Awards

[xaur]

PREVIEW:

https://github.com/decredcommunity/proposals/blob/awards/drafts/awards.md

[xaur]

Discussions:

• 2020-08-08: Forward Thinking Friday - 7 Aug 2020
• 2020-08-25: draft first published in #proposals

[xaur]

Copying my notes below to collect everything in this PR.

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For all such proposals I always recommend to start small, get some results and come back for the bigger second iteration.

Deciding award amounts is one of the biggest challenges here. If it is too large it will turn off stakeholders. If it is too small, eligible people might not bother to receive them. I would expect that some of the eligible recipients will treat Decred as a shitcoin not worth their time. Some might ignore the award because they have agreements to not help altcoins.

I agree pricing awards in DCR is a good idea, esp. if it's a nice rounded amount. Not sure about 1K DCR, I would start with ~300 DCR.

One idea here is to issue awards of different sizes proportional to the positive impact on Decred. Judging this will require help from experts, e.g. giving the devs a set of 4 BIPs and asking them to distribute 100% across them, and then using those percentages to distribute awards (with rounding to a nice number ofc).

Second challenge is choosing which BIPs to award. The problem is, a lot of things helped Decred to become a reality, and hence there's a lot of possible things and people to award. To address this, this prop can be a multi-round intiative. First proposal will correspond to the first round. Each round has a limit of N items to award, because the resources to process the nominations are limited.

Some items might not have an associated BIP. It may make sense to reformulate the proposal in terms of "contributions" to cryptocurrency space rather than BIPs, to include things like the CSPP paper.

One input to consider for choosing the items is what Decred features are in the spotlight right now. For example, it would amplify our media wave if the CSPP award is executed around the same time as we release v1.6 (which will bring CSPP to the GUI). A hypothetical award for some atomic swap paper would make sense in connection with a major milestone in dcrdex development. And so on.

I recommend to plan for your management/coordination overhead and state if you get paid for it. Personally I'm ok with paying for that that, but more importantly, all time/energy resources must be planned for in a good proposal.

Since the prop depends on the devs participating in it, you'd need to secure their commitment (the amount of hours they're willing to spend on it) and add it to the prop and budget (if necessary).

Plan for the case that some eligible people will not claim the award, e.g. where will the money go and when (or simply stay in the Treasury).

I would try to execute the "The topics to focus" bullets (Reason/Barriers/Limitations) in a neutral fashion so that it's negative to Bitcoin. I would also add a bullet covering the current breadth of adoption in the intended network. We shouldn't pick only items that didn't get adopted elsewhere.

Will our writers/media team be willing to do the interviews/write-ups for no cost?

I would include any associated costs.

Recipients may reject our reward or decline being interviewed. --> We could still spin this in a good light

Agreed. I would design the flow around the fact that even if the person rejects the reward now, he may reconsider later convinced by Decred's non-stop progress. Imo our doors should stay open. Of course if the person rejects now the reward could go to the next candidate, but if this program gets any continuation it should be possible to claim the missed/rejected reward in the future rounds.

What form the reward should take?

Sending physical objects will be pita and huge security risk of stolen funds. And it will be a step back from the digital nature of ccs. Just sending to a DCR address should be enough.

To make it feel a bit special, how about ordering an exclusive graphic from our design team for each payment? It could be themed based on the specific contribution. For example, if we ask saender to give an artistic spin on "HD wallets" he might output some abstract art inspired by that concept. (See Decred Journal covers for his past work).

If this is successful, should it continue

Definitely continue. There are potentially a lot of contributors to the crypto space to reward.

COULD THE MEDIA PUBLICITY BACKFIRE?

It can always backfire. The media backfires on Decred since the very launch, when CoinTelegraph posted a bunch of FUD quotes from "experts" (ok Vitalik was an expert, but the others? wtf). But they will have less grounds if executed decently.

Because this proposal has something to do with dev, attracting talent and you are not an unknown member, I think this prop's chances are good. Even the discussion is interesting.

[xaur]

Copying my chat message, I think the main focus of this award/"thank you for your contributions" idea should be to give back, and any recruiting or PR should be treated as a nice-to-have byproduct.

Also, to minimize the perceived bias that people were paid to promote Decred (in case they find it interesting themselves), we can state it clearly that "the award is issued as a thank you and the recipient does not owe anything to Decred".