We need to do a better job at communicating intent in a clear way and not leave out vital info. I would love if we could make a 1-year development plan concerning the DApp(s) - the things they will share, the difference in ressources they will have and who is planned to develop what branches/forks and subsequently who will support the individual dev teams. Concerning the initial question - I strongly appeal to leave stuff as is for now (until the Ethereum DApp is ready to lose the white-label status and embrace public demand), but further out I was advocating many times for putting the DApp, once ready, onto the domain name and put the galaxy at galaxy.giveth.io - As for knowledgebase, tutorials, et al - these should be reachable from inside the DApp and be supported by a thisis.giveth.io or something similar (the way swarm city handles it)

Giveth.io should be a landing page with 2 options:
1-Giveth Platform: It will show the current Giveth logo-- If you are a project or an organisation that wants to change the world and drive positive impact, you click here.
2- Giveth Galaxy showing the Art design that was created for the devcon T-shirts. If you are a dev that wants to learn coding, participate in the all projects Griff and other team members are driving, then you click here. Each one will have its own personality and messaging, appealing to its targeted audience. They will both be sub-domains: galaxy and dapp.

Responding to @Griff's:
"but eventually I would love for the Giveth DApp (Not the Giveth DApp team) to be on Giveth.io... but we need a lot of bug fixes, ux testing, etc. To happen before it goes to the main site. When the users like using it, we should start talking about moving it to giveth.io"

Giveth.io was meant as a platform, a dapp if you want to call it that. We are getting close to having the opportunity to realize that vision but to do that, it needs its proper communication and branding to onboard campaigns. So a website that shows its utility, use cases and allows for projects to be on boarded should be at the start of that dapp.giveth page.

I am not sure what is meant by " (Not the Giveth DApp team) to be on Giveth.io" it sounds excluding, not a value that I relate to Giveth. I would love to understand better this particular statement. Additionally, "When the users like using it, we should start talking about moving it to giveth.io"---sounds very conditional and lacking collaboration and team spirit. Just as the funding to the dev team was.

We need the dev team to keep working on the platform which is the most tangible goal to achieve that relates to the original vision of "making the world a better place”. What is more powerful than empowering organisations and individuals to collectively manage funds aimed at enabling a good cause? You may argue that "the vision" has changed but it hasn’t changed for most of us, who were there from the beginning of it all.

I see clearly difference of opinions and a lot of suggestions that are not aligned to Giveth vision and values.

Thank you @Satya for creating this Loomio and to all of you who cared enough to formulate an opinion.

I don't think that speeding the discussion toward a flawed vote with two unacceptable options is the best way to move this discussion forward.

When I suggested we use galaxy.giveth.io, this was meant to imply that giveth.io was ONLY a receptacle for subdomains. socialcoding.giveth.io, dapp.giveth.io, etc. Since we all know that, at it's heart, Giveth is a group with pretty-well defined circles of interest, each responsible for stewarding their own part of the galaxy, and for some individuals from those parts to remain in contact with the others to coordinate a cohesive vision for moving forward.

I don't think it's fair that anyone at this point can claim ownership of the entire Giveth moniker, regardless of what part of Giveth they represent. I understand the tension that it appears to some that the entry point to the Dapp is not as clearly defined as it needs to be, this is definitely something that can be dealt with on a message level rather than trying to break the machine apart.

A watch definitely needs all the gears in order for it's hands to point in the correct directions. However, that watch will only be correct twice a day if the spring was not there and nobody to wind it.

Giveth's first working title was "Charity DAO" and my efforts to build a DApp for Giveth will be full steam ahead in that direction. DAOs for Charity.

We created social coding (it was first called the Smart Contract Circle) in 2017, to build a community in the Ethereum space and it grew into a much bigger thing. We started helping other non-profit groups and building communities around solving problems in the blockchain space (Can't have blockchain 4 good if the blockchain doesnt work).

Thats why in March in our presentation at EthCC https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iShzx6iqwus&t=60s we intro'd the giveth galaxy concept and since then Giveth has been a community focused on #blockchain4good.

That is what our community knows us for, and that is what giveth.io is about.... its about all of our projects, not just the ones that a few people like most.

The DApp is a huge piece of this, it is our flagship product and I always want it to be. The Giveth DApp (to me) is about decentralized governance... and our dapp currently has little (debatably no) governance in it.

It was interesting that we turned down aragon's grant for 150k to build liquid pledging as an Aragon DApp... that would have been a really nice piece for integrating governance into the DApp.

