What are proposals?
Proposals are how DAOs take action. You can think of proposals as the nervous system of the DAO—members submit and vote on proposals, and if passed, the DAO does something.
What can proposals do?
Proposals can contain actions, which is where things get really interesting.
Actions
Actions are software instructions that get executed on the blockchain after a proposal is passed. This lets you do things like spend from the DAO's treasury, add or remove members, mint new governance tokens, and more.
An action could, for example, pay a contributor by transferring money from the DAO's treasury to their wallet. The purpose of the DAO DAO UI is to make it easy to do this by abstracting away the technicalities of the blockchain in an easy-to-use interface.
A blockchain software instruction can do pretty much anything:
- Deploy a docker container on Akash.
- Update the configuration of a smart contract, such as the DAO itself.
- Pay a RPC node provider.
Truly anything you can do on a blockchain is supported by DAO DAO DAOs, with the added benefits of sophisticated governance processes.
Voting on proposals
When you create a proposal, the voting distribution of members at the time of proposal creation is snapshotted and used for the proposal. This means that if you were not a member when a proposal was created, you will not be able to vote on it.
This security measure prevents an attacker from purchasing a DAO's governance token if it's listed on an exchange, manipulating a vote, and then selling the tokens immediately afterward. Essentially, it ensures that a DAO member knows to whom they are making a proposal: the people who have voting power at the moment the proposal goes live.
How do I create a proposal?
Check out the How to create a proposal guide to get started.