Re-consider how we recognise third party supporters

[lehnberg]

This is a follow up action point resulting from the relevant discussion in the last Governance meeting.

Tl;dr

Submit your proposals for how Grin should relate to projects that support us, and this will be discussed in a future governance meeting.

Objectives

O1. To foster good co-operation and support of a healthy ecosystem of companies, projects, individuals in the Grin ecosystem.

O2. To recognise (serious and earnest) efforts by supporters for their help and support of core protocol development.

O3. To avoid any type of official "endorsement" of a third party project, and make it as clear as possible that Grin does not vouch for any particular solution.

Types of supporters

Present

Currently, we have the following two categories of supporters on Friends of Grin:

• Individuals, sending us monetary donations. Those who wish to be named need to send us $100 equivalent or more and let us know of this.
• Companies, sending us donations. Those who wish to be listed with their logo and a link through to an URL of their choosing, need to send us $1,000 equivalent or more and let us know of this.

Additional types

In addition to the above types, we also already have, or anticipate to have the following types of supporters:

• Companies that pledge to donate x% of their profits/income to the general dev fund, either indefinitely, or on a limited time basis.
• Companies or other organisations that pledge to hire staff to work on contributing to the Grin protocol development, full time or part time.
• Project developers and contributors, who form companies or other organisations to work on Grin protocol development, or on peripheral services that help further the protocol.

Questions

Q1. Does Friends of Grin need to evolve? More categories?

Q2. How do we ensure company listings are not interpreted as endorsements?

Q3. Is all support treated the same? Does it matter if you donate $600 or $60,000? What about ongoing support versus temporary support?

Q4. How do we avoid the system being gamed? I.e. a non-earnest business donating the minimum amount and receiving a billboard for life and lots of credit and exposure they can use to shill their users with.

Q5. If there's a review of who we accept, how is that review conducted? How will that process be fair?

Request for proposal

Please submit your proposal in this ticket on how this should work. As detailed as possible. Once we have some proposals worthy of discussion, a point will be added to the agenda of one of the governance meetings.

[sesam]

The list is already on a separate page https://grin-tech.org/friends so as the amount of friends grows, the google juice and recognizability decreases.

• The links should have rel="nofollow" added, so search robots understand the links aren't endorsements.
• For humans, a short sentence just before Companies should explain it. Maybe "Our warmest thanks to all listed!" and "Grin can not endorse any single company or entity." and maybe together in combination.

Is this friendship transferable if a company gets acquired? Is updating logos and texts allowed? A lifetime right?

[garyyu]

My 2 cents:

Q1. Does Friends of Grin need to evolve? More categories?

A1. Keep it simple, and stable. That's the way to avoid overwhelmed explain in the future.
And the incentive is always good and necessary :-)
So, I propose following categories solution, giving "Recent Donators" / "Complete List of Donators", plus ordered / un-ordered.

So the structure could be:

• Recent Donators (put the donators in recent one year)

  • Companies in Donation Amount Order
    • Here put those companies with over 10k USD donations, and in amount order (biggest donator is the top left one)
  • Companies in Donation Time Order
    • Here put those companies below 10k USD donations, and in donation time order (first come first display)

• Complete List of Donators (put the donators in whole history)

  • Companies in Donation Amount Order
    • Here put those companies with over 10k USD donations, and in amount order (biggest donator is the top left one)
  • Companies in Donation Time Order
    • Here put those companies below 10k USD donations, and in donation time order

For Individuals, we can use same structure.

Q2. How do we ensure company listings are not interpreted as endorsements?

A2. Add one sentence to claim it on the front of the listings.

Q3. Is all support treated the same? Does it matter if you donate $600 or $60,000? What about ongoing support versus temporary support?

A3. Covered in A1.

Q4. How do we avoid the system being gamed? I.e. a non-earnest business donating the minimum amount and receiving a billboard for life and lots of credit and exposure they can use to shill their users with.

A4. No idea. Isn't that a reasonable way? they indeed donated, so it's their right to claim they donated.

