Polls, Bounties, and Proposals

Polls and Proposals are both ways to gather feedback from a community. Similar to the differences between Organizations and Agora DAOs, Polls, Bounties, and Proposals each have distinct characteristics in terms of decentralization and automation.

Polls

Polls are available to Organizations and Agora DAOs using Clarity.

Polls are community-wide votes that are facilitated off-chain, using chain indexers to calculate DAO members' voting power and vote tallies. Polls do not execute any smart contracts as a result of passing. They are meant to signal what the community desires, rather than automatically execute those desires.

Creating and voting on polls can be limited to Admin users of an Organization depending how the Decentralization Parameters are set up.

When a poll is created, the creator pre-defines the options the community will be able to vote on.

Timing for polls can be configured on a per-poll basis, as there is no smart contract enforcing a particular cadence.

Polls can be in the following stages:

Voting

Organization members eligible to vote can submit votes.

Concluded

Voting has ended and results are shown.

Bounties

Bounties are available to Organizations and Agora DAOs using Clarity.

Bounties are similar to Polls in that they are facilitated in the same off-chain manner, do not execute decisions automatically, and can restrict creation to Admin users.

However, bounties are unique in that the options to vote on can be submitted by any member of the Organization.

Bounties allow communities to leverage the power of collective intelligence.

Timing for Bounties can be configured on a per-bounty basis, as there is no smart contract enforcing a particular cadence.

Bounties can be in the following stages:

Accepting Submissions

Organization members can enter submissions during this period.

Voting

Organization members are able to vote on submissions during this period.

Concluded

Voting has ended and results are shown

Note: Bounties can be configured to be able to be in both the Accepting Submissions and Voting stages at the same time if desired.

Proposals

Proposals are only available to Agora DAOs using Clarity.

Proposals are community-wide votes that are recorded with transactions on-chain. Proposals that pass a community vote execute smart contract effects automatically.

Participation in Proposals cannot be gated to Admin users. Instead, any DAO member owning a Stake that holds enough Governance Tokens to satisfy the relevant user participation threshold has the ability to create and vote on Proposals.

Figure 1: Stages of a Proposal

Proposal Timing Configuration

Proposals use governance thresholds and timing configurations that are pre-defined by the DAO's Governor Contract, so they cannot be configured on a per-proposal basis. The stages all Proposals must pass through are shown and described above in Figure 1.

Proposal stages:

Draft

The proposal has been submitted, but a community-wide vote has not yet started.

Voting

Voting for the proposal is open to the community. Votes are submitted via on-chain transactions that are tracked by Agora.

After the voting period (V in fig. 1) has concluded Agora checks if the vote tally meets the Proposal Approval Threshold.

Locked

Passed proposals are locked for a specified amount of time (L in fig. 1) before executing their effects.

Executing

The window of time (E in fig. 1), where the proposals effect smart contracts are executing.

Executed

The proposal passed, and the effects were successfully executed in the allotted time.

Failed

The proposal either did not receive enough votes to execute, or the effects were not executed within the Execution stage

Comparisons

Poll Pros

• Free to create & vote on because transactions are not submitted on-chain.

• Quick and flexible way to gather community sentiment.

• Restricting governance actions is useful to many early stage projects, or teams who desire more control over the direction of their project.

• Malicious proposals that passed are not automatically executed.

Poll Cons

• Some members may not have the ability to create and/or vote, no matter how many Governance Tokens they hold, depending on how the Organization is configured.

• Rely on trusted actor(s) to execute decisions of the Organization.

• Polls and their votes are not stored on-chain, so more trust is required when members want to self-verify votes are counted accurately.

Bounty Pros

• Free to create & vote on because transactions are not submitted on-chain.

• Quick and flexible way to synthesize collective intelligence.

Bounty Cons

• Some members may not have the ability to vote, no matter how many Governance Tokens they hold, depending on how the Organization is configured.

• Rely on trusted actor(s) to execute decisions of the Organization.

• Bounties and their votes are not stored on-chain, so more trust is required when members want to self-verify votes are counted accurately.

Proposal Pros

• Passed proposals are executed automatically via smart contracts.

• No dependency on actor(s) to execute passed proposals.

• Any DAO member holding enough Governance Tokens is able to participate in any governance action, from creating to voting on proposals.

• All governance actions are recorded on-chain, which allows trustless self-verification of the recording of votes.

Proposal Cons

• Governance actions require on-chain transactions, which cost users fees.

• Less flexible on a per-use basis, since the DAO's Governor Contract sets the thresholds and timing.