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RChain Bounty Program
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Create an RChain Worldwide Community Forum Service #588

Open ghost opened 6 years ago

ghost commented 6 years ago

Last Update: 14/10/2018

Benefit to RChain

RChain Members will greatly benefit from the creation of a worldwide community forum.

On the worldwide community forum, we can share ideas, ask questions, talk about everything we care, things like governance and meetups and perhaps most importantly, get to know each other and grow as a community.

Specifically, the usage of Discourse will help in the creation of an archive of the conversations in the Markdown file format, which is a very versatile file format, in a sense that it allows for easy conversion to multiple other file formats and design styles.

Through the addition of plugins (from the official Disourse plugins repository) we can add very cool features, now and in the future. (these will be added progressively)

Furthermore and perhaps as important, the usage of the RChain Worldwide Community Forum will lower the barrier-to-entry for the majority of people and migrate conversations that should not take place on GitHub (which is a developer centric platform), to it.

Budget and Objective

Estimated Budget of Task: [April: $2500, May: $0, June: $2500, July: $3000, August: $1819] Estimated Timeline Required to Complete the Task: [200 days] How will we measure completion? [Have >=200 registered users on the forum.]

The objective is described above in the Benefit to RChain section.

Legal

Task Submitter shall not submit Tasks that will involve RHOC being transacted in any manner that (i) jeopardizes RHOC’s status as a software access token or other relevant and applicable description of the RHOC as an “asset”—not a security— or (2) violates, in any manner, applicable U.S. Securities laws.

Notes

Tasks (Alpha Phase)

Tasks (Beta Phase)

Tasks (Final Phase - Release Candidate)

IOU

Members contributions are tagged accordingly.

dckc commented 6 years ago

A couple thoughts, not necessarily critical issues:

How does this relate to https://forum.rchain.coop/ ? It will compete, in some ways. Is it important to have both of these?

How does it relate to other coop IT infrastructure #428? Clearly there's an emphasis on self-hosting, which I support. But should the hosting migrate to the same platform as the membership website?

pmoorman commented 6 years ago

@ICA3DaR5 what's the status with this? I haven't seen you address Dan's concerns yet, and I'm not sure you intent to proceed with this.

I'll close it now (to keep the issue list sanitized), but you can reopen it once you're ready to work on it again!

ghost commented 6 years ago

@dckc The forum I am building is a community-driven forum, it will host all efforts of the community. https://forum.rchain.coop/ is very developer centric. Hosting is not an issue, if it's asked I will migrate it to the same platform as the membership website.

@pmoorman I am actively working on it. At the moment I am migrating some membership-created content. Temporary domains is: https://rchain.gr/

I'll update the issue later today!

dckc commented 6 years ago

Well, developers are a large part of the RChain community, so if what you're building will host all efforts of the community, it will host developer efforts, and so it will compete with forum.rchain.coop.

As to hosting: it's not just a question of what you're willing to do. It's also a question of what existing coop IT staff (including those contracted at pyrofex) are willing to do in the long term. I wonder if they would be happy to host two forums. There's also a question of whether they would happy with whatever technology choices you're making. I encourage you to include them early and often.

ghost commented 6 years ago

@dckc IMO there is a need for a forum outside of developers.

Domain: https://rchaincommunity.xyz/

zsluedem commented 6 years ago

What about this bounty program in github?!It works like a forum and it is community driven. I don't think start a new forum would be a good ideas. You have to teach people to learn how to use it and everybody has to take time to learn .It is really redundance. I suggest you can start a new "topic",community in developer forum instead of building one. In coding world, we all want our codes DRY（don't repeat yourself）. It takes less time and effort to maintain our codes. I think we apply this rule to our governance and project maintain.

dckc commented 6 years ago

I wonder if you/we could convince the folks running developer.rchain.coop to use discourse. It's much nicer.

pmoorman commented 6 years ago

I'll agree with @dckc and @will here that we'd probably be better of (especially in terms of maintainance) to improve on what we have, rather than to add new stuff.