Q5. If there's a review of who we accept, how is that review conducted? How will that process be fair?

A5. To make it simple, perhaps we can just put one sentence at the very beginning of the page, to claim that Grin open source project welcome any donations and Grin devs don't and have no resource and ability to differentiate who we should accept and who we should reject, so all donations are accepted fairly. I'm not sure this make sense. Perhaps others can suggest better way:-)

[garyyu]

Updated for Q5:

Q5. If there's a review of who we accept, how is that review conducted? How will that process be fair?

Propose to make it as a general rule that each new listing must have a related PR (just like which we're doing now), then it's easy to track each listing record, and then the "review" is open and public for any new listing.

[0xmichalis]

Is this friendship transferable if a company gets acquired?

Probably not

Is updating logos and texts allowed? A lifetime right?

I think we should keep the logo and text untouched. The "lifetime right" part is addressed by @garyyu's proposal to separate recent from the complete list of donations.

[sesam]

@lehnberg maybe this is ready to be dealt with in a meeting and added to decisions log? Then anyone interested can PR the change.

[lehnberg]

Ahead of today's meeting, and based on the good proposals in this thread, I'd like to make the following proposal for how to handle this.

Proposal:

1. Track donation data, but not as part of Friends of Grin

1. As per a previous meeting decision, we need a funding transparency report, this should include showing money coming in, and money going out. We should not duplicate this effort, but instead rely on this data for Friends of Grin.

2. Add new category in Friends: Hall of Fame

2.1 Motivation

1. The hall of fame is future-proof, i.e. even with 1000 members inducted, it still works.
2. It encourages continuous donations based on the activity of others participants.
3. It raises the bar for doing a "hit & run" donation, and the listing will not be permanent and would move down in ranks as donations from other sources come in.
4. It allows for easy comparison between projects by relying on actual USD equivalent donated, not "% of profits" or "% of revenues" pledged, or some other fuzzy terminology.

2.2 Description

1. Top position of Friends of Grin page.
2. Leaderboard, similar to a "Hi-score".
3. For both individuals and companies alike.
4. Requirement for admission into hall of fame: The cumulative value of donations exceeding $25,000 or crypto equivalent (at the time of donation).
5. The hall of fame list contains the following columns:
   • Logo
   • Name (URL)
   • Optional "Supporter of Grin because" Message
   • Sorted by: Cumulative value of donations (in USD, at time of donation)
   • Number of donations made
   • Last donation date
6. The top 10 entrants are displayed on Friends.
7. If there are more than 10 entrants, all other members are on 11th place, and are listed separately (click through to a separate page, or a click-to-expand section).
8. Upon presenting us with proof, any individual or organisation can be inducted into Hall of Fame, which includes:
   • Announcement on Forum
   • Welcome tweet from @grincouncil
   • Image
   • Optional text message (we reserve the right to arbitrarily edit it for appropriateness)
   • Front page coverage on grin-tech.org for the top 3 positions in the Hall of Fame

2.3 Example of Hall of Fame table:

#	Avatar	Name	Supporter of Grin because	$ donated	Times donated	Last donation date
1		@garyyu	Grin is good	$38,794	2	Jan 11 2019
2		Acme Corp.	We are fans of the emission rate	$35,689	15	Feb 12 2019
3		Simon B.	-	$32,175	4	Nov 2017
4		@Kargakis	Better money. ツ	$26,891	89	Feb 01 2019
5		lehnberg	I want you to subscribe to my weekly newsletter.	$25,001	2	Jan 15 2019
6
7
8
9
10

3. Clarify that no listing on the page are endorsements

1. Neither Hall of Fame, or other Friends of Grin categories should be seen as endorsements and should be clearly stated in a disclaimer at the very top of the page.

4. Hold off on promoting non-monetary contributions

1. Currently, there is no overwhelming list of examples of companies that employ protocol developers or who offer other services.
2. On the basis of keeping things simple, it's proposed we only worry about this once we have a couple of clear examples to consider.

5. Optional: Remove logos in companