Reform of application process to CC Fund

Governance
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Reform of funding proposals to the Grin CC Fund.

We would like to reform the Grin CC Fund so that it is a community driven fund, and therefore all submissions put to the fund must go through a community clearing process first.

By this we mean that work submitted to the fund must be first put to the community in order to carry out the work for free and If no one is capable of carrying out the work, the community must outsource the work in the cheapest possible region in the world. If the the job has not been completed because the community is not capable of carrying out the work or outsourcing is not a viable option, only then is the application to be assessed by the council.

The aim of this proposal is to save as much resources for the development of Grin.

We also propose that a percentage of the money saved by the community is used to buy and hold Grin in reserve for the future development of Grin and its ecosystem.

The submission process should proceed in the following stages:

  1. Application for funding and job details are submitted to the Grin community clearing section.

  2. Community members must put themselves forward to carry out the work. Members must accept the job within a specified amount of time.

  3. If no community member is willing or capable of carrying out the work, the community must then proceed to find suitable remote workers from India, Kenya,… to carry out the work within a specified time frame.

3.a. If a suitable remote worker is found, the community must then submit the proposal to the CC for accepting or rejection of terms and payment amount.

3.b. If terms and payment proposal are accepted, the original application will be rejected.

4.If the community is not capable of carrying out the work and no suitable remote worker is found, then the community will pass the application for funding to the CC Fund for assessment.

The main aim of this proposal is to save as much resources as possible so that they may be used for the present and future development of Grin and its ecosystem. Resources are best used on funding core developers to work full time on Grin. Ground workers carrying out spell checks and writing news letters should not be something that is carried out by community members for payment.

The founder/s of Grin gave us something and asked for nothing. I think it is only our duty to at least ground keep and also ask for nothing.

I will be willing to work at least 10 hrs per week on grounds keeping.

Spell check on this document will be carried out later this evening. :joy::joy::joy:

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There is no we unless you are referring to me|I|myself in the first person perspective. Do not claim your words to be anyone else but your own. Everyone here can speak for themselves

The main limiting resource for grin is currently good human capital, not money. Quality is preferred over quantity.

Firstly, stop with the we nonsence, write it in the first person, your stating your opinion, your proposal. Give others the time to voice their own opinion.
Secondly, this topic was discussed and closed. Do not try to again reopen it by sneaking it in another topic, stay on this topic or it will be closed.

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You accuse me of :

Close the thread without allowing me a reply and now mock and claim that I am saying that I speak for others.

I never opened a discussion about reform of the funding process. Yes, I mentioned my displeasure at the abuse that I believe is going on in another thread that has nothing to do with this thread. Recommending how funds saved are used is not an attempt to sneak anything. Its is only a demonstration of how resources that are being wasted can be used for the long term benefit of Grin.

I can write and speak of myself how I want. Deviating from my argument and raising irrelevant topics adds nothing the the thread, so please stick to the to pic discussed in the proposal.

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I feel no need for reform. The current process seems adequate to me.

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Your feelings are not my concern. Saying that it is adequate is not a logical critique of my proposal.

Submit a logically argued attack on my proposal for a response.

For instance:

• Why you think the community carrying out ground work for free is a bad idea.

• or you may think spending €1500 on spell checking and a newsletter is a good use of CC donated funds. Explain why?

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I really don’t have the energy to keep up with this. I regret engaging in the first place. But to honor your request for a logical formulation of my disagreement with your proposal, I’ll say this:

Your proposal assumes CC commissions work to the community. Your proposal says if “XYZ conditions cant be met, then CC should find contractors in XYZ countries to do the job.” Thats fundamentally not how this works, because there is no central planning committee deciding what work needs to be done.

How it actually works, is community members propose projects they would like to work on, and ask for funding. Those proposals are weighed in on by the community (in forum posts) and if community sentiment is there, CC tends to follow up with funding. Doing otherwise would require some central planning committee, which is antithetical to decentralized development, and therefore Im in favor of the status quo and not in favor of your proposal.

