Signal Navigator

The Signal navigator runs non-binding, share-weighted governance polls — "temperature checks" that let a ship read the room before committing to a binding vote. A member opens a poll, others cast share-weighted votes, and anyone reads the running tally. Nothing executes on-chain: a poll mints nothing, burns nothing, and queues nothing. The worst case of a bug is a mis-tallied non-binding poll.

Class: Read-only · Permission: none. Signal holds no DAOShip permission bit and never calls a mutating function on the DAO — it only reads delegation-aware voting power. Because it is read-only it is endorsed socially, not by a permission grant. See the Navigators overview for the three trust classes.

How polls work

A poll captures voting power at a snapshot, weights each vote by that snapshot, and accepts votes only inside a fixed time window.

• Share-weighted, Loot excluded. Vote weight is daoShip.getPriorVotes(voter, snapshotTimestamp) — the same delegation-aware Shares power binding proposals use. Loot carries no weight at all. A voter with zero Shares power at the snapshot is rejected. See Shares vs Loot.
• Snapshot at poll start, not creation. Each poll stores snapshotTimestamp = votingStarts - 1. Weight is fixed the instant voting opens and cannot be changed by later delegation moves — this is an anti vote-buying design. Shares or delegations acquired after voting opens carry zero weight; anything settled before the start counts.
• Immediate or scheduled. startTime == 0 opens the poll immediately. Otherwise it is scheduled, with now <= startTime <= now + maxStartDelay.
• 2–10 options, one vote per address. A poll has between 2 and 10 options. Each address may vote once per poll.
• Half-open voting window [votingStarts, votingEnds). The poll is votable at exactly votingStarts and closed at exactly votingEnds — the last votable second is votingEnds - 1.
• minSharesToCreatePoll gates creation. This threshold (checked against the creator's power at creation time) is the only spam control on opening a poll. Voting always requires non-zero snapshot power regardless of this setting.

Poll lifecycle

Status is derived purely from timestamps plus the cancelled flag — it is never stored. Cancelled is terminal and overrides every other state.

There is no ReentrancyGuard and no pause: the navigator moves no value and makes no untrusted external calls, so there is nothing to re-enter and nothing to freeze.

Trust & visibility — Signal is post-launch only

This is the most important operational point. Signal is a read-only class, so it is endorsed by the DAO sanctioning it, not by a permission grant.

• A freshly deployed Signal navigator is self_asserted. Its polls are not indexed and not shown — this is the spam guard.
• It becomes sanctioned only when the DAO's vault posts a daoships.dao.navigators list naming it. That post is a governance action, grants zero permission, and changes only how the navigator is displayed. On sanction, the indexer backfills the poll history.

Option labels

The contract stores only optionCount on-chain; options are bare indices 0..optionCount-1. Human- readable labels are optional and off-chain: the poll creator posts a daoships.signal.poll Poster record carrying the option text (and an optional description and discussion link). The post is honored only when it comes from the poll's creator, has exactly optionCount labels, and the poll is still Pending or Active. If no valid labels post exists, frontends render numeric Option 1…n.

Create a poll

Opening, sanctioning, and voting in a Signal poll is covered step-by-step in the Use navigators guide. The short version: deploy the navigator from the DAO's Navigators page after launch, sanction it with a vault daoships.dao.navigators post, then any member meeting minSharesToCreatePoll may open a poll.

Events & indexer data

The navigator emits three events. None of them carry the DAO — the indexer resolves the DAO from the navigator address, and pollId is per-navigator (sequential from 0).

The indexer materializes polls only for sanctioned navigators:

For the full schema and handler design, see the Indexer & data layer.

Related

• Navigators — Overview & Catalog
• Shares vs Loot
• Proposal lifecycle
• Use navigators
• Indexer & data layer