Proposal: extend forwarding interface to include an optional 'input' parameter

[izqui]

Note: this has been closed to be tracked in the "wishlist for future upgrades".

A feature that would greatly impact UX is allowing users to provide contextual information when forwarding actions. Radspec is great at providing descriptions for what the on-chain consequences of executing the action are (e.g. 'Mint 10 tokens for 0xabcd...') but information about the 'why' is also really important (e.g. 'Token grant for our recently hired frontend engineer'). This would also be a good place for people to link to external information about a proposal, such as a detailed proposal PDF in IPFS or a Github issue where people can discuss about the proposal. I think this will be specially important when we start forwarding more than one action at a time (see #363).

The frontend should allow users to provide additional metadata for every forwarder in the path that supports passing metadata. The most basic version of this would be to just allow text metadata, but apps' frontends via a DSL could specify what fields of metadata can be inputted and how that is reduced into the metadata bytes array that gets passed to the new forward(bytes script, bytes metadata) function.

I started writing up this issue in the aragonOS repo but figured it is a bigger product discussion that should happen here first. Support for this would require an on-chain upgrade of apps to support aragonOS 5 (or whenever this is released), major changes in aragon.js and a decent amount of client UI work.

cc @sohkai @jounih @lkngtn @luisivan

[lkngtn]

We may want a tag for issues which cannot be addressed without major revision of AragonOS.

[sohkai]

@lkngtn it might be a good idea to make a few tags for dependencies, e.g. dependency: aragonOS@next, dependency: aragon.js@next, etc.

[sohkai]

I think metadata may be too strict of a term; I suggest just input.

In the case of TPS' range voting contract, the evm script is parsed to get a list of candidates to add as candidates to a new vote: https://github.com/spacedecentral/planning-suite/blob/f3888e1d0448cd590aa028790f9b7a6b57855ac6/apps/range-voting/contracts/RangeVoting.sol#L431.

It'd be a lot easier to do this if all you had to do was include a DSL in the arapp that declared the information (if any) required to forward through a particular app.

[lkngtn]

I think the idea of allowing people to express the why of an action, even if it's not coupled to anything on chain currently is tremendously useful. It can link to an external discussion forum or just provide a justification for the action.

[stellarmagnet]

Need this feature so badly!

Is there some near-term solution to this that doesn't require any major changes? Like at least for the Finance and Token Manager apps.

It will allow the Community DAO to take form, and will also be useful for the Aragon Cooperative, and a few other use cases I am thinking of for Space Decentral too (a community curated media initiative, Maximum Jailbreak).

Right now in the Finance app, you can add a "Reference" but you can't even see that reference in the UI of the Voting app. Having a Reference field like this for the Token Manager would be great too, then a way to display the Reference text in the Voting app.

In the Autark Flock proposal, we do have enhancing the forwarding (cc: @Quazia), but this seems like something greater that everyone should be on the same page about.

I think a lot of DAOs can flourish in the near-term with this feature.

[izqui]

Showing the Finance payment in Voting could be trivially done with a small frontend upgrade to Finance (just need to change the radspec string for newPayment). Just created an issue to track this:
aragon/aragon-apps#626

The complexity difference between adding this just to the TM or do the general aragonOS implementation wouldn't be that different, so I'd prefer we go for the general case!

[sohkai]

Closing for now; we will evaluate protocol level changes for forwarding apps in the future.

[sohkai]

We will include an IForwarderWithContext interface with aragonOS@5.