Nerman Returns

⌐◨-◨

Appreciative of all the work Joel and team have done, but not comfortable voting yes given the level of adoption Nerman has had so far.

FOR x 🥌 🥌 🥌
↳ 0x32d1...d4f5
↳ benbodhi.eth
↳ sewerpipe.eth

AGAINST x 🥌
↳ w1nt3r.eth

Throwing weight behind zero weight votes with reason.

Echo the sentiment of others: I appreciate Joel and Nerman, but I do not think it warrants this increased funding, especially in the current circumstances.

I feel a little bad voting this way just here: I have felt this way about several other recent proposals but have had less time to be actively voting.

sent from voter.wtf

Sent from https://goops.com Nouns Governance Pool

https://www.lilnouns.wtf/vote/nounsdao/470/votes FOR 95 VOTES 0xADa31Add8450CA0422983B9a3103633b78938617 | "Joel seems like the kinda guy who does what he says. and says what he does. Delegate to Lil Nouncil if you are based." AGAINST 0 VOTES ABSTAINS 64 VOTES 0x63aa1670aBAF10b93a8fD9804eA304641Ec8aCE8 | "Until the implementation of autonomous voting for off-chain props, I vote abstain on Nouns props. " 0x9e0e9D25a5ED9bc773f91691f0b45599255257B1 | "I'll only vote on proposals that require explanations once the proposer attends our weekly calls to explain them."

Let's go Nerman!

Can't vote in this round, but figured I'd give my technical assessment.

I've built nouns.sh — nouns auction frontend. I've spent most of the time on the indexer. I wish I had an SDK that makes indexing easy.

However, looking at the Nerman.js source code, I can say with confidence that I wouldn't use it in its current form. It's a relatively thin wrapper on top of the smart contract and the ethers library. Most of the code can be autogenerated from the ABIs. The SDK doesn't seem to be well designed, the source code is messy, no tests. The SDK doesn't hide Nouns domain complexity, one still needs to know how the DAO works and translate it to API calls.

The nouns.id website seems to be useful for quick scripts and automation (e.g. bots, third-party website integrations), but anyone seriously building a client is better off not relying on a third party website for critical information like this.

Re: marketing, I think the bigger issue is to motivate people to build for Nouns, not use a specific SDK to build on top. Even with a fantastic SDK, I'm not sure people will flock to building things.

That said, I definitely think we should invest in a frontend indexing library. Both Ponder and Graph look great as a base, we could also make a more focused one ourselves too.

I'm also supportive of retroactively funding things that people are finding useful (e.g. lots of mentions of the Discord bots in the votes)

strongly prefer interacting directly with the protocol vs front-end use but am fairly non-technical .. feel like signaling in favor of anything that moves us in that direction is the move.

offline tools incl scripts, documentation etc so that anyone could reasonably go end-to-end in Nouns privately is imo one of the more important things we can fund. fantastic hedge against depleted treasury since those materials will likely remain valid proportionally longer as gov upgrades become less likely in that scenario. It is great insurance that the dao can keep humming along, while providing a path to increased baseline protocol competence, decentralization etc

I know its just a small piece of this prop but if the ask was same to really focus on guiding Nouners with minimal proficiency through parsing props manually/offline i'd pay up.
&+1joel,toady 🎄🎄

PizzaDAO supports this proposal.

thanks nerman

nerman is nounish

A lot of what joel wrote in his vwr resonates with me but have to vote with my feet here and abstain due to lack of usage.

Ultimately not a strong believer in the ”build infra to keep it around if/when a need arise” thesis.

🫡 zeroweight.eth

+1 to 9999.

Merry Christmas, nouns 🎄

I keep up with Nouns by reading Discord blasts by Nerman. Joel and team are an engaged group of devs who understand that we need connective infrastructure, not only frontends, to shuttle information across the Nounosphere. As the protocol changes or new layers like propdates, prop house, etc. are added, having a multi-pronged SDK enables devs to reliably build on top of the Nouns ecosystem. The plumbing is thankless work that doesn’t seem like it pays off until it does. With awareness, Nerman can become the bedrock of future Noun clients.

• Nerman is great, has been used in most nouns discord servers in various capacity.
• Nouncil relies upon it for 100% of their voting ops.
• Joel is great contributor as everyone has pointed out.
• Supportive of Noun as retro reward too.

• Technically as others pointed out, true composable solutions that ethereum ETL based and/or subgraph are better than SDK wrappers.
• Impact isn’t there to warrant a prop-house size monthly burn rate.
• Unsupportive of ETH denominated funding. If the DAO is bullish on ETH, it should benefit from bigger relative treasury during market rallies not accelerate spend.

It's easy to think about Nerman as a discord bot and lose sight of the forest for the Trees, when in fact Nerman.js is a powerful SDK to let application devs unlock access to Nouns. Yes, we've had a bunch of client team's access the contracts directly but that is slow and expensive and not particularly friendly to onboading new developers. Many of us want to onboard more developers in 2024, who often add outsized network value while at the same time being potential Nouns owners. If we want to go strong in 2024 for onboarding many developers, through outreach, meme'ing, prop house and Hackathons (think ETH global), we need one easy to use, highly efficient SDK that abstracts away the contract calls and make Nouns development accessible for application developers. You shouldn't have to know the details of blockchain development to build great interactive experiences on top of Nouns. A lot of the heavy lifting happens in the next 6 months to warrant the funding level and then I'd expect it to drop down to a single developer and then eventually in success, a maintainer of a thriving open source project. Nerman.js is very strong Network Good and I hope in the next 6 months we see this team and SDK play a key role in onboarding many new developers to the Nouns developer ecosystem

nom nom nerman

--- to begin: ---

An explanation of why our indexing approach is compelling.

https://nouns.id is a static website built using Nerman.js indexed data. It is hosted entirely for free using Netlify and Alchemy. Once every 24 hours Netlify automatically runs the indexer and rebuilds the project to update the data. Scroll to the bottom of the home page, check out the stats, and look at a sample page: https://nouns.id/500. The pages load instantly, and that data is just the beginning of what we can calculate. We talk directly to an Ethereum node and don't depend on any other hosted service, like subgraph. Trust minimized front-end dev. I maintain that this is an interesting and vital approach to exploring Nouns data.

--- and, a response ---

Nouns is still centralized. Until the veto is removed we are a DAO on a leash, permissioned and fragile.

If we ever want to remove the veto we need to develop a few things: a decentralized voter base resistant to 51% attacks / voter fatigue, a decentralized community resistant to social takeover / propaganda from hostile actors, and a decentralized technical infrastructure to maximize permissionless collaboration and competition.

I want to get rid of the veto. All of my work is aiming towards that, and maybe it's time to be explicit. Nouns is far less interesting to me if the veto is retained.

Building a decentralized voter base and a community resistant to takeover was my main intention with Nouncil. It worked. Nouncil has been operating for years, regularly has more active individuals voting than the DAO itself, and is the second most active voting participant in the DAO. Proof of that here: https://nounsagora.com/voters?orderBy=mostVotesCast - Kudos to Noun 12, champion of the votes.

Nerman Gov has processed more than 20,000 unique votes in Nouns and helped Nouncil maintain its independence and defy capture pre-fork era. It's also the only voter body truely accountable to public opinion and regularly pivots and makes changes based on feedback. Nouncil has been running mostly without me, and without further funding, for the last 6 months. Check out our user participation rates at http://api.nouncil.wtf/. They're high. These are very engaged voters. They still meet every single week to discuss Nouns DAO proposals.

The rest of Nerman, the SDK and developer experience that we've pivoted to focus on, is all done looking at the decentralization of Nouns technical infrastructure and looking towards building a healthy, competitive dev ecosystem around Nouns.

The Nouns Foundation was set up as stewards of the centralized DAO / Nounder resources. Closing the official Discord was a first step towards decentralization, and the current plan is to sunset nouns.wtf in the next year. The @NounsDAO twitter account has been changed to "Official Twitter of the Nouns Foundation." We are well on our way.

There is one giant behemoth remaining. The monorepo. The central repository of official Nouns DAO code. If any centralization is lurking its right there. Our Nerman Discord bot has replaced NounsBot in most servers, and with the Nerman.js SDK our intention is to offer alternatives to the nouns-assets, nouns-sdk, and nouns-subgraph packages. Our documentation will become an alternative canon source for contract source code, ABIs, and a general understanding of the DAO.

Migrating off of centralized resources is only the first step. Step #2 is building healthy thriving communities of builders with competitive incentives to create a decentralized cornucopia of resources. We want to keep people engaged while naturally limiting governance capture. If the DAO were static everyone could host nouns.wtf and subgraph clones and we're golden. But Nouns DAO is changing, and with the verbs current proposal it's not slowing down. We need active dev teams, and they need to be paying attention to keep up with the DAO or things will break. This is expensive and funding many teams is cost prohibitive.

This is why with Nerman.js we started building an SDK first, and not a front end, with the goal of creating a healthy, competitive dev environment that reduces the costs of supporting multiple teams working on Nouns clients. We are thinking long term. If nouns.camp and agora are the only functioning gov clients keeping up with DAO changes, we have failed. Nerman.js will give developers a headstart and allow builders to focus on solving new problems and improving user experience rather than recreating indexers and data processing functions with duplicated functionality. It's not cost effective to keep working this way. A by product of what we want to do is also onboarding a large amount of devs into Nouns and strengthening the health of our social structure as a whole.

If you didn't read through our final propdate please do: https://www.updates.wtf/update/337-3

I'm surprised at the comments about not seeing changes or new features from Nerman. We were very active in the DAO, releasing new features consistently and frantically during the fork and with v3. This was a primary way for people to pay attention to the fork events, propdates, zero-weight votes, candidate proposals, nouns nymz, and I'm very proud of the fast, public work we did here.

Currently the SDK is primarily used in our own MVPs to showcase functionality - Nerman Discord, Noun O'Clock bot, and https://nouns.id. Our Discord bot is in all main Nouns discords, including Agora, who built their own bot but migrated to Nerman Discord so they could focus on their core business model. NounsNymz and SharkDAO used the SDK in projects to handle events, and to be clear these are talented developers fully capable of accessing the contracts directly. The SDK just saved them time.

We just released the indexer. It's brand new and no one has had a chance to use it yet. We haven't yet received any budget for incentives or creative marketing. This current proposal is precisely when we want to start pushing for traction and building community. Its going to take some work but our marketing ask is reasonable, and will be spent encouraging devs to build with Nouns.

Our SDK will save teams serious time and help Nouns DAO keep project costs competitive. We want to build developer kits - we can provide the exact data and functions needed to launch a new governance client. Just build the UI. We want to start funding competitions to incentivize development, and we also want to continue building our own things - dashboards, gov clients and clients to interact with parts of the DAO not implemented anywhere yet (submit a head! add a new palette! burn a noun!). We've also yet to see an auction client that takes much attention from nouns.wtf. And the video we want to produce would target developers and bring them into our universe.

Our guiding light is developer community and getting more developers building in Nouns. Quite simply, we had to build these tools before we could start encouraging people to use them. We are ready for a flurry of work now. We want more devs, more projects, and more competition driving an ever increasing level of proposal quality.

A developer friendly tool kit won't happen accidentally as a by-product of making a client. We certainly can pivot to developing our own front end clients, building more dashboards, and onboarding developers in a more public way rather than focusing on supporting write functions next. This would prove the utility of what we've built already, but slow down feature completion for the SDK. It is a valid path if that's what the community wants, but we would always be developing with the SDK and developer community in mind.

On a final note - I've requested ETH because I like the meme of working for a DAO and getting paid in ETH. It's that simple, and it comes up in conversation anytime I speak about Nouns DAO IRL. I like ETH, I like memes. It's why I'm here.

The Nouncil has spoken.

We discuss all Nouns proposals every week in our Discord https://discord.gg/fdjJpMeV6K. The calls are public and all are welcome!

You can find previous call recordings here: https://nouncil.notion.site/30328df718424f17a623859018497fc2?v=806b5234a2a34b619c3d5028bcd879f0&pvs=4

Nouncil has been a heavy user of Nerman and it has been integral to our operations. Over 3/4 of voters are in support of continuation and development as shown in the results below.

** Vote Results & Reasons **

For - Wins

FOR - 28 VOTES

borg00000 | "(bot)"

benbodhi | "Nerman is such a useful bot! We've been using it in Nouncil extensively and I see all the great work going into it. Big supporter to see the work continued."

AGAINST - 8 VOTES

akva556 | "nah bro 145 eth?
you gotta be kidding me"

ABSTAINS - 3 VOTES

+1 40. Joel is an amazing contributor. However, funding Nerman at this scale is hard to justify.

Would love to see more funding going to subgraph and Ethereum ETL based approaches that are easier to consume. Less opinionated, more open software may get more adoption than heavier SDKs. Would want to see more use of Nerman before committing to these funding levels.

sent from voter.wtf

seems like much too high spend for this utility. would want to understand impact to justify additional funding.

(noun40 voting via agora)

joel has been one of the best and longest standing community members we have and as an independent matter i would vote to retro a noun towards joel in a heartbeat for all he's done (e.g. short shorts, leading nouncil for so long) but i've consistently struggled with funding nerman at this scale. outside of the discord bots (which i admittedly have less exposure to these days b/c i don't use discord for nouns stuff much at all now post farcaster) i don't know if there's much evidence of usage of the nerman.js SDK. i think this is partly b/c onchain smart contracts like propdates are by themselves APIs? camp can digest and display directly without another SDK layer. all of the nouns gov clients read and write to the nouns dao smart contracts again without an SDK. so there are plans here to keep going down the path of being comprehensive (e.g. support all the write functions) but the reality is that nouns clients are already interacting with / writing to the smart contracts directly. so then there could be some net new developer that is not engaging with nouns b/c of the hurdle of interacting with our smart contracts and could be invited to do so with the JS SDK but idk. with software i'm a bit skeptical of large spends on things that don't have traction and usage in the present. again love love joel and all he's done for nouns but i'm struggling to vote for this prop.

Love Joel but we're in outflows and this will not move us away from that. We should be patient and slow and allocate thoughtfully and much more selectively, rather than lose the plot on blowing the treasury and allocate capital loosely and ineffectively.

I originally wanted to vote FOR, but after some long internal dialogue I think this needs to be reevaluated.

Most people won't consume Nerman SDK or API, they just want to implement their own versions. We currently see that with each new expression of noun clients. I am not sure we keep funding these frameworks if they don't get traction, same with those clients. If nouns camp didn't have clear traction it wouldn't be funded. I think honestly Joel and his dev should work with nouns camp to just make a better OG nouns replacement.

This could be the wrong thought process and not a clear Against, so I'm going abstain with my reasoning.

I honestly haven't seen any changes or upgrades to nerman, I'm sure a lot happened on the backend, but not really any new features or something that further engage the community. I think nerman is a cool addition to the ecosystem, but it's not really a necessity.

Personally think the budget is way to high.
A 25K marketing video? Who are we marketing it to exactly? Also generally not supportive of compensation being denomitaded in ETH.

I would happily support mainting nermans basic upkeep costs, I can't see a reason to go further than that.

Nerman is such a useful bot! We've been using it in Nouncil extensively and I see all the great work going into it for multiple use cases. Big supporter to see the work continued.