Editing DAO Governance Framework (section)

=== UI Software ===
''Main article: [[Front-end software]]''

A DAO must have software that allows the public and its experts to access its capabilities. UIs therefore have two faces. This software provide a view of the Forum that enables its respective audience to interact for their respective purpose. Primarily, experts use their UI to engage their REP holdings to secure work and to govern the DAO. Secondarily, experts use their UI to search the Forum for pressing issues in governance. The public primarily uses their UI to engage experts by encumbering fees in Work Smart Contracts. Secondarily, the public uses their UI to search the Forum to find the WSC and evaluate whether the DAO's reputation is sufficient to warrant their business. 

Ideally the UI software would be formally governed by each DAO itself. However, pseudonymity and openness makes this impractical to enforce. Individuals can engage a distributed database with any UI they choose. Thus competing UIs are likely to emerge in most DAO instantiations. DGF simply provides recommended defaults on out-of-the-box UI software, and allows each DAO to choose their minimal canonical UIs.

In its purest, ideal form this system would support stateless client applications, serving all operational data reliably from blockchain storage. However, blockchain storage is currently expensive; so in practice, we can only use it in cases where we require the long-term guarantee, such as the REP ownership list.

This means that we must implement a separate, off-chain stateful layer. There are a variety of options for this off-chain data layer such as IPFS. For now we merely specify that such a layer must exist.

There are both formal and informal processes – hard and soft protocols – associated with each of the above outlined areas of power. Hard protocols are specified by code, and enacted by running systems, whether on or off chain. Soft protocols refer to patterns of participant behaviors.