The direction the DApp team seems to be taking it is not focused on DAOs for charity, its focused on Transparency for donations... That is great, and I want to support that, but that's not honestly a great application for Blockchain tech... that can be done with an open database. Until it has DAOs on it, uses Dai and is fun to use, it doesn't really make sense from my standpoint to be on the website.

In all of the interviews, presentations, and conversations I have had about the DApp, the goal is to create DAOs to make social impact.

This is why the next two loomios are being made... to push for decentralized governance on our DApp. :-D Michael and Jeff have big plans :-D

The DApp team making white lable versions of the dapp for other teams, in the name of giveth, is AWESOME! I love it! And i want to keep working with the dapp team on improving the codebase for us and other people to use!

Giving up the domain name makes no sense, and linking the giveth dapp at this point makes no sense either... I have 100's of ether that are donated in limbo that i cannot use (major bug), I ran DECENTRAL on ETH and had to mitgate huge exchange risks (we need a stable token) and the UX is really bad!
I am doing everything in my power to fix this, making issues on github, funding milestones, and talking to other people that can help with funding.

I am also working closely with Aragon to push DAO integration to our dapp. We are very very well positioned to make all things things happen.

Satya, you and Grace have been stepping back hard from Giveth and i think you are out of touch with what we are doing. I don't think you guys have the best perspective to decide what to do with the domain name.

Thinking a lot about community, and tools. The DApp is ultimately a tool in the hands of the people, as is governance through a tool like Loomio.

We can change and improve, replace or 're-tool' as appropriate to more efficiently and effectively serve the purpose that connects us.

My greatest desire is for the community to learn and grow through using our tools - it saddens me that differences in how we want to use this tool threatens to divide the community!

May we find a solution that is not a 'this vs. that', and allows us all to work in the way we are best suited toward the shared vision.

I guess the real piece here is I see the Giveth DApp as one of the DApps that will be spawned off of the liquidpledging codebase. The Giveth DApp has DAOs... so with what we have now, its just not ready yet... so why would we rebrand? We are creating the Unicorn DAC to be stewards of the Giveth Galaxy... maybe that DAO will think this is a great idea when the Giveth DApp gets further along :-D

I joined Giveth full time to push forward the mission of solving one of the biggest problems in the social impact sector -inefficient distribution of resources clouded by corruption and abuse of power. I truly believed we can deliver on this promise, although it was always clear to me it will not be easy nor fast. I joined to help with what I could do - development.

Working as volunteer ever since I was a teenager, and later on listening to the problems other volunteers and social impact workers face as well as together actively working to try and solve those with technology persuaded me we can make a huge difference with decentralized tools such as the DApp. I want to believe that we were very much aligned on that mission a year ago. Looking at what Giveth is now and all the initiatives that are part of it I can’t help myself to wonder, are we still working on that? Or did the focus change? I would love to run a survey among us and among our community with one question - what is Giveth trying to achieve? I do think the answers to that question will be very different between those two groups. I do think that significant portion if not the majority of the community thinks that Giveth = the Giveth DApp and is part of our community mostly for that reason. I do acknowledge that this has been changing lately and we are slightly more truthful/honest/transparent on what are all the things we are doing. Yet I don’t think even “Giveth core team members” know what is being worked on, how and by whom is what funded, how does these initiatives relate to our original goal and what are the current goals.

And here lies my argument. The Giveth brand is strong in the blockchain space but also outside in social impact communities and charitable organizations. We have unique opportunity to benefit from this name by landing key partnerships with the 99.9% of world that is not in the blockchain space. We can reduce the risk of having nothing at all should ETH/crypto continue to drop and we can limit the risk of not mattering by working with these partners, listening to them, and delivering new exciting tools that meet their needs rather than working on something that may be unusable once finished or just simply catering only to other projects in the space which themselves need to be proven to the general public. This is what crypto adoption is about - working with people outside of the space to learn from their experience and slowly improve it - so why can’t Giveth lead the charge? There is a low hanging fruit of utilizing the ready to use DApp as a beacon. As something tangible that anyone can imagine and understand. I would love to see this future with the name giveth.io and with the much greater community (let that be Giveth Galaxy) benefiting from delivering a blockchain tool that is actually used by “masses”. Sure this process will be challenging - I dare to say painful. Of course it will take a lot of work and there will be ups and downs but let’s build the future of giving as soon as possible. Together. United. As Giveth.

This is a ping from a distant satellite. I don't feel the tension, I'm just reading about it for the first time.

If I understand correctly, instead of this being a high-level issue I would propose to break it down into smaller low-level issues such as:

Product Website vs. Incubator Website
This is mainly about having different target audiences and different missions between two potential webpages and unfortunately, as much as I feel like we made amazing progress with the website recently, I still think it does not represent the Giveth brand to the best of its potential so this for me is purely a design issue. We could have carefully tailored sections and wording on each website that properly explains all that Giveth is about, and showcases each "product" attending to all requirements from all parties.

And then we would have a second minor issue;

Which one gets to use the root domain?
Well, how about both? When we launch a new product i.e. the Dapp, we should certainly have the autonomy to replace the homepage with the product page, for a week, for 3 or 6 months? We can always switch it back when we feel like we don't need that anymore. We should have a landing page for the community, a landing page for the dapp, one for each smart contract, one for social coding, one for each circle, all under the Giveth umbrella and we should be able to highlight these sections on the homepage directing traffic to these inner pages when needed.

The answer seems to be quite obvious so I think there may be additional tensions behind this issue. I think it has to do with our internal management and communication. Giveth is everybody's baby and it's easy to get frustrated when we see our dreams interacting with everybody else's dreams.

Management + Communication
The way I see it, Giveth is the galaxy and the Dapp. I think what we need to work on is understanding what seems to have been holding us back from achieving our goals with the dapp or whatever is preventing us from coming to the obvious conclusions for what's best for the whole. We can give both the incubator and the individual products all the attention they deserve with a single website or collection of webpages so that is not the issue. I think we just need to be able to communicate between ourselves and give each team the autonomy to make decisions that might affect the whole, even if that interferes with our personal dreams for Giveth.

Anyway, I just think this can be solved with a single website with multiple pages for a single brand with a single team behind it. <3

Wow everyone! I'd love to put the break on this discussion but it turns out to be a great way to vent emotions and show your passion for Giveth :+1:

But seriously, some stuff I'm reading here…

There are multiple reasons we decided to focus the dapp a bit different than some of you would like to see. The most important are:

1. Running out-of-money and dependency on (individuals) funding milestones.

The RSK deal is basically making sure we can keep the dapp team together (FYI RJ and me were already gone!) apart from being an an amazing opportunity to do some good in the world (there’s half a million USD waiting to be distributed through our platform). 
And we want to build a business model that makes sure we can continue developing the dapp and work on our mission! That means working with anyone who is willing to pay for getting things done. But we have a whole list of potential models. Continuity is just very important for us. The dApp team falling apart in this stage would be the end of it, and I’m not saying that because we’re so talented ;-)

2. In relation to that, we need to apply for grants.

But we can't get grants if we are not a legal entity (even the Eth foundation doesn't provide grants to non-entities). And some people within Giveth were always putting the breaks very hard on us becoming an entity! Becoming an entity means more autonomy from the Giveth Galaxy, but I'm convinced it will open doors for all of us.

3. In relation to that, if we want to succeed at that, we need our own positioning.

We will be fund raising for the Giveth dapp, and we will be getting paid for building features on top of the Giveth dapp. The Galaxy is awesome, but it's a distracting message for investors.

4. The dapp is built on assumption.

We built this tool for ourselves and use it in ways we don’t even intend it to function. We’ve been saying for a long time it’s not good enough. If we want to change the world we need to work with NGO experts in the field, build a board of advisors, work with the people who we aim to help. That means working together, run workshops.

5. And we want to be a thought leader to help reach these objectives.

The comms circle has mostly been focusing on Giveth Galaxy initiatives, but we want to talk about the problems we aim to solve. About our mission. My vision is that if a traditional charity wants to become more transparant, or do something with blockchain, they come to us first because they know us being the expert.

6. Talking about marketing, we are a market place, the hardest type of model to succeed.

It means driving demand and offering. It's a super difficult problem even for the projects currently on our dapp. And sorry, us funding some stuff is not what I call a successful project, nor proof for the concept or our assumptions. But if projects don’t get funding, they fail, and we fail. If donors don’t find interesting projects, we fail. So we need a (marketing) strategy to tackle this problem.

——

Some people within the team have been putting the breaks hard on all these points. Not even safe enough to try, just pressing breaks all the time. @griffgreen I’m out of touch, you're out of touch, we are all out of touch!

We could either give up, or we could go for more autonomy (and expected friction). We decided the second because we believe the potential is too enormous. 

As such the Dapp is going to its own domain with its own branding, positioning, team and entity this year. I hope the people controlling the breaks can live with this blasphemy - or alternatively come up with solutions that would solve these issues.

To stick together under the Giveth umbrella, my proposal was clearly not the best!
Grace proposal probably matches well the sentiment within this community. Pick direction A or B on the Giveth.io landing page :smiley:

No matter what; we will be building our new site and brand this year, I hope we can get it prominently featured on Giveth.io and stick together as a group.
 I would be very sad if emotions would drive us apart because I can assure you we are still on the same mission yet with somewhat different execution.

Love the project, excited to see charities have more transparency... its just a diverging direction from where the Giveth DApp is moving towards (IMO). I want to be part of building a platform to help find new powerful ways for humans to organize. The charity system is broken and adding some transparency with a lot of crypto friction is not where the Giveth DApp ends, its just the foundation for something much bigger.

DAOs, curation markets, liquid democracy, futurarchy, meritocracy, these experimental forms of human organizations can realign the incentives around making the world a better place. This is what inspired the WHG to found Giveth. Some how more people got involved and the idea got turned into transparency for existing non-profits... that's not what I have been promoting, and thats not what the Giveth DApp is best suited for. I think it's cool and fits under #blockchain4good, but it doesnt get me out of bed everyday. We want to support projects like this: https://blog.goodaudience.com/rewriting-the-story-of-human-collaboration-c33a8a4cd5b8

It is these new models that can make a real impact and revolutionize the way we solve tragedy of the commons issues, and that is what the Giveth DApp has ALWAYS been targeting, we are well positioned to continue in that direction, with our close ties to the Aragon DAC.

Still I hope to support the DApp team in adding features and identifying bugs in the DApp so that all the users of all the versions of your software end up better off, and I am excited to see Aragon DAOs act as delegates and campaign managers!

Sorry but I really don't see how one excludes the other.

I love all that stuff as well, it's very exciting, but it's all still research and experimentation that needs constant funding from enthusiasts and believers with a high probability of failure. And who knows some (future) model will succeed. It's important work, we need new models!

But at the same time we have something that can make impact now! Perhaps not the impact that those new models promise to make (which we obviously still have to see). But as things come out of research, or people are confident to try - and if it can be translated to technology - we can implement those in the dapp right? Or build a new dapp around it?

And we have to act now. All those experiments might take too long and come too late for humanity to save itself!

So I don't see how one excludes the other. It's not black/white! There are executors within Giveth (like me) and there are researchers within Giveth (like you). This is the best combination ever to change the world!

The researchers within Giveth can do very strong R&D, the executors bring to 'market' what we have, and together we move things from R&D to the 'market'. It would even generate new funding for R&D!

And maybe that's where it goes wrong with Giveth and we keep having all these tensions:

Executors messing with jobs of researchers and visa versa.
Both parties wanting to focus all attention on themselves.
The current circle setup not being a reflection of how we're actually organised / operate.

Want to build new forms of human organizations?
...perhaps we should doubt how we will succeed if we aren't able to organise ourselves without tension! :slight_smile:

As I think about it more, being bold may be the better approach here. I definitely think there is a business model in the current version of the DApp but when one looks at longer term impact, it may very be that disrupting current models, creating examples to inspire, and pioneering new ways to think about charity could have a much larger long term impact and will attract and inspire much more funding. One does not need to exclude the other, but a bigger vision needs to be front and center.

The issue is focus. We turned down 150k+bonus ant from Aragon (tho we got 40k from the deal) for 45k from RSK... so that we could spawn off white label versions of the dapp? that is not aligned with the push to daoify the nonprofit space... it's a huge distraction. Also strategically I think it's too much to onboard non technical people to any dapp. I'm happy to be wrong and will continue to support the effort, but I have spent 2014-2016 trying to bring bitcoin and ethereum to normal people... I don't think it's going to happen without a lot of resources expended on hand holding and a lot of UX research.
You guys have a different perspective and hopefully you are right. When i talk to mycrypto, exchanges, and other user facing apps the support requirements are incredible and users make sooooo many catastrophic mistakes. I just can't fully support these moves.

This is not fully accurate though, is it? We got 150k to build Aragon version of LP as an Aragon dapp (which was not clear when accepting the grant in first place and is not mentioned in the contract we signed). We only decided to turn it down not to undermine our relationship with Aragon otherwise legally the contract was quite clear. That's why we turned it down and before we did we even talked of using this money in social coding and hire someone else to deliver on it while we oversee the quality (and it was agreed on by Maria). It was only later on when we all (you were there as well) agreed to abandon that grant and instead make such LP Aragon dapp through AragonDAC (where BTW that 150k should have gone, did they?).

Putting LP on Aragon will be a strong step in the right direction for adding DAOs to Giveth, and creating a strong UX for DAO users. It woukd make a lot of sense if the end goal was creating DAOs for nonprofits, but that's a side goal, not the focus. This is why it didn't make sense to continue with the grant IMO, if we are focusing on the current existing nonprofits as users.... it doesn't make sense, if we want DAOs it makes a lot of sense.

That plus we agreed 150k is too little to actually deliver the LP Aragon dapp. And just to be clear there was never a problem of adding DAOs and governance to the DApp. At this time we are, however, more excited to have an agile way of developing where we validate with intended clients in iterations rather than doing this the waterfall way and only validating after we finish building.

ALL!
There is no such thing as a big charity that wants or seeks transparency.
The DApp is providing exactly that transparency.
It will be easier to move to the mainstream with the DApp at the forefront of the website.
There should be no limit in the options a user might have! From currency to specific tasks and of course additional functionality to upload and save documents(I mean additional functionality for other types of docs).
Yes there is more to be done but at the moment the DApp is more exciting for the non-aware users than any of the other initiatives.
My 2 cents: Giveth.io hosts the DApp and we continue to improve it and onboard organisations.
The Giveth Galaxy is the groups of initiatives including the DApp aimed at the Ethereum community (and why not other crypto ecosystems)!
To me it’s a game of numbers: the user base of the DApp can grow faster and gain wider acceptance than the community interest on all other initiatives the Giveth Galaxy is currently dealing with!

That's the piece. You dont have a problem with governance but its not a priority. And while i would argue we have lots of users of the dapp now and we have lots of problems to tackle... We are not considered the intended users. We are however in fact a subset of intended users but the benefit is that we have a more narrow scope of issues to address (we understand crypto). The problems this larger set of users will have has very little to do with the dapp, they will have all the problems we have, on top of not understanding how to convert the funds and interact with the tools safely.

The killer use case of the Giveth dapp (IMO) is to allow new forms of blockchain entities to exist and be a training ground for discovering new ways to organize our societies in general. This is a 10-50 year effort, and it is where I want to put all my life force behind. This effort is not benefited by multiple white label versions of the dapp helping bring transparency to donations, it receives more benefit from projects like dappnode, tennagraph, iden3, brightID, Aragon DAC and the like, and of course with DAOs on top the Dapp will be an amazing force pushing in the right direction.

It is still a fantastic project and I will continue to support it, as long as the end goal is focused on utilizing #blockchain4good. The part that bugs me is that the current use case being pushed is actually hurt by a blockchain tho... an open database integrated into existing finacial systems would be a much easier way to bring transparency to donations to existing nonprofits (I wonder why existing large nonprofits don't make efforts in this direction). Assuming that you just want to start here and do some user testing (and as long as we have outside funding that wants to use the dapp to send money to these nonprofits we are using to test our app... it's a win win) it makes perfect sense. I'm not a fan, but it's logical... as long as there is more on the road map.

The Giveth DApp with Michael and Jeff will probably stay focused on the dao effort aided by the Aragon DAC, and I'm sure both teams will feed into eachother. This is the magic of open source.

As a disclaimer this is a total aside from the main discussion here, not meant to complicate the already complicated issues but the intersection of nonprofits and Giveth is what brought me here originally so I just wanted to throw it out there. Happy to discuss off loomio.

The point around transparency for non-profits has come up a couple of times and I just wanted to put in a plug for the white paper under draft. Respectfully I see the DApp's potential for nonprofits as far more than just transparency for donations. That's not provided now because the demand for it is barely there and regardless it would take up time and resources at the expense of programs (something no one wants). I see the DApp as providing a foundation of transparency with accountability measures layered in, which combined have the potential to change some fundamental flaws in the relationships between Givers and Makers and in doing so, unlock greater impact. If anyone is interested in reading more I am happy to share the most updated draft of the whitepaper and would welcome any feedback on that concept.

Excellent! I have no problem with this usecase but until now the DApp was really never marketed to be such tool. We were always fully marketing it as social impact tool and that it will be soon open for anyone to use (even last year at Devcon3 we said first social impact project will use it in January 2018). So I always felt responsible to deliver on these promises and they were the reason why I joined the team. It's great to have the intensions out in the open, now we can more easily discuss how we can work from now on so that both parties can achieve their goals as efficiently and painlessly as possible :) .

"The Giveth DApp with Michael and Jeff will probably stay focused on the dao effort aided by the Aragon DAC, and I'm sure both teams will feed into eachother..."

And there you have it...