I agree with @ICA3DaR5 that the current developer forum isn't very welcoming to non-developers. If we can channel our efforts to pursue the suggestions by Dan & Will, that would be awesome (= create new topics in the dev community, and explore changing to Discourse)

will commented 6 years ago

Nah

On Fri, Jun 29, 2018 at 00:09 pmoorman notifications@github.com wrote:

I'll agree with @dckc https://github.com/dckc and @will https://github.com/will here that we'd probably be better of (especially in terms of maintainance) to improve on what we have, rather than to add new stuff.

I agree with @ICA3DaR5 https://github.com/ICA3DaR5 that the current developer forum isn't very welcoming to non-developers. If we can channel our efforts to pursue the suggestions by Dan & Will, that would be awesome (= create new topics in the dev community, and explore changing to Discourse)

— You are receiving this because you were mentioned. Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHub https://github.com/rchain/bounties/issues/588#issuecomment-401268348, or mute the thread https://github.com/notifications/unsubscribe-auth/AAAHtQM8CnyO7zf8RIb4Af27VXd6tHcwks5uBdLEgaJpZM4TMxH6 .

pmoorman commented 6 years ago

oh, wrong Will! Should have been @zsluedem of course...

ghost commented 6 years ago

@zsluedem A forum is much easier to use, especially Discourse. More people have experience using forums than using GitHub. GitHub is developer-oriented by design.

@dckc Let me finish this first, make it look nice and include everything I want to include in it, then the next step would be to test it and take suggestions/comments. After that we could talk with the folks running forum.rchain.coop, as you probably have already figured, I am better at doing/creating stuff than negotiating/public relations.

Issue updated.

ghost commented 6 years ago

This has been completed, with an IOU of a few things like more categories and plugins, which I'll add during the month of testing (July). The forum is ready for people to start using it. Let's start utilizing it as a Beta for this month -> https://rchaincommunity.xyz/

$0 budget for the month of July and forward. Hence the IOU!

allancto commented 6 years ago

@ICA3DaR5 I do think multiple forums are a good idea. Just as in the world at large there are many newspapers, many different development tools and so on. Imo the value of this particular forum will be unknown until we see the usage of it. But it certainly might be a good venue for moving the bounty system out of Translation and into community building, commentary and discussion. So as far as value to our Cooperative, I feel only time (usage) will tell. As far as an experiment with potential to increase the quality of participation in our Bounty system, I endorse it. @jimscarver @zsluedem @dckc @pmoorman please look again at the issue and the work product and vote as you see fit.

@ICA3DaR5 will continued maintenance be required? If so is there a plan for maintenance, moderation and so on?

Thanks! -allancto

jimscarver commented 6 years ago

I am a little confused. A $2500 budget was paid in April and now there is another $5000 budget for June. I do not understand what the additional work involved and am inclined to vote a much lower budget. I am uncomfortable paying in advance for future work. I do support a community forum but who controls it? It should be managed cooperatively by several trusted members not one person.

ghost commented 6 years ago

@allancto I will continue to maintain it with full transparency. I will open another issue with a $0 budget for the IOU part and for the maintenance. We can discuss about moderation on Site Feedback.

@jimscarver Vote as you see fit. I spend a lot of time setting it up securely and thoughtfully and @zero-andreou alpha-tested it. Please post the management comments at the Site Feedback. I am just the creator of it, not planning to be the one who controls it. Discourse has a trust mechanism built in (https://blog.discourse.org/2018/06/understanding-discourse-trust-levels/), which we can tweak during this month of Beta testing.

jimscarver commented 6 years ago

I voted a budget of $500 but still the rewards seem way out of line. I am changing my vote to zero as I find your justification to be uncompelling. It seems to me the setup was already covered my the $2500 already received.

pmoorman commented 6 years ago

Going along with @jimscarver comment above, I've voted $500 until it's clearer how the higher budget is justified. I also agree that we shouldn't pay for work that's still to be delivered.

