Aragon Agreements leverage Aragon Court to allow DAOs to supplement their programmatic rules with subjective constraints and intentions that are interpretable in plain English.
To date, acceptable actions and behavioral boundaries within DAOs are rigidly defined in code, and strictly enforced by machines alone. However, many concerns cannot or should not be so rigidly defined in code and must be augmented with more subjective judgements.
Aragon Court acts as an arbitrator made up of real people, jurors, to enforce human readable rules established in an Agreement. It's not an alternative to the traditional legal system, but in some ways it's more useful because it doesn't care who you are, even if you're pseudonymous.
Let's say there is a DAO with an Agreement instance saying that proposals should be made in good faith and benefit token holders equally.
A malicious member submits an action to create a vote that transfers all of the DAO's funds to the members who vote ’Yes’ on the proposal. Once a majority approve it, the funds would move and the minority would have their funds stolen.
Except, another member notices that and challenges the action, and prevents the theft.
An organization is running a program to reward developers for creating open source apps based on specific usage metrics but to be eligible must meet certain licensing criteria and documentation standards.
Let’s say a developer submits an app that meets the requirements except that the code uses an ineligible closed source license.
Another member notices and challenges the action, and prevents the app from being added to the list of apps eligible for rewards.
