AGP-104 proposed the App Mining Program in ANV-4. The proposal identified a lack of incentives to develop, maintain, and promote Aragon apps outside of narrow one-off grants, and that these grants do not seem to properly incentivize developers to identify user needs, contribute or maintain solutions on an ongoing basis.

Rather than decide through governance and politics what applications should be built on the platform or who should be paid to build them, the App Mining Program shifts the decision making process to focus instead on defining a budget and a scoring mechanism based on objective KPIs and then distributes funds periodically and predictably based on those parameters and the relative performance of Applications.

Over the past several months since AGP-104 was first proposed, the implementation team has iterated and discussed with the community several approaches and has come up with the following initial KPIs and policies for the App Mining Program:

KPIs

These metrics were chosen based on the expectation that organizations that are highly active and hold significant value indicate traction and adoption of the Aragon platform. It is important to note that these metrics do not directly correspond to revenue for the Aragon Network, and so these metrics may need to be adjusted in the future as the Aragon Network determines the best ways to monetize.

Scoring Policy

The scoring policy determines how the KPIs combined into a single metric can be used to divide App Mining Rewards proportionally. The following processes have been adopted for this purpose:

KPIs → Organization Scores

Organization Scores relate the three KPIs to organizations as a whole rather than individual applications.

Organization Scores → Application Scores

Application Scores are a share of the Organization Score from all organizations that have installed the application.

Organization and Application Scores are being computed on a rolling basis on apiary.1hive.org.

Eligibility Policy

For an Application to be eligible for App Mining Rewards, the following criteria has been determined:

• The app must be open source and with a license similar to the licenses that Aragon uses or any FOSS license of the Free Software Foundation or any open source license approved by the Open Source Initiative
• The app must be an original work or a derivative work offering novel functionality
• The app must not already exist on the registry
• The app must be useful as a standalone app or module that can be used as a composable building block for Aragon organizations
• The app publisher must provide user documentation, including installation instructions

Discussions around eligibility have been interesting and the idea to leverage Aragon Court to help moderate these policies was popular. While Aragon Agreements hasn’t launched yet, we didn’t want to delay the launch of App Mining until Agreements was ready, so we have created a workflow that emulates as closely as possible how the flow will eventually work when Agreements is ready. This means we will be using an Aragon organization and Aragon Court to determine which applications are considered eligible based on the above criteria.

Submission Instructions

Application publishers must opt-in to the App Mining program and agree to its terms and conditions. They must also submit their applications for eligibility review by Aragon Court.
Application publishers should use the following instructions to make their submissions:
Before getting started, you will need:

• Access to the Ethereum account that you use to publish changes to the aragonPM repository associated with the Application you are submitting. This is your “publishing account”.
• The Ethereum address of the aragonPM repository associated with the Application you are submitting. This is the application’s “aragonPM Repository address”.
• An account on the Aragon Forum.

When you are ready to submit:

• Using the publishing account, navigate to the address book, and click “New entity.”
• Enter the Application’s name in the Name field and the Application’s aragonPM Repository address in the Address field. These should match what can be found on https://apiary.1hive.org/apps.
• Create a new thread on the Aragon Forum titled “App Mining Submission: [App Name]” and include any information you want to present to jurors, including links to Github and documentation.
• A representative of the Aragon Association will contact you privately to get the terms and conditions signed.

An administrative account will pause the delayed action after submission, validate that the submitter has agreed to the terms and conditions, then create a dispute in Aragon Court related to the submission. If the Aragon Court ruling resolves, allow action of the submitter the delayed action will be unpaused, allowing the App Mining submission to be added to the registry, otherwise the submission will be cancelled.