Request For Funding, @lehnberg

Governance
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Request For Funding, @lehnberg

Tl;dr

This is a request for funding to support Grin doing operations related contributions. To be paid $1,500/month quarterly.

With a full year’s worth of funds ($18k) earmarked for this purpose, and a governance decision made every quarter re-affirming funding based on performance.

To be added to the agenda for the next Governance meeting.

Motivation

Beyond work on the main grin (node/wallet/miner) repositories, work on the admin side of the project has evolved over the past year. The /grin-pm repo is now a place where we track general project management issues, meeting notes, event presentations, financial data, and more.

I think this work adds value and is important for the project’s health, for it’s good governance, and for progress to be made faster.

Grin would get reliable and consistent support for the non-development related tasks, that would help achieve its potential quicker.

Specific tasks in-scope

Funding request

$1,500/month

Role

  • Part-time
  • Ring-fenced around admin tasks

Misc. details

  • Funds on a quarterly basis as everybody else.
  • Each quarter, a decision is made whether to extend my funding based on past performance.
  • Full year’s worth of payments ($18k) would be earmarked for this purpose in advance.

About me

I’ve been working in gaming for the past 12 years, 8 of those in product management and the 4 years before that doing business development, marketing, and project management.

As 1/3rd of vault713, I’m behind grinbox, an open grin transaction protocol, and wallet713 an easy to use open source wallet for Grin that implements grinbox.

In Grin, one of my early contribution was researching foundations, and have since been doing contributions as listed above, often related to the /site and /grin-pm repos or general governance. My ambition is to be making more technical contributions over time.

Next steps

The intention is to raise this as a discussion point in the next Governance meeting and ask the community for its support.

Edit April 9: Minor wording clarifications based on Gary’s feedback below.

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I think I speak for the vast majority in saying that this is well deserved. Most would additionally support travel expenses when representing the project outside Europe.

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Thank you.

Most would additionally support travel expenses when representing the project outside Europe.

I thought about this too. Ultimately I opted against proposing it as I felt it might disincentivize event and conference organisers to cover these expenses.

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With GRIN’s price in the dumpster, it’ll be hard for the community to raise any money for anything TBH. When the coin is flying high, raising money is easy cuz everyone’s rich. When the coin’s price is a straight line down from launch, everyone’s poor and won’t have any money to donate.

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@lehnberg You’re definitely well deserved! and the $1,500/month is quite fair or even not as much to sponsor a well qualified contributor like you. I believe most of community members love your contribution and glad to fund you for a sustainable long-term contribution! :sunny:

But perhaps we can discuss to update some keywords on your above “Request For Funding”.

I have to say that I never heard any operation role or admin role in Bitcoin community. Also I’m a little bit dislike such kind of keywords here for Grin open community. And the following sentence also misleads the “open” ideal:

more structured and permanent admin

As I said I love your current excellent contributions on Grin, I DO welcome your work on those specific tasks in-scope. But I would propose to keep us alerting for any possible potential leading / hint on centralization. I would prefer to use more open and more decentralized hints here, such as:

  1. Welcome any contributors to join us to contribute these tasks, in any possible innovated way.
  2. It’s doesn’t mean a closed/occupied role in Grin community and which will never happen.
  3. Grin newsletter / updates of PoW newsletter comes from Grin community and not controlled by any role or any person, it’s open. Yes?
  4. The clarification on any other possible concerns. Anything else?

In short, I would propose to replace all those operations / admins with just one word: contribute / help / helper.

And back to the funding amount $1,500/month. This is the 1st time for Grin community to fund a part-time, so we will set up a model for any possible future part-time funding. I know you have some reasonable calculation on that, but perhaps you missed one point: the “standard” YeastUnit :slight_smile:

$1,500/month is 0.15 Yeastplume Unit, or 0.75 working day per week.

I would propose to use more simple unit other than the fraction, say the minimum funding unit is 1 working day per week, or $2,000/month according to Yeastplume Unit.

It’s a little bit over your original request, but perhaps you deserve to contribute a little bit more time to Grin :sunny:

For short, I propose to fund you with the minimum unit, i.e. $2,000/month, instead of your request $1,500/month.

Any less than 1 working day per-week part-time contributions should not become a funding request in the future.

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Hi @gary, thank you for your support and feedback.

Indeed, it was not meant to monopolise these tasks or claim them as my own. I wanted to define explicitly what I would be working on, should my request be approved. The proof of work updates have been open and crowd-sourced since they started, but the contributions so far have been coming mainly from myself.

I’ve clarified the post based on your suggestion, I agree it could have been worded better.

Regarding funding amount, you’re again correct in that I didn’t base my request on the standard Yeastplume unit. Whether an adjustment should be made or not I will leave to the meeting to decide.

Others: FYI this topic is scheduled to be discussed in today’s governance meeting.

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I watched the work from @lehnberg for a while now and I’m very happy that he can continue with doing so after the approval yesterday in governance meeting.

Unfortunately I had to sit on my hands, to not to mention that I do not agree with the amount of contribution for the organizational work.

From my point of view on the project Grin, there is a huge contribution (in value) in technical skills.

But the organizational direction Daniel rolled out untill now is remarkable, and highly needed in a tsunami of information about blockchain related projects. The translation from technical inputs to a user friendly environment and consumable for everyone, is highly needed. And Daniel is the right guy for the work that has to be done.

Only, in my opinion the $1,500/month quarterly, does not weight up against the work he does and has to do in the future.

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@gary can we bring this back as a topic for next meeting?

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@nass thanks for your support and indeed @lehnberg did the job remarkable :sunny:

And please feel free to join next governance meeting (23th Apr. 15:00 UTC in Gitter main lobby), and submit any reasonable topic to discuss with the community, it’s quite open. Just please remember to update the meeting related github issue here: Issues · mimblewimble/grin-pm · GitHub)

I / We agreed with that $1,500/month on yesterday’s meeting for two main reasons:

  1. @lehnberg would like to insist his original request amount (instead my proposed one which is a little bit higher).
  2. Grin General Fund pool is not so rich (or even quite poor) at this moment, we just have 3 full-time developers to be funded, it’s not bad to save some fund if @lehnberg is already happy on that amount :blush:

But if you have more reasons or you can help to find more donations for that, please feel free to let us know, sincerely.

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This request was approved in the last governance meeting.

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Aside from Igno’s writing of the original code, I really don’t think anyone has pushed the Grin project further than @lehnberg. He seems to proceed in a manner that’s patient, deliberate, unassuming, and methodically productive.
I like those qualities. This is well deserved.

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We’ve launched a new campaign to support the funding and growth of the GRIN cryptocurrency. We are impressed with the goals of your cryptocurrency and given that GRIN did not raise VC funding, has no block rewards going towards development and did not do an ICO – we think our innovative solution can help you guys hit your milestones. It would be great if you could share this around your social media!

Campaign link: https://cryptounlocked.wetrust.io/will-grin-s-estimated-hashrate-surpass-2-5-million-gps-ar29-anytime-before-july-1-2019-ba1lH1zLla

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Therefor Grin Amsterdam managed to donate 0.8 Bitcoin to the development fund a few months ago after a successful first event! www.twitter.com/grinamsterdam

Thank you for your reply(Y)

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