Web3 Association - Open source contributor funding experiment setup

[lovegrovegeorge]

Project Abstract

This is a research proposal to experiment with an open source contributor funding process. Developers in the ecosystem would be funded to help with developing the most impactful open source initiatives in the ecosystem. Contributors could work on new initiatives or improvements to existing open source solutions.

This funding process will trial a number of approaches from our funding analysis (https://funding.treasuries.co). This funding process and the approaches being trialled could become long term funding solutions for Polkadot if this experiment proves to be successful.

This proposal is for the setup of this experiment. A future proposal will be submitted that requests approval for the actual funding process once the experiment has been setup.

Grant level

• [x] Level 1: Up to $10,000, 2 approvals
• [ ] Level 2: Up to $30,000, 3 approvals
• [ ] Level 3: Unlimited, 5 approvals (for >$100k: Web3 Foundation Council approval)

Application Checklist

• [x] The application template has been copied and aptly renamed (project_name.md).
• [x] I have read the application guidelines.
• [x] Payment details have been provided (Polkadot AssetHub (DOT, USDC & USDT) address in the application and bank details via email, if applicable).
• [x] I understand that an agreed upon percentage of each milestone will be paid in vested DOT, to the Polkadot address listed in the application.
• [x] I am aware that, in order to receive a grant, I (and the entity I represent) have to successfully complete a KYC/KYB check.
• [x] The software delivered for this grant will be released under an open-source license specified in the application.
• [x] The initial PR contains only one commit (squash and force-push if needed).
• [x] The grant will only be announced once the first milestone has been accepted (see the announcement guidelines).
• [] I prefer the discussion of this application to take place in a private Element/Matrix channel. My username is: @lovegrovegeorge:matrix.org (change the homeserver if you use a different one)

[lovegrovegeorge]

Questions / some areas to discuss:

• Unknown funding amount until after voting stage is completed - The actual funding amount required cannot be stated until further into the setup of the experiment. Therefore this proposal could either stay in a draft state until that can be determined or it could be approved and merged and then updated in the future. The value used in the proposal so far is the maximum amount we could suggest for the experiment, however the actual value could be much lower depending on the final agreed experiment parameters.
• Confirming and agreeing on funding allocation after priority suggestions and contributor proposals are known - Our suggestion with this experiment is to discuss and agree whether the experiment should continue or not after seeing what priority suggestions and contributor proposals are submitted. This information will help with making an informed decision about the total funding to allocate to the experiment based on the funding period duration and the number of contributors that can receive funding.
• Vested DOT concern - The experiment would pay developers monthly once their contribution logs are approved. The main concern i'd have is around how long the vested delay of funding is as this could make it difficult for the participating developers that would have rent and bills to pay.
• Full-Time Equivalent on milestones query - The experiment would select developers to work full time for a set duration of time such as 4 or 6 months. I’m unsure whether the milestones FTE value should include these participating contributors in the number or if this value should only focus on the efforts required to operate the funding process experiment itself.

[keeganquigley]

Hi @lovegrovegeorge thanks for your comments. Happy to give my opinions below:

Unknown funding amount until after voting stage is completed - The actual funding amount required cannot be stated until further into the setup of the experiment. Therefore this proposal could either stay in a draft state until that can be determined or it could be approved and merged and then updated in the future. The value used in the proposal so far is the maximum amount we could suggest for the experiment, however the actual value could be much lower depending on the final agreed experiment parameters.

The committee most likely won't vote to approve a grant with an unknown funding amount, especially for this amount. I would recommend reducing the scope/cost to include only what you need to get started, and then you can always apply for subsequent follow-up grants. For example, the committee might be more inclined to approve just the first milestone of $3k to help you bootstrap the experiment setup. Then you might be able to better determine how much more you need.

Additionally, any ask greater than $100k needs to be voted on by the W3F council, in addition to the 5 approvals required to sign the grant. This could take a while, and might prove hard to get. Any changes down the line would need an amendment with the same amount of approvals. Whereas if you lowered it to a level 1 grant to get started, only 2 approvals would be needed to hit the ground running.

