RichardRed0x
commented
5 years ago Categories should be defined very robustly with terms around discipline or delivery, that could not be twisted too easily. (e.g. Development, Research, Design, Marketing, Events …). There needs to be one category for all “offtopic/misc” items. The function of this “misc. category” would be creation of bottom-of-the-hierarchy listing. Ideally all the not so meaningful, vague, useless and outright scam projects should have a good chance of ending up at. From a voters perspective – misc items are always taken tertiary in regards of DCR projects needs. If anything worthwhile does end up there, it would have to really prove itself to be worth voting.
Categories are a good idea and I think they're in the pipeline already, the same kind of categories are required for the contractor management system so we should settle on a set that works for both use cases if possible.
With regard to a "Misc" type category where poor proposals would likely end up, I can see the appeal but I don't think that is desirable unless the voting rules are different for proposals in that category. If these "Misc" proposals have the same criteria for being approved then they need to have enough attention and informed votes.
I don’t propose to go this extreme with it, however find it worth considering to introduce some kind of indication of the projects result (successful, failed, cancelled) as well explore ways of incentivizing reporting (bonus pm costs?).
On reporting, that has been discussed before and I don't think there would be support to incentivize reporting. I do think we need a place to store progress/completion reports on Pi so that they can be associated with and found from the pages of successful proposals.
lukebp
ta-lind
ghost
xaur
Sharing a collection of thoughts and notes we’ve come across in EETER regarding the governance process and it’s ux. This being primarily looked at from the perspective of DCR as project as well voters.
Problem Having observed the 2017 dash masternode budget voting – I think it’s fair to conclude the project got seriously milked by a big amount of low quality proposals. Imo most of these have not added up positively towards the projects health, growth or development.
Being somewhat aware about the reality of “professional project writers” and how traditional funds face similar issues, I think it will be an everlasting issue for Pi and DCR as even now about half the proposals submitted are not so meaningful.
While the community has so far done well in rooting out the bad proposals, would bring up the topic to explore possibilities how by design this issue could be improved pre-emptively and ensure new voters wouldn’t only have to rely on social media communications or repeated mentions from community members around staying vigilant.
Proposal categories Same as in dash voting, there are no categories in Pi yet. Looking at it from a visual perspective, having everything lumped together creates clutter, which inevitable leads to less engagement and less understanding as it takes more energy to understand what's what.
To give an example – w/o categories, a relevant development proposal can be buried between proposals for DCR dogwashplant or DCR sock factory proposals (or anything that relies on noise to push itself through).
Categories should be defined very robustly with terms around discipline or delivery, that could not be twisted too easily. (e.g. Development, Research, Design, Marketing, Events …). There needs to be one category for all “offtopic/misc” items. The function of this “misc. category” would be creation of bottom-of-the-hierarchy listing. Ideally all the not so meaningful, vague, useless and outright scam projects should have a good chance of ending up at. From a voters perspective – misc items are always taken tertiary in regards of DCR projects needs. If anything worthwhile does end up there, it would have to really prove itself to be worth voting.
Wrap up: categories provide insight to the voters, as what’s the bigger puzzle about, and how do the proposals as pieces fit in there. For proposals, it’s another small step to better define themselves.
Additionally: Category selection should be a mandatory choice when creating a proposal. Should consider the feature of being able to flag or report a proposal that misrepresents its category. If a proposal has been tagged by X amount, it could be moved to the right category (by triggered nr of votes w/ choice where to move it or by moderator) or an indication would be displayed (icon and nr next to category). Tradeoff about this is the introduction of another soft-censorship method. Though enforcing respecting of actual terms by having some consequences outweighs this imo.
Voter insights
Additionally: It could make for a good research topic to attempt mapping out so to say Decred’s ultimate theoretical long term goals and what’s roughly needed to achieve those. Once such data exists, this could certainly help to bolster creation of a voters guideline (besides the proposal guideline) and potentially some ux innovations. For more distant reference on country level, Australian government has this list of preferred skillsets regarding the quotas of work-visas given out yearly: Australian Skilled Occupation List (SOL).
Follow-up / reporting Having some experience with traditional funds, it’s interesting to notice that the amount of scrutiny for even smaller amounts tends to be through the roof. From status reports, documentation of deliverables/results, spendings time matches, cheque reports etc. I don’t propose to go this extreme with it, however find it worth considering to introduce some kind of indication of the projects result (successful, failed, cancelled) as well explore ways of incentivizing reporting (bonus pm costs?).
Interested in getting feedback on these – mainly on dev feasibility and any tradeoffs or issues to consider.