The community seems to be in agreement that there should be a community fund (though may disagree with the percentage).
While the poll is ongoing, I think it is worth to have some discussions on how this fund would be governed.
To begin with it can be an annually elected committee or a combination of the committee and those with certain aged forum accounts + have voted in the previous poll.
Zcash actually has some good references.
Community Advisory Panel (CAP)
I liked the Magic Grants idea as described in the video, I don’t think anything would have to change from that personally…just a matter of how you go about elections I guess.
Like you are explaining to a 5 year old, can you explain how this could work in practice.
How are funds secured/spent etc. I’m assuming a special multisig wallet will be created that requires a majority of CAP to sign the transactions or something?
I’m generally more a fan of the ‘benevolent dictator’ (or small group of them) rather than the community making the call. I’d say have the project leadership determine who makes the calls with the fund and just be extremely transparent with the how much/to who/why of it. The decision maker(s) can poll the community for input, but I don’t have a lot of faith that long term strategic thinking happens by committee. If you leave the decisions up to the community, you run the risk of things turning very political and not in the best interest of the project.
To begin with, I think we should just get the ball rolling with the community elected committee but I think we should aim to get it to become a fund matching model in the same vein as Gitcoin.
Going down the Gitcoin route would require quite a bit of development and engineering resources which the core team cannot spare right now as it is busy doing Spark but it is something we should aspire to.
In a nutshell, funds are matched with donations so it’s almost like voting with your money. But the key difference is depending on how many people donate, the matching can be more than what you donated. So for instance, while you may have donated only $1, if a lot of other people have also donated, it can be matched by the fund for $50.
But even if a whale donates a big amount, he won’t necessarily be matched from the fund much because the wider community doesn’t support it. To prevent sock puppets, the donations are linked towards other forms of authentications liked aged forum accounts and would still need to be reviewed by another committee to catch clear abuses or gaming the system. It’s not perfect but no voting system is and I think it’s a good compromise.
Fund matching provides an assist in the form of a filter that in a perfect world serves as a gauge of interest (i.e. from honest actors), but as you say it can’t be relied on exclusively as it can be gamed relatively easily. Also, just as one can create 1000 wallets, one can create 1000 forum accounts (complete with bots posting to them and ‘liking’ each others posts) as has been done on Google, Facebook, Twitter etc. for many years now. Any given set of rules can and will be gamed.
Ultimately, human judgement needs to make the final call. Even for selected projects, disbursement of funds should be tied to delivery milestones etc. subject to human review. It’s fine to provide seed funding up front to get things rolling, but the bulk of any funds should be contingent on actually delivering something whether it’s code, a service, content or whatever when possible.
Sure even GitCoin has these things as well. I think there should be always some human committee to review things that would greatly discourage gaming the system.