If more work needs to be done in July, let's pay for it in July.

@ICA3DaR5 I think the main problem here is that from your comments it's hard to understand where all this time/money went, and how it's justified. If you can explain better, the higher budgets might be perfectly justified.

allancto commented 6 years ago

@jimscarver you are correct that the total budget for this project was $7500, which i consider very inexpensive relative to its potential. @jimscarver @pmoorman it's my assessment that over time this will prove to be of great value to our Cooperative. For context please add up all the budget numbers to date for Translation and for custom forums paid for by our Bounty system. In addition think about the effect these custom forums have had in terms of siloing and fragmenting our worldwide community, rather than bringing us together.

  1. The project already has users, people posting in the forum.
  2. The project in itself lessens the need for manual translation, and if automated translation can be added will imo be much better than manual translation.
  3. The project gives us the potential to reverse the trend @pmoorman calls "siloing" and get all our different language communities talking together. And a fast onramp for new communities

I've created an issue already to improve this Forum in #829. We have found that Translation has been a large expense for our Cooperative (monthly expense during Jun was ~20k). It's my belief that automated translation done right will have better usability than manual translation and will also provide translation of all of our documents almost instantly and at low cost.

@jimscarver you raised an excellent question about trustless moderation. I hope that the Worldwide Forum will become so heavily used that moderation will become an issue, that would certainly be a signal of success! I encourage you to formulate those ideas into another FIP (Forum Improvement Proposal) to upgrade this forum and experiment with ideas around Cooperation at Scale.

Thanks! -@allancto

ghost commented 6 years ago

I respect all of the opinions of the community. Nevertheless that's the amount of USD that I value my work, therefore I stand by my vote. Everyone is free to vote and I respect those votes as well.

@allancto Please validate your comments by voting.

I will open another issue for the IOU part, which everyone can vote for July.

allancto commented 6 years ago

@ICA3DaR5 @jimscarver looked at the content in the forum and believes it may currently contain plagiarized or otherwise improper content. Whether that's true or not there should be an explicit projection of cost of moderation in this forum. It appears that the voting to date approves half of your requested budget, leaving the other half till next month voting, which may be appropriate until these questions are addressed. Perhaps that's what you mean by the "IOU" till July. Thanks! -@allancto

ghost commented 6 years ago

@allancto I forgot to add sources on the English and Spanish content, which I will do in the next 2-3 days. I have added sources on the Greek content.

That's exactly what I meant with the "IOU".

dckc commented 6 years ago

Making it more clear that https://rchaincommunity.xyz/ is in draft state is URGENT.

Right now, pages such as https://rchaincommunity.xyz/t/introducing-rspace/80 are copied from elsewhere without attribution. And they bear the RChain cooperative logo, with no disclaimer. These pages are visible via a Google search and anyone who finds them that way will not have the context of this issue. Without this context, the pages are just plain plagiarism.

(the translations need links to their source material too.)

dckc commented 6 years ago

The title and "Benefit to RChain" speak of a community forum, but I see only one participant. Please either

  1. change the objective to include something about community participation or
  2. change the title to "set up forum service" or some such and change the "Benefit to RChain" to explain why forum software installation benefits the community.
ghost commented 6 years ago

@dckc Attribution was added on the English blog posts yesterday! We are doing Spanish today, that's the only one left. We were aware of these issues and fixed them.

I will edit this issue tomorrow properly. Thanks a lot for your comments!

ghost commented 6 years ago

@dckc

Updates:

  1. Added sources to the English, Spanish and Greek Blog posts on the forum.
  2. Added links from the Medium posted Spanish and Greek Blog posts to the forum.
  3. Added links from the forum posted Spanish and Greek Blog posts to Medium.
ghost commented 6 years ago

Updates:

The Italian team added sources in the blog posts.

ghost commented 6 years ago

Updated the issue to better reflect completed work and future work.

ghost commented 6 years ago

Let's talk about the Discourse Translator plugin. Do we want to use it? If so, which of the following services and pricing?

I suggest we use the Free Microsoft Translator tier for now.

Here's some information...

Noticeable Features

Translation Services Supported

Microsoft Translator

Microsoft Translator Text API is a cloud-based machine translation service supporting multiple languages, reaching more than 95% of world's gross domestic product (GDP).

Pricing

Free S1 (PAY AS YOU GO) S2 S3 S4
Price (per month) $0 $10 (Per million characters) $2,055.01 $6,000.00 $45,000.00
Maximum characters included in tier 2,000,000 N/A 250,000,000 1,000,000,000 10,000,000,000
Overage rate (per million characters) N/A N/A $8.22 $6 $4.50

Google Translate

Translation API provides a simple programmatic interface for translating an arbitrary string into any supported language using state-of-the-art Neural Machine Translation. Translation API is highly responsive, so websites and applications can integrate with Translation API for fast, dynamic translation of source text from the source language to a target language (e.g., French to English). Language detection is also available in cases where the source language is unknown. The underlying technology pushes the boundary of Machine Translation and is updated constantly to seamlessly improve translations and introduce new languages and language pairs.

Pricing
Translation $20 per 1,000,000 characters*
Language Detection $20 per 1,000,000 characters*

*Price is per character sent to the API for processing, including whitespace characters. Empty queries are charged for one character. Google charges on per character basis, even if the character is multiple bytes, where a character corresponds to a (code-point). For example, translating "こんにちは" to English counts as 5 characters for the purposes of billing.

pmoorman commented 6 years ago

@ICA3DaR5 I don't really know how to proceed with allocating budgets on this issue for the month of July.

For me —as I've said before— much of the value of a forum is in the users, rather than in the software. Do we have any indication already that people are actively using the forum? Do we have a plan on how to increase usage and activity?

I'm standing by for further suggestions from your side on what kind of budgets you think are justified here.

cc @kitblake @AyAyRon-P

ghost commented 6 years ago

@pmoorman The forum is not ready yet. So I haven't pushed to market it yet. I don't want to push for an unfinished product. It's quite there though. Most likely it will be production ready by August 08.

I have a some thoughts in mind for the marketing side, we could and should discuss this further, maybe on a separate issue. In fact, if someone wants to market it, he/she should create another issue and do it!

If you value the usage/users from day zero, how do you expect people to develop/setup things like the forum? How do you expect people to start building larger things?

Step one is to build something, step two is to market it.

Is it fair to post hours worked and an estimated budget researching, configuring and setting up on August 07 or should I do it today for up until today?

My estimation as of today is > 500 working hours in total, including the previous months.

ghost commented 6 years ago

Moving on.

dckc commented 6 years ago

Stop!

You can't really expect to be paid for 120 days of work setting up a site before anyone even uses it. I didn't spend that much on rewards.rchain.coop. We're not spending that much on the member site. We could get years of professionally hosted discourse service for what you have been rewarded.

I don't think you should ask for any more budget until you have hundreds of users at least.

I asked three weeks ago that you add something to the objective about participation by this community you keep referring to. I'm not the only one. I see no such change to the objective.

If you want to spend all this time adding features without addressing feedback from your peers, you're free to do that on your own time. But I don't see why RChain should reward you for it.

ghost commented 6 years ago

@dckc

Stop!

Stop what?

You can't really expect to be paid for 120 days of work setting up a site before anyone even uses it. I didn't spend that much on rewards.rchain.coop. We're not spending that much on the member site. We could get years of professionally hosted discourse service for what you have been rewarded.

First of all, I am not expecting anything. If that's the case wouldn't it be better to close the bounty system and hire professional agencies to do the work that the cooperative wants to get done? What's the point of the bounties?