Anyways… You put forth a proposal, and I am a member of the community weighing in with my opinion (as you claim to want). Feel free to disparage me for speaking out against your proposal, but I don’t have the energy to debate you further.

In all seriousness, don’t forget you can always start your own development fund with your own mission statement and your own funding criteria :wink:

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I agree with @Anynomous that you use “we” when you really should’ve used “I”. It’s deceptive.

I don’t agree with this proposal. However, it does make me question things a bit. Considering our community shrinked quite a bit, do we really need this many groundskeepers? Before you all start yelling at me, I’d like to clarify that I’m not questioning their work. It’s been transparent and they deliver on it. I’m merely thinking about the metrics. We didn’t increase the community nor do I believe it brought new developers. Which makes me think if we should try a more organic approach to community building. If someone writes a blog post, we have something, otherwise we don’t. If nobody writes anything, that’s fine too. This means that at the moment, we simply don’t have people investing their energy in this. I guess my question is, should we try something new instead?

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@oryhp We discussed this a few times between CC members. At that time we came to the joined conclusion that as long as the total budget for groundkeepers did not increase, we were fine with more or less groundkeepers. But everything is open for debate.

We can always try new things. I hoped the community would have grown and subteams would have formed, unfortunately that did not happen. IMO though the part of the proposed solution of hiring low cost oversee workers who do not know the project will not be beneficial to the project.

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What do you mean? if you mean organic growth I also agree with you. I was very skeptical from the beginning with the idea of “going out looking for developers or collaborators”, but I think it was worth a try. In the case of the role of groundkeeper as such, I still maintain that it is a necessary role to have, it is not an easy task to keep up with everything even if it is “little” for now.

To grow the community I think we should start with in person meetings, let’s have a beer or a coffee. I have already met with some of the users here and I plan to meet with a few more in the remainder of the year. I also tried to introduce Grin everywhere, specially on local meetups.

I would like people to stop expecting groundkeepers to grow the community. As far as bringing in more developers/projects/collaborators, let’s face it, right now we can’t compete with any projects. There are too many projects burning too much money on literally anything. There are projects that have crazy millions of dollars per quarter of a year just to spend on their respective communities.

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I definitely agree here.

Even though I won’t be joining these (I’m still unsure if I want to attach a face to my avatar), I think these are a great idea. Community bonding and knowledge sharing is key to organic increase of new users.

I agree, it’s definitely not easy. At the same time, I’ve seen much bigger communities doing better than Grin by not having any paid groundskeeping. A very simple example of this is ETC. It doesn’t matter if people think it’s a shitcoin or whatnot, there’s people that are passionate about it that actively write and share their thoughts on the project. I’ve been there since the early days and there was never any paid groundskeeping. Some people got paid eventually by a few investors, but ETC itself never paid them. It was all achieved organically by starting with a few trusted individuals that were willing to put in their time. Eventually, we’ll need the groundskeeping to be done organically as well because the money will run out. How do we transition from a paid role to something that will have to be unpaid eventually? To be clear, I’m not trying to suggest what should be done. I don’t know what the right answer is. But I do have a feeling that out of all the communities I’ve seen, if there’s one that wouldn’t need groundskeeping, it’s Grin. And it’s because the community is very small and there isn’t a plethora of events to report on right now.

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Just because you agree, does not mean you are both right. Accusing me of being deceptive is nothing more than a cheap ad hominem attack.

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On what grounds did you allocate a budget for a grounds keeper ?

The anonymous donor has cleary left guidelines that the so called CC has decided to ignore. Why?

I will flesh out his guidelines and submit them to the forum to be applied to funding proposals submitted to the so called CC. I am actually surprised that his guidelines have not been formalised and applied. Using their guidelines I think you can clearly see how you and other CC members have been profligate with the donated funds.

What is very clear is that the core team and their conservative use of the first donation was the reason for the second donation. Not this so called CC and its liberal use of the funds.

Why not? If they are hired on a regular basis they will get to know the project and they will also be local ambassadors for Grin.

Also, you are overseas to me, just as I am overseas to an American. Do you care to expand on what you meant to say?

