Introducing Token-based Roles & Permissions

February 3, 2022
richiebonilla.eth
February 3, 2022

DAOs have an accessibility problem. The DAO contributor experience is disjointed & confusing because we must work around Web2 access control. As more people migrate to Web3, the average contributor will be less crypto-native. The DAOs that provide the most seamless contributor experience will have the best chance at recruiting the best talent.

In a traditional company, people join and leave rather infrequently. Therefore, it is possible to manage onboarding and off-boarding processes manually in order to grant or revoke access to resources and accounts.

These assumptions do not carry over to DAOs because DAOs have a more fluid structure. People come and go often and it is common to work with multiple DAOs at once. It is therefore untenable to manage access control manually. In fact, the inability to provide true permission-less access to information and coordination tools is a meaningful bottleneck for DAOs to flourish.

In Web2, everyone at the company had a corporate email address. Since everyone's corporate email had the company's domain name, enterprise tools could allow anyone with a corporate email to access applications or files. In DAOs, we don't have corporate emails, but we do have tokens. Members & contributors to a DAO often hold common tokens or NFTs that signify their membership to—and status within—the DAO.

What's the solution?

Token-based roles & permissions allow Clarity to grant you roles & permissions in a base just by seeing what's in your wallet. Clarity can therefore do this as frequently as necessary to support the free-flowing nature of DAOs and their contributors.

This enables a seamless contributor experience that is permission-less from start to finish.

Add a Join Page to your base

DAOs can now add a Join Page to their base. You can think of this like the city gates for your organization. If you choose to enable the Join Page, anyone can easily access it at: https://app.clarity.so/your-base-name

You can decide if you want to allow anyone on the Internet to join your base, or if they need to pass certain token requirements. By adding a token gate, visitors will need to connect their wallet to join.

If a visitor does not pass the token requirements, then they cannot enter the base through the Join Page. However, you can still invite them to the base by inviting them via email, or by sending them an invite link.

Contributors can self-assign roles based on their tokens

When a new member joins, they have no roles by default. DAOs can decide what default permissions everyone has when they join (e.g. read-only, can comment, etc). Contributors can then visit the Role Gallery to self-assign roles.

By adding token requirements to roles, you can ensure that the right people can equip a role without asking an admin for help—and you can still use traditional admin-managed roles as well.

Create unlimited custom roles with granular permissions

Configure each role with 18 categories of abilities for granular permissions. Manage roles in a convenient table view where you can get a full picture across roles.

Collect important documents & links on the Home screen

Context is necessary in order to be a successful contributor. Direct new contributors to your Home screen, where they can find documents and links to gather context about your project & community. Clarity provides a unique opportunity to have a context-rich environment because project coordination, notes, and your wiki all happen in one tool. You can also link to any other website from the Home screen.

Contributors can request to claim tasks & projects

Once a contributor has comment permissions, they can participate in conversations and ask to claim tasks and projects on your roadmap or bounty boards. You can use Views to create filtered boards of the work in your base and then pin them to your sidebar.

Set a reviewer on any task or project

Set a reviewer on any task or project. If you set a reviewer, that person is the only one who can mark the work as completed. This helps ensure that tasks don't get paid out prematurely, or in error. It also marks a definitive point in the process where the contributor knows they have finished that work.

Track & pay rewarded contributions in the Contributions workflow

The Contributions workflow is automatically setup and configured when you create your base. Tasks and projects will show up in each stage of the workflow as they are updated. Download CSVs to pay contributors easily with your favorite payout tool. More details about that in our recent announcement.

Try it yourself

⚡️ This release is live in the app.

❓ If you're just getting started, feel free to reach out for help via in-app live chat.

🤙 Or jump into the Clarity Commons Discord where we are inventing the tools & practices DAOs need to succeed.