I am working according to the README

"Some important things that new RAMs should be aware of:

Be a self-starter :: because there is no boss, nobody is going to tell you what to do. Being a RAM is much more like being an entrepreneur than it is like being a employee. The greeter issues can help you find someone to show you around initially. Think for yourself :: RAMs work together like a swarm of insects does... but we need to avoid herd-thinking. We rely on independent thinking, and speaking up when you think we're going the wrong direction. Independent thought makes the coop stronger. Get things Done :: We value the guy that steps up and executes. Having opinions is easy, but doing the work is hard. Morals matter :: The crypto space is a wild-west landscape, where it's our own job to figure out our moral standards, and stick to them. We believe in transparency, openness, and fairness. But it’s ultimately up to our members to create and guard those values. Be nice to each other :: Most of our work happens online, distributed, remote. Be nice to each other, and easy to forgive. Even if you disagree, remember that we're all working towards the same goal."

If you are referring to the Discourse Plans, you pay for the things listed in the price table, not for setting it up and doing the work mentioned in the issue.

I don't think you should ask for any more budget until you have hundreds of users at least.

I will not argue with that. Please vote your opinion.

I asked three weeks ago that you add something to the objective about participation by this community you keep referring to. I'm not the only one. I see no such change to the objective.

I did change the objective.

If you want to spend all this time adding features without addressing feedback from your peers, you're free to do that on your own time. But I don't see why RChain should reward you for it.

I didn't receive any feedback. Please point me to a feedback that I haven't responded. I respect your opinion.

So, you waited for me to do a month of work and commented on August 1st?

dckc commented 6 years ago

Which part of the objective regards community participation? I still don't see it.

ghost commented 6 years ago

@dckc It's written under the Benefit to RChain, should I move that under Budget and Objective?

I added a notation pointing that out.

dckc commented 6 years ago

You might move it, but mostly you should make it measurable (the M in SMART). How can we tell when we have achieved the objective? My suggestion above is: when we have hundreds of participants.

dckc commented 6 years ago

regarding:

More than 5000 individual settings have been carefully studied and configured.

How many people have studied all these settings? Please add something to the objective about having redundancy in the administrative role.

ghost commented 6 years ago

@dckc I know what SMART means.

I studied those settings, I would very much like to have redundancy in the administrative role. I am open to conversation/consensus on how we should proceed with that carefully!

I added that to the objective.

pavlos1851 commented 6 years ago

@ICA3DAR5 I have experience in discourse. I would love to help.

ghost commented 6 years ago

Awesome @pavlos1851

Let's chat on Discord(?)

pavlos1851 commented 6 years ago

@ICA3DaR5 Sure!

Valentine-Mario commented 6 years ago

@ica3dar5 made me an moderator in the English category. So far, I've promoted the forum among RAM members who speak English and does who are not RAM members but hope to join and contribute to the community

dckc commented 6 years ago

On Aug 1, at the invitation of @ICA3DaR5 , I represented my position formally as a vote: a large negative budget vote. So as it stands, anyone who claims a reward on this issue this month is losing RHOC.

I just double-checked to see if there has been any movement on the several requests to add something about actual numbers of users to the objective, and I see nothing.

In fact, I see this circular reasoning:

How will we measure completion? [Announcement will be made on this issue.]

But that begs the question: how will you measure when it's time to make such an announcement?

To re-iterate: I don't think you should ask for any more budget until you have hundreds of users at least.

Valentine-Mario commented 6 years ago

@dckc what about the admins that were recently added to the forum and have been putting time and effort to moderate and promote the forum? I think it's quite unfair to vote such a negetive budget. And when you say losing RHOC, would it affect the rewards from other issues for the month?

dckc commented 6 years ago

If you're putting time and effort into promoting the forum, then you have in mind increasing the number of users, yes? If you add something to the objective about a number of actual users of the forum, that would be responsive to requests from me and others and we could perhaps get past this "I will not argue with that. Please vote your opinion." stuff that led me to the large negative budget vote.

when you say losing RHOC, would it affect the rewards from other issues for the month?

I think @lapin7 has deleted negative rewards in the past when dealing with invoices. I don't know whether the invoice templates do this automatically. None of the software I have written does it automatically. As far as I know, he is under no obligation to do so.

allancto commented 6 years ago

@dckc you are gaming the trustmetric system we've adopted. You are asked to vote your conscience, which I assume is a non-negative number.

I will enter an issue in the next few days as to how to define intentional gaming of this voting system and what actions should be taken when it occurs.

Thanks! -@allancto

dckc commented 6 years ago

You're wrong and you're presumptuous. I stated my position plainly and voted accordingly.

casanwugo commented 6 years ago

Upon posting French contents on the forum,, i realize that quite some effort go into making posts look good in there (especially converting to markdown). I think @ICA3DaR5 is doing a really good job!

ghost commented 6 years ago

@dckc Basically by voting such a negative number you are terrorizing other people. There is a fear of voting their opinion, because they will actually LOSE RHOC? A few people DM'd me that they are afraid of voting because of that.

I don't think that's fair.

dckc commented 6 years ago

I asked you to explain how it's important to have this forum in addition to forum.rchain.coop. Your response was "IMO there is a need for a forum outside of developers." That is: argument from authority which invites no further discussion. And are you an authority on community forum development and collaboration? What experience do you draw from? (for my experience, anyone can go from my github profile https://github.com/dckc to my web site http://www.madmode.com/ to http://www.w3.org/People/Connolly/ and https://www.codementor.io/dckc and https://www.linkedin.com/in/connollydan/ and see my 25+ years of collaboration and community building expertise) @pmoorman and @zsluedem concurred. I don't know @zsluedem 's credentials well, but @pmoorman demonstrated his expertise in start-up marketing in any number of issues starting with https://github.com/rchain/bounties/issues/234 .

It's a net loss to the coop to have these forums competing with each other rather than combining them. The only way I see a net win is if this Discourse forum becomes so wildly popular that it takes over the role of forum.rchain.coop. That is: if it has hundreds of active participants.

@pmoorman said "much of the value of a forum is in the users, rather than in the software." There was considerable support for this view in the TAG+guides meeting July 26 (#847)

I advised that you collaborate on infrastructure with those who run forum.rchain.coop. Your response was "Hosting is not an issue" which shows a clear lack of appreciation for how much of an issue it really is. At least we have @pavlos1851 providing some back-up. But installing 10 plug-ins (Cakeday thru Header search) before any users have demonstrated a use or need for them -- even hypothetical users in use cases -- looks like typical featuritis. Have you subscribed to the channel for security notices for each of those plug-ins? Choosing one at random... Discourse Moderator Extension plugin... I see it doesn't even have an explicit security notice mechanism. Are you watching the github repository to be sure you are notified of any security issues or fixes?

You write:

If you are referring to the Discourse Plans, you pay for the things listed in the price table, not for setting it up and doing the work mentioned in the issue.

Yes, well, you make my point exactly. The coop gets value from the features listed in the table regardless of who sets it up or how long they take. If a hosted service can do it just as well and much more cheaply, why should the coop pay a bounty? The point of the bounty system is not to pay for services that are already readily available on the open market but to do work that is unique to RChain. The coop already considered this issue and chose to pay Pyrofex to operate a forum.

Meanwhile, we encourage independent experimentation to some extent. But you have been rewarded $4000+ over two months. That seems more than enough. I consider it my duty to see that nothing more is rewarded without some measurable plan for getting people to actually use the thing. I tried to make that clear in my August 1st message, but you blew that off too.

It was you who closed off discussion with "I will not argue with that. Please vote your opinion."

So now you have my opinion in the form of a budget vote.

Griping about "terrorizing" does not address my concerns and does not influence me to change my vote. If people are afraid to claim rewards for this issue for this month, then I have done my duty on behalf of the coop.

To be crystal clear: what would address my concerns is if you edit the objective in the issue description to show a measurable plan for actual users.