CC Fund: expenses, responsibilities, spending guidelines and follow-up processes

[l33d4n]

Thank you again. I’ll address to @Neo and @Anynomous replies together about the issues from the original post first to keep it short, hope it’s not mixing things up:

CC Role definition / CC Spending guidelines:

@Anynomous

I discussed this with @l33d4n and we want to make some changes to the Grin CC description, clarifying which responsibilities council members have (key-holder and preferably active community members), but decision making, checking deliverables and reviewing are a community effort. Clarifying this should avoid differences in expectations.

@Anynomous pushed PR that defines the role of the CC members:

Update grin-council.md

Grin Community Councilm members are primarily representatives of the community and are keyholders of the community funds. … Decision making on funding request as well as defining, checking and reviewing deliverables is a community effort.

We (as a community) will have to take a more active part as mentioned above but I think It is important to add a clarification that the responsibility of the CC members (as the keyholders) is to approve only expenses that meet the spending guidelines.

Just to make sure that the “final word” is the spending guidelines to avoid misunderstandings what can/cannot be funded. It makes sense?

@davidtavarez explained it better a year ago:

@davidtavarez

I think there is a general misconception about what it means to have a request approved … everything must be done within the boundaries of the Grin CC and the spending guidelines. So, if anyone disagrees with the spending guidelines they are free to open a Pull Request, add an item to the agenda and share their arguments.

GK duties:

@Neo

I also think the CC should have an elected President or someone incharge of overseeing everything, including the GK duties… Like a stripped down role of what Daniel used to do… Having someone akin to a President seems the best way to improve transparency and hold the CC more accountable.

if we clarified the responsibility of the CC members as keyholders, it’s basically transfers most of the responsibility to the community, and the GK as part of his duties will publishes regular updates to keep the community informed about the mentioned topics:

@Cobragrin

• Agenda maintenance.
• Transcribe meeting notes and summary.
• Decision log updates.
• Track-record Task list.
• Funded requests progress tracking on regular basis.

The responsibility of tracking the progress of funded requests regularly is the most important for trust and transparency. As part of my responsibility, I will check regularly that the funded tasks are being carried out and I will update at the CC meetings on any issues that requires action from their part.

Right now I’m just trying to solve the issues from the original post without additional expenses or changing the rules so I think the one GK role covers it. Let me know if you think we should add or change something.

Transparency reports:

@Anynomous

Finance reports were not up to date and need fixing.
This should be taking care of now since @cekickafa will get admin rights to the GitHub page. CC members have merged the finance overview pull requests.

I asked @Cobragrin about the GRIN wallet report, he explained to me that he does not have access to the GRIN wallet and he got the records from the CC members, but…

@l33d4n

the GRIN wallet report is messy, outdated and contains errors (revenues marked as expenses so when calculating the balance I got a negative number -240K GRIN)

I tried to verify it again after the last merged PR from 2023-05-24 (2 days ago) but when calculating the total revenue - total expenses we get -240,478 GRIN while the stated current balance is 128,307 GRIN

@Anynomous Can you please update the GRIN wallet missing records first to solve this issue?

Mining reports:

@Anynomous

Community mining farm. Update for transparency and clarify who has the responsibility for the farm.
In short, all miners except G1 are now in a professional mining farm where we pay 30% of mined Grin for electricity and housing. A fair and honest deal, in practice this means we pay something like 0.04$ per kWh + free housing.

Can we add “Mining report” under the Docs repo or maybe a new repo?

@l33d4n

…“Mining report” or something organized and accessible to the community, how many miners were purchased? How many of them are active right now? testnet or mainnet? the g1 has been inactive for a while, what is the plan and who is responsible? What are the monthly expenses/maintenance costs? What is the revenue?

Paying 30% of the base currency makes the accounting work easier, so basically this is a one time task (info file + list) and then only requires a regular updates from the GRIN wallet report so it doesn’t add any ongoing administrative work but solves all the transparency issues.

Decision making:

@Neo

It’s hard to find community members who actively engaged in the project, motivated enough to always been around to offer their opinion and actually take action.

The engagement with this post is an good example how the community members share their opinion and engage if they understand the topic or if it’s enough important to them.

For example, we can improve the community engagement as suggested in the replies of this post:

@Anynomous

Explain to the community the relevance of features like PIDB and Nostr, their benefits for users. When a feature gets enough up-votes, move to a funding request for and a vote for the request. In this way we are certain the community is supportive of the funding request.

@stakerV

If this data can be prepared and regulary updated as a part of funding system,. it would be easy for me to update website regularly. I think a sumamry page like this may show what projects are on development to people outside grin community, which would help extend our reach to new developers and users.

@ardocrat

I suggested to create Kanban board for CC projects at Github to know who is working and where… having all information at one place is much better for project management and transparency for whole community.

Personally, I’m not sure what is the “best way”, but we can be sure that once the information are more transparent and accessible, the community members will be able to share an opinion and contribute to the discussions.

Some of us may even be able to contribute code or take part in other things.

Funding requests vs Bounties:

@Anynomous

Change the way we move to funding requests
After discussing it with @mo5ito and also as part of what was proposed by @renzokuken, we will first discuss features on the forum, only if they get enough support from the community, we will propose to move forward with a funding request.

I think that this post proved that the funding requests method is much more complicated, especially when we can’t enforce it, make sure what the end result will be or what will go wrong along the way as happened several times. It worked, until it didn’t.

@l33d4n

The question that needs to be asked is, why put community funds at risk in the first place?

Bounties reduces the risk to zero and simplifies the whole process with a clear definition for the end result, so we can avoid unnecessary arguments and dramas:

@Cobragrin

Code > Release > Payment .
Without to progress report tracking, no procceed to payment draft by GRINCC.

Protecting the fund and keep development ongoin is possible this way.

@ardocrat

This increases responsibility and motivation, cause developer knows he will just not get his reward if work will not be done.

There are still issues that need to be discuss (thanks to @renzokuken who explained above) but I think the community supports the need for changes, at least in this post.