I find it always quite dangerous to try to interpret others or put words in their mouth.
The original message was:
Just my interpretation, but the donor expresses that a) the donation is about the technology and protocol, b) “We saw your work and your ethics towards the project”, “You keep working as you did in the past.”. Meaning that the donor liked the way the project was managed until then, there was no request to change direction
My interpretation is that the donor was excited and focused on the technology. Apparently he agreed with the working ethos of that time and the ‘technocratic’ way of governance. Having a community council that funds groundskeepers, funds ecosystem projects and has small bounties for activities, is extending the spending beyond the technology and protocol level although with the objective of the overall well-being of the project. I do think however, we should not stretch to far away from what those donors intended the money to be used for, technological development. Hence, we only use some small part of the fund for administrative tasks, promotions and community activities…
I agree this would most certainly raise some attention and some eyebrows. I am not certain though that ‘wowing’ developers’ with our funds in the form of bounties is the right way. It is not secret that Grin has extensive funds that are available for any worthy funding request, so money has never been a real bottleneck. as far as I can judge. The right people are the bottleneck. Hence I think the most important thing is that we have a technologically interesting environment, with interesting people and interesting ideas that those ‘right people’ would like to participate in and contribute to. Having developers that care about a good pay is fine, but if they are not with their heart in it at al, they will most likely disappear as quickly as they came to the project.
In my opinion Grin has always been Decentralized, with technocratic/objective councils that listen to reason for any funding request.
Is that true decentralization…? I think it is the best kind of decentralization you can get while at the same time making sure spending is sensible. Lets say you would allow people to vote using any Telegram account, sure it would be more decentralized, but it most certainly would not lead to better decisions making. Probably many owners of Grin do not care about the long term goals of the project. A majority could easily vote to spend funds on FOMO functionalities and would vote to change the emission schedule to enrich themselves. For the same reason governments have representatives and expert who check proposals before changing policies or spending funds. Grin is no different.
The above is purely my own view and speculative. My contributions to the project have been time and knowledge and only some small funds.
I like your idea of starting some bounties and brainstorming again about bounties and functionalities we would like to have, as we have done in the past:
We can create some bounties to kick this off, see it here is interest. My expectation is that there is only a few people to take on such bounty projects, so a few bounties should be enough to get things going. Anyone is free to make suggestions for a bounty or request for a bounties themselves .