How to Create Gorgeous Proposals

Now that the Curators have a clear path forward for whitelisting Proposals (see Stephan’s recent post), it’s about time to learn how to make use of the powerful functionality provided by the Mist browser! This post will show you how to make attractive, user-friendly Proposals that will encourage DAO Token Holders to understand and vote.

Making a Proposal is surprisingly easy, but putting together a well-thought out Proposal that has a good chance of reaching quorum is no simple task. There is no way to guarantee any Proposal will reach quorum, but I do hope that this post will give Contractors and all DAO Token Holders a solid starting point:

1. Research the Opinions of the DAO Token Holders: Discuss your idea on The DAO’s Slack (6000+ members), the DAOhub.org Forums, The DAO’s Consider.it page and r/TheDAO, the official subreddit.
2. Write your Proposal: Take the DTHs input into account and write a good proposal with a title, body, links to discussion forums, links for more information, a picture,, and any other information you think is relevant. Don’t hesitate to make use of formatting including bold and italics.
3. Edit and Format your Proposal’s Description: Use Markdown formatting to make it interactive in Mist, myetherwallet.com and other voting interfaces. Tip: Use a lot of links and a picture, but make sure the picture stays small and keep the text in the Proposal concise. Also I recommend using https://ipfs.pics to host your pictures and remember, you will need to link to the webpage that hosts just the image, not the webpage that includes the interface of the actual website, you will know what I mean when you make this mistake ;-).
4. Make a Test Proposal: Use this wiki to create a test Proposal using the 0.6.2 version of the Ethereum Wallet on a test DAO on the Testnet. Ask me for tokens to an existing test DAO (@griff on The DAO’s Slack, /u/grifffgreeen on reddit) or deploy your own DAO altogether! When deploying your test DAO, choose a closing date that is very soon so that you have a short Creation phase.
5. Submit the Proposal to The DAO: Use this wiki to create a proposal using the 0.6.2 version of the Ethereum Wallet — be sure to follow the instructions step-by-step.
6. Continue the Media Outreach: Submitting the proposal/pre-vote is the easy part, the hard part is getting DAO Token Holders to vote for your Proposal. Helpful links in educating the DTHs on how to vote for your Proposal include: how to turn the 0.7.4 version of the Ethereum Wallet into Mist , how to vote with the 0.6.2 version of the Ethereum Wallet and how to Vote with the Mist browser.

Here is a good example of an interactive Proposal. Incidentally, it is the only Proposal to have collected over ½ of the required quorum:

And below is the markdown that was used to create the above Proposal (I added paragraph spacing in the gist to make it readable on this blog post, but Mist will only recognize `\n` as a paragraph break and when pasted into the description box it will effectively be one line of code).