Small proposals, low quality proposals, unfinished ideas

[xaur]

Politeia is designed to handle big decisions with big impact. It is not intended to handle smaller things as that would lead to voter exhaustion. Multiple ideas were proposed to handle smaller proposals. Collect, research, categorize and publish them somewhere.

TODO: formulate more clearly what this issue is about and how it differs from #104.

Discussions:

• 2019-02-14: "filtering these ideas into ones we want to pay for, and ones we don't"; "dynamically pricing those items we want to work on. perhaps with something like politeia, but smaller scale"; "better signaling to contractors and new contributors alike what the community and stakeholders prioritize. if we want to create the uber for knowledge workers, /decred-issues/ feels like a thousand people requesting rides"

[xaur]

This discussion touches an interesting point of whether to spend Treasury funds on community article translations during a bear market.

[s-ben]

Relevant development: Aragon (decentralized governance project) has a proposal for a "bounty DAO" to fund "low-cost, low-risk" bounties. Asking community for $12,500.

The purpose of the Bounty DAO is to fund low-cost, low-risk bounties that are proposed and voted on by ANT holders. Transfers can be proposed by any ANT holder at any time, either before or after completing work. It is up to the authors of each proposal to argue the merits of their proposal and convince ANT holders to approve it. The designated venue for discussing proposals is the Aragon community forum.

[xaur]

I believe Dash also has some mechanism for small proposals as well (was it called 'micro funding'?). Perhaps @RichardRed0x is more familiar with it.

[s-ben]

I genuinely believe this is a huge opportunity if we can get it right. If we don't do it right away, we should definitely follow how DASH and Aragon's experiments play out to learn some lessons.

[xaur]

This has a lot of overlap with "Finding paid work" #104 - check the discussion there. I wonder how to formulate their differences.

[xaur]

Dropping some random thoughts for now.

"Small proposals" (#33) is coming from Politeia perspective, it looks to extend ideas of Politeia into the field of smaller proposals, perhaps by means of one or multiple "mini politeias". It is about submitting ideas, discussing, iterating, and signaling what stakeholders see as useful and what can be "upgraded" to a full blown proposal or grouped with other small proposals into a single large proposal. It is about preventing voter fatigue by offloading all small things into its own sandbox, at the same time providing a welcoming place where ideas (otherwise rejected as too small) can flourish. Sounds a bit related to a business incubator.

"Finding paid work" (#104) has a pretty self-describing title. It is about matching workers with payers. It is a place where workers can come without ideas and funding, choose and secure work, deliver and get paid.

Perhaps #33 is more about generating, crystalizing and selecting ideas worth funding, while #104 is about finding work, finding workers, finding funding, matching them, forming binding contracts and executing. #33 sounds like it heavily involves stakeholders and signaling, while in #104 they are not in focus or even are optional. Perhaps preparing ideas precedes allocation of funds and workers for them. The two may end up being just different aspects of the same system, or different stages of the same pipeline.

In both cases, the source of funds can be either Decred Treasury or, when the DAE concept matures, a small group of Decred holders aligned around some issue. The latter can be useful for issues that have low overall support among all stakeholder, but high support from a small group of stakeholders that share a common need.

[xaur]

Ideas from chat on 2019-02-14:

in fact pretty much every issue is a legitimate issue/decent idea. expressing and documenting the fountain of ideas rising up from chats, etc. seems pretty valuable IMO. sort of like the “top of the idea funnel”. what could be really valuable is the next part of the funnel. filtering these ideas into ones we want to pay for, and ones we don’t. perhaps even dynamically pricing those items we want to work on. perhaps with something like politeia, but smaller scale. something to answer the age old question, ‘can i bill for this’, in an efficient way, better signaling to contractors and new contributors alike what the community and stakeholders prioritize. if we want to create the uber for knowledge workers, /decred-issues/ feels like a thousand people requesting rides