Vested DOT concern - The experiment would pay developers monthly once their contribution logs are approved. The main concern i'd have is around how long the vested delay of funding is as this could make it difficult for the participating developers that would have rent and bills to pay.

The DOT is vested linearly, on-chain over a two year period. Therefore a bit will unlock with each block, but yes the majority of it would be locked to start with.

Full-Time Equivalent on milestones query - The experiment would select developers to work full time for a set duration of time such as 4 or 6 months. I’m unsure whether the milestones FTE value should include these participating contributors in the number or if this value should only focus on the efforts required to operate the funding process experiment itself.

Yes I would recommend including these contributors in the FTE value, since they would be working full-time. Especially if their payment would be part of the total costs.

I hope these answers help.

[lovegrovegeorge]

Thanks @keeganquigley, I'll update the proposal this week

[lovegrovegeorge]

@keeganquigley I have updated the proposal to now focus only on the experiment setup phase. The the other milestones have been removed. The first milestone now focuses on capturing the communities priority suggestions about what open source initiatives could be the most impactful to work on and setting up the contributor proposal process so that I can invite developers to indicate their interest in the funding process. I have removed the voting stage part from the first milestone as voting should only happen if the funding experiment was approved and actually going to be executed. Voting would become the first thing that happens if a future proposal is accepted to fund the experiment.

Two points I'd like to highlight:

Funding experiment parameters After executing this initial experiment setup process we should have some priority suggestions from the community and some developer candidates that are interested in participating in the funding process. I would look to suggest what I think is sensible in terms of funding process parameters in a subsequent proposal based on the priority suggestions and contributor proposals that have been submitted. I believe it could be valuable for us to discuss these parameters and any initial thoughts about them before the proposal is finalised and submitted for review. We could have this conversation in the comments of a future proposal.

Voting participants If the experiment was approved then the selection of voters is an important part of the experiment. I would be very interested in members from the Web3 Foundation or Parity being involved in the voting process. Members from the Web3 Foundation are very familiar with their own idea funding process so participating in this experiment and providing their feedback should be very insightful. Another open source funding proposal that was shared to me recently could also have some of its members be involved in this experiments voting process to get further insights from them - https://polkadot.subsquare.io/referenda/1080. This experiment could operate fine with 5 voters similar to the other proposal I just shared. However a lot more insights and feedback could be generated using 10 to 20 voters, so I'd always prefer to increase the number of voters where possible. So my question is whether members of the Web3 Foundation would be happy to participate in this voting process? This is obviously assuming that the future funding proposal got approved. The voting process is designed to be simpler than idea funding so it shouldn't take up a large amount of time and the feedback given should be highly relevant and insightful.

[lovegrovegeorge]

@keeganquigley Yes I'm keen to include anyone from the Polkadot who is experienced with OpenGov, the technical fellowship or governance / funding / treasuries in general in the voting process. So i'll look to invite multiple people if they're interested after reaching out to many people.

I've updated the formatting as requested, also updated some of the spacing across proposal, should look good now after properly reviewing the preview!

What else do I need to do with W3F agreement / setup wise with this proposal?

I will reach out to the other open source proposal and look to start collaboration tomorrow to get that going. In terms of starting this proposal I would look to start it sometime next month. I started working on a new economic model recently that ties in very well with the work i've been doing for the last few years. It's taking my full attention over the short term until I can get a first version out next month to start getting feedback. Should be a good read, happy with it so far! After that is out, I would be ready to be full time on setting this up and reaching out to everyone I can in the ecosystem.

[lovegrovegeorge]

@keeganquigley Updated title to "Finalising proposal parameters" and added the parameters into the specification.

[Polkadot-Forum]

This pull request has been mentioned on Polkadot Forum. There might be relevant details there:

https://forum.polkadot.network/t/bounty-proposal-open-source-developer-grants-program/9445/4

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[lovegrovegeorge]

Hey @keeganquigley, just wanted to give an update.

I finished the first version of the economic model for organisations I was working on - https://contributionism.co

Whilst doing that I learnt about Gesell's ideas about demurrage and money - https://silviogesell.com/video-course

I've realised there's a huge opportunity to take this analysis and apply it to Web3 so I'm going to work on this and release some analysis over the coming months. This will be highly useful content for all Web3 ecosystems when thinking about the implementation of money and treasury income.

The main concerns I have with this proposal is that I have very little leverage and influence in the Polkadot ecosystem (or any ecosystem) to get enough people onboarded with the process / ideas. So even with a lot of effort I am not confident I will get enough traction and I don't want to claim any funding without something to show for it that is useful.

In an ideal world it is something that really needs a decent amount of support from the foundation / core team in public statements that they say we're thinking of going down this route and properly experimenting with a new approach. They can then help with asking what the community what they think. The community response and buy-in would be much higher than just me trying to reach out and convince people to trial this approach and get involved.

So i'd still obviously like to run the experiment but when I work on anything it's important that the initiative is the highest impact thing I can work on, otherwise I should redirect my time to whatever initiative that is the highest impact! Making impact is the only reason I'm currently working for free to try and improve the industry. I'll share the next piece of analysis i'm working on soon and then take it from there on how and whether to initiate this experiment!

[keeganquigley]

Thanks @lovegrovegeorge for the update. Understandable; have you set up a priority suggestions board and invited the community to post their suggestions per the deliverable? If not, have you tried doing any other temp checks with the community, such as on the Polkadot forums?

That might help to get the community motivated. But let us know should you wish to not continue working on it and we can potentially close it for now until you want to pick it back up.

[lovegrovegeorge]

No priority suggestions board, had enough experience sharing things to know that it'll take more than just creating and sharing it to get much attention, will require ongoing effort. So if I allocate the time I want to do it properly which will mean reaching out to people individually as well as forums, chats etc

Still eager to run the experiment though will prioritise some other areas of analysis first and then keep you updated!

[keeganquigley]

Hi @lovegrovegeorge since it has now been several months are you able to provide an update?

[lovegrovegeorge]

Hey @keeganquigley, so since August time last year I started working on an economic model for organisations called Contributionism (https://contributionism.io). It is complimentary to my other work looking at treasuries and funding processes and how Web3 ecosystems could reward contribution.

Then after that I started learning about economic ideas such as land value taxes from Henry George's work and demurrage money from Silvio Gesell's work. I've been working with someone on the topic of demurrage and have been applying it to Web3 (https://money.web3economy.io/). Got a few more updates coming out this week about money supply on this resource.

Now looking ahead I would still like to work on the funding process and contributor funding as outlined in my analysis, I believe it is a much better path forward for Web3 funding processes. However after spending a lot of time in economic theory and analysing a number of them to then suggest my own ideas I've realised that money is likely the most important starting point. Money, land and organisations are some of the most broken global economic systems we see today. Fixing money through the implementation of better monetary policies in Web3 networks currently stands out as the best starting point to fix the global economy.

The upside for fixing money is also huge for Web3 ecosystems like Polkadot as simulating demurrage via a network coin tax would mean generating an ongoing amount of income for the ecosystem treasury that the ecosystem would then need to spend each year - using something like contributor funding! Under a demurrage money system, treasury income is never the problem, it is having a good funding process that generates a good ROI as this creates the positive fly wheel effect for rapidly increasing growth of the ecosystem.

My priority is always to make the most impact possible, so I think I'll need to spend my time on perfecting the analysis and messaging of how to fix money and how it impacts Web3 ecosystems. Then after this is done I can then focus my effort on funding processes again. Once money is fixed a great funding process is going to be needed to spend the treasury income!

So you're welcome to shut down the proposal, I can't see me having time for this until next year. If Polkadot or W3F were keen to properly explore contributor funding in more detail as a alternative and potential replacement to idea funding then I would love to help, but if it is a situation where it is just me trying to suggest and make this process myself without significant support (as I am a small drop in a big pond), i'm not confident this proposal will be a very impactful initiative.

[keeganquigley]

Thanks for the update @lovegrovegeorge sounds good, lets go ahead and close it for now, and we can always potentially pick it back up in the future if you want to work on it again, by simply commenting on the PR. Cheers and best of luck with the rest of your work!