We would need to find some kind of balance. Cryptocurrency foundations often publish how much is spent on dev, but not necessarily how much goes to each individual developer. That’s harder with grin because we don’t have many people on the payroll.
Maybe the best we can do is allow some private funding requests, and still include them in the spending reports? This offers transparency while minimizing attention drawn to the request by requiring the forum post, open discussion, and a public vote?
I’m not real sure. I’m just thinking out loud here, since I figure this is the time to make as many improvements to our current spending approach as we can. The previous system has failed to attract outside developers, which has been a huge disappointment. I’m trying to figure out why it failed, and what we can do to change that.
Possibly? Gut feeling alone tells me that 2 separate funds trying to cover the same space could lead to problems. What happens if the majority of requests go to just 1 of the 2 funds for whatever reason? What happens if one of the councils chooses to be closed-fisted and not fund reasonable requests when they know the other council will (and they can therefore keep funds for their own special interests)?
Would either of those situations be problematic, or is okay if it works out that way? I just want to avoid rushing into a split like this if it ends up causing unforeseen issues.
It was my convoluted way of saying that making the process prolonged or difficult by potentially requiring them to submit 2 funding requests would be a situation we’d want to avoid if we can. We want to try to remove any unnecessary roadblocks to getting contributors funded, while still avoiding misuse of funds. It’s why I thought maybe smaller autonomous teams with clearer goals would be better, since they would possibly have a better chance of reaching those who aren’t covered in our current system.
There is a clear intention, i.e. “advancing grin/mw”.
I don’t think it’s necessary for every single developer or every small task to submit a formal funding request. E.g. Grin++ as a trusted part of the community could submit an overall proposal asking for “x$ for task y” and spend the money to achieve that goal as they think is best (buy mobile phones to test the wallet; buy Apple hardware for iOS development; send money to devs)
While past behaviour isn’t a guarantee for the future, the council has proven to be trustworthy and reliable (even if some people don’t agree with all their decisions).
As for the new group, the council can “earmark” the 30BTC for them and only pay out funds if they prove themselves to be trustworthy. Yes, there’s no guarantee that tbd would receive all the promised funds, but given the council’s past behaviour I’m not worried about that, I’m sure they’d keep their promise.
After all, we have to trust at least one party any way: either the council to pay out the promised funds (in total or in several installments) or the tbd group to handle their funds as they promised. Whatever we do, there’s trust involved, there’s just a difference in how we divide this between the council and tbd.
As I understand it, the goal of this simple proposal is to move beyond the current state (“council controls 100%”) and give some control to another group. This resolves the critique that Grin is run by an evil council cabal.
The tbd group can split their funds further if necessary, i.e. it can fund single developers’ requests (e.g. 5k to DevX for a month) as well as funding more general tasks (e.g. 100k for a Grin++iOS).
Running budgets for Grin teams (with funds spent at their own discretion)
as appropriate uses of the funds.
I can’t speak for @tromp of course, but his post mentioned his intention, and from that I conclude that he’s against only splitting the tbd funds, but not against doing it when it makes sense.