/decred-issues/ seems like the perfect granularity for sourcing ideas
imagine that repo with floating $/DCR signs next to each issue, determined by stakeholders in a super efficient hive-mind way, open to all newcomers.
or, people run with those ideas, then submit them in a "mini politeia", where stakeholders can up/vote work product, dynamically pricing them
this would be similar to how our current contractor system works, but more scalable. it could then be used as input to the humans deciding who to bring on board as a contractor
a "farm team", if you will, with a dashboard offering a global view of committers, the numbers they're putting up, and how much the stakeholders and community members value stuff
if done right, it could be highly engaging
and pull stakeholders in for voting on larger issues too
stakeholders could keep this system in check by controlling its budget via Pi. if the valuations are off, shareholders could reduce the (relative) salary of the farm team players across the board (or cancel it entirely)

maybe a bounty system like "I set a bounty of X DCR to get Y done", explore existing system like gitcoin, or something else. The key is to get incentives right
a good start would be some sybil-resistant signaling, ideally with tickets

making it clear which of these issues constitute valuable work that could be billed for is the key to making them useful. "sybil-resistant signalling" is what I was hoping for from the research proposal 2 on pi, I agree on "ideally with tickets", but we don't currently have a way to facilitate that.

if it caught on, and this signaling started creating a lot of value, the total amount put into the system could be dialed up to encourage more
or down if engagement was poor, or stakeholders thought the signaling didn't represent them

a good signalling mechanism with tickets that covered smaller decisions, specifically about what constitutes valid work, would be great. That in itself would be quite significant vesting/delegation of sovreignty, and probably require a good deal of dev work to produce something like a "politeia-lite".

I think the MVP here is [simple method of deciding which issues are billable] + [stakeholder approval to spend X budget on "grab an issue from the bucket"]

[xaur]

An important aspect to consider for any ticket-based signaling is voter privacy. If a system to signal for many small items is built, it may generate a lot of mini-votes and signatures, much more than current Politeia votes for large proposals. This huge pile of votes may be susceptible to some nasty analysis.

[s-ben]

I think stakeholder privacy could be preserved, even with a lot of "mini-votes". Features like the vote trickling in pivoter could easily obscure votes, for instance by adding some randomness. And it's hard to imagine anyone other than us doing that much work analyzing votes anyway. It does make me ponder the shower thought: what about contractor privacy? Could contractors act not as individuals easily identifiable by their comms and invoices, but as a group?

[xaur]

Sure, nothing prevents a group of people to hide behind a single name.

[s-ben]

We are Anonymous. Here is our invoice.

Not sure this is the best place to put this, but there was some relevant discussion a few days ago around using the new contractor management system to support billing for smaller tasks. Specifically, several people expressed support for a feature that would allow a contractor to add multiple people to an invoice, opening up the possibility for people to be paid for smaller tasks without having to have a DCC: Support multiple individuals per invoice.

[xaur]

@s-ben I believe that fits #104 (Finding paid work) better. Feel free to also post there.

[xaur]

In a discussion about voter psychology was mentioned an idea to survey stakeholder opinions on various issues. Main Politeia would be flooded by survey questions, while surveying on regular comm platforms would be prone to manipulation and have privacy issues. The signaling mechanisms explored by this issue could probably be applied to surveying stakeholders.

With that discussion I think I finally found a clear difference between #104 and this. #104 is about finding paid work as the name says, while #33 is broader in scope: it also covers finding unpaid work, policy votes that don't require funding, and surveying stakeholder's opinion on arbitrary topics. Also, it looks more from the voter perspective, while #104 looks more from the worker perspective.

[xaur]

My ideas converge to thinking that this issue is about anything involving stakeholder signaling for arbitrary things.

[s-ben]

I'm converging around a fuzzy idea of a reddit/Politeia-like interface where stakeholders can signal on lower-level things if they want. And if we make it an engaging enough experience, stakeholders will engage.