributors in a circle can actively engage in the management of its growth.

Here’s how it works:

Setting Up Vouching for your Circle

Via admin controls, a circle admin can decide to enable or disable vouching. Admins can also set the number of vouches that are needed for circle entry, the period of time a nominee remains available to vouch, and some descriptive text for the module.

A vouch is a vote by a circle contributor to invite new members. Vouching can be as little as 1 vouch needed (any contributor can add other contributors) or could be set so that every member of the circle must vote to add a new member. If the minimum threshold of vouches is met, the contributor can gain access to the circle.

Nominating a Contributor

Usually, the vouching process will start on the social layer, via conversation or collaboration leading to a realization that someone in the community should added to a circle. When this happens, any member of the circle can nominate the provisional new contributor. They will need to add the member’s ETH address, name (such as a Discord / Telegram username) and a statement about why they are nominating.

Vouching

Once this has been performed, other circle members will see that the potential collaborator has been nominated, and they can take the step of Vouching for the member if they so chose.

If the new contributor is vouched for by enough of the circle’s current contributors to hit the circle’s vouching threshold, they are added to the circle and can log in with their favorite wallet app, set up profiles and begin to receive or send GIVE.

Future features will build on this process, including the addition of more surgical toggles that can determine the status of new members. And, admins still have the ability to remove members if mistakes are made. We at Coordinape are particularly excited about how this new module might aid DAOs in bootstrapping their communities and letting contributors participate in the active growth of their working teams. Please feel free to give it a try, or ask for more information in our Discord.