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I think you are blending your own opinion when interpreting these words. To me it looks like the most important part was that the donations were meant to enable those involved in the project to function freely without financial worries.

Again, you are projecting your opinion and sentiment. I think you have the misconception that decisions were and are made by the CC. The CC members are just representatives, all funding requests were made publicly and discussed on the forum, in Community Council meetings on Keybase where the community supported these funding requests. Based on the input we get from the community, the CC makes decisions. In other words, if there is any problem with any individual funding request, those concerns should be raised on those forum topics and in those meetings on Keybase. Since those concerns were not raised, we can assume that the community does not have them or at least does not find them important enough to raise them.

Now the question of how many, and how hours of ground-keeper work we need, that is something we can actually discuss. I also pondered sometimes if a single part time ground-keeper would not be enough to do the core tasks that are needed.

With cheap oversee labor, I refer to hiring people based on a cheap labor location (e.g. India) opposed to their knowledge of the project. As far as I understood that is what you were proposing. If you are lucky these can be combined. There could be community members in low income countries that are willing to take on tasks for a small fee. However, going for the smallest fee is not the most important objective in my opinion, quality is most important.

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How does €1400 a month for a newsletter (for 3 months I believe) contribute to the development of the technology and protocol?

Their instructions are very clear. I think it is you who is being deceptive with your interpretation.

Again, another attempt at deception. The instruction are very clear.

Nothing wrong with cheap labour. Most of the things I wear and the technology I use is made with cheap labour. Also:

I think we can find some very good cheap labour.

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I suggest we move past these attacks. If you approached this a bit differently, the discussion here would’ve been on a different level.

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That’s true for most things but not for blockchain development because a bug in this space can destroy the project. It’s true that even the best developers write bugs but they write them less frequently so we should try to minimize them. So i agree that in this case quality is very important.

Like @Anynomous has said, each proposal is discussed here and on keybase, if it bothers you that much then please state that, in a polite way, when proposal is made. Nobody is always right about these things, nobody even knows whether those roles should be paid or not. Just remember that when someone states his opinion in an impolite way people mostly just ignore it (after all people don’t want to waste their time debating with that person).

Also everyone should remember that most people here (also members of CC) devote a lot of their free time to try and improve grin, so let’s try to be friendly with each other.

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Yes, I agree, quality is very important. But:

• I am not making an argument for hiring Grin core developers. Although I think it would be possible to find suitable candidates.
• “Blockchain” has a handful of experts (Cypherpunks) and the rest are amateurs.
• India, Kenya,…also have experts in cryptography, distributed systems,…

https://www.isical.ac.in/~crg/members.htm/

• Labour is cheaper in 3rd world countries because of a surplus of man power.

What makes you think the quality will be worse because the cost per unit of labour is cheaper?

Why do you think that a PHD student in cryptography from India with a coding background would not be a benefit to the Grin community, but at the same time think nothing of spending €1400 a month for a news letter?

You are you more concerned about my manners instead of being concerned about misuse of development funds. Misuse that may jeopardise any more development grants from the donor.

Some important questions to think about than my manners:

• If we misuse funds this time, will they not contacts us again?
• Are we being judged right now ?

You may not like my manners, but can you make a valid argument against my case without reverting to group solidarity?

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I agree that people in 3rd world countries can be extremely good programmers, i had a feeling that you didn’t care about developer’s skill. Based on your answer i guess we agree on that. About the newsletter payment → honestly I’ve decided not to pay attention to the parts which are not “development” related because i don’t have time. I mentioned manners because that’s how people react and if you want to achieve something you need to act in a certain way.

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I think you are confused. This thread is to reform the application process. Saying :

To avoid answering question related to this thread makes no sense.

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The topic is not about specific proposal. Here are my issues with the proposal:

  1. how does the council hold bigger amounts of grin safely? Afaik you can’t do n of m multisig
  2. CC members have been given the voting power by the community, so i don’t see the point in thinking they’re a separate entity
  3. You can achieve similar things today, get a better candidate in advance and let him make a proposal. The whole process of finding another suitable candidate reduces incentives for someone to make a proposal.
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