Recap
- DXgov was established in September. What started as just a passion project of Augusto has now flourished into not only our governance platform but a core squad at DXdao supporting and building governance.
- Forking the existing repos under one DXgov organisation was one of the first
- The initial team inherited from Aqua’s deprioritisation had Hamza, Madusha and Ross form the DXgov team alongside Augusto. Although it took some time to adapt to the new code base and architecture we all picked it up quickly and hit the ground running
- The attack plan was the initial plan around what DXgov was going to focus on, and although it has changed a lot since then, the core of it is still intact and being executed now
- The team further expands. With a now Argentine majority of developers Augusto called in some of his friends to the project. Lulli and Milton were DXgov’s first external contributors just onboarding into DXdao and they have done an incredible job so far. This is the team that can deliver DXgov’s first product.
- Following the Lisbon retreat and conference a lot of higher level tenets of Dxgov changed. Explained more here Lessons from Lisbon re: DXgov
- We began experimenting with sprints and agile methodology. Not something that has been very adopted in DXdao yet widespread in web 2 development teams we tried to adapt sprints to our way of working (DXgov Agile Sprint Plan · Discussion #322 · DXgovernance/dxvote · GitHub). So far it has been working well as we have stuck to the weekly format, had more frequent releases every 2 weeks on average. Our retros can be found here Discussions · DXgovernance/dxvote · GitHub
- With Geronimo also now working on the team as our lead designer work on guilds has been and still is well under way. The team’s momentum has been great and we are making fantastic progress on guilds while still supporting and upgrading DXvote.
Statistics
Didn’t think a development team building a decentralised application could have statistics? Think again … well, we have some cool github stats. Important to bear in mind that tracking stats like this is not an indication of quality and is more just for fun.
The above graphs are more of an interesting set of graphs instead of actual useful data. It just highlights how global we are as a development team with a large number of timezones (partially thanks to daylights savings) and how we rarely have hours with no commits.
This one is completely superfluous (Commits&lines !== quality code) and mostly just for Augusto’s ego being the author of the year for all years so far. However it is nice to see the large number of contributors we have had.
This is the most informative set of graphs. It highlights the decrease in lines of code as well as increase in files. This shows our efforts on increasing code maintainability by refactoring into multiple files with less duplicated code. Also shown in the right chart is the increasing frequency of releases thanks to weekly sprints.
What we could and will do better
Documentation/Transparency
Something lacking in the DXgov project is documentation. Fortunately there is currently a draft version of DXgov documentation with write ups about the architecture, difference with dxvote, guilds, gov 2.0 and more. I will update this once it is release at dxdocs.eth
If you want to learn more right now: The State of DXgov
Quality Assurance
In the relatively short life of DXgov up until now we have had a relatively large number of problems. Much of this stems from small bugs in what is a pretty complex system.
Although we have done a few things to improve the process with better QA there is still more that could be done and potentially having a more dedicated team for QA could be very useful.
We are also working to add testing to the new code we write for guilds as well as being more careful about how we implement code to ensure it is as maintainable as possible. In a complex system like DXvote code maintainability can be tough and its something we plan on improving with refactors and more strict rules around new code.
Additional steps will also be taken to further define and expand processes we have to spot bugs early and to reduce the possibility of human error.
For anywhere that funds may be potentially at stake I think we have good practices around slowly rolling out changes as with the new wallet schemes but more can of course be done here and more will be needed as we get ready to use the wallet schemes in xdai and mainnnet. Audits will of course be another nice assurance of quality once we have more of them.
2022 and beyond
Although roadmaps frequently change this is at least the most solid plan for what is coming next for DXgov.
Guilds 1.0
The first checkpoint of 2022 is of course guilds. Where DXvote has been mainly an internal governance tool until now this is the first part that will be more open for anyone to use. Of course we have always been open in the sense of open source but here we will be actively encouraging others to try out and even become partner guilds. Guilds offer a great use case for general DAO tooling where we just need a simple DAO like entity for a specific purpose. They also act as great stepping stone for organisations looking forward to what we are building with 2.0 but wanting some practice time right away!
DXvote 1.1
The ground up approach of designing guilds has left us with an amazing UX for guilds that can be very easily ported over to DXvote alongside planned refactors of the application. This will coincide with the continued rollout of the new DXvote architecture and wallet schemes following more thorough auditing.
Governance 2.0
This year’s main goal is of course the big one, gov 2.0. More roadmaps will likely follow later in the year as we earnestly build out the platform that began almost a year ago now. Smart contract work will of course begin first, modifying the voting machine to use the new voting power formula as well as new supporting contracts. Likely this will lead us to make some changes and additions to governance 2.0 as it is further thought through. Although we make no promises, it would be amazing to by the end of the year have not only DXdao but also other prominent organisations using the governance 2.0 platform by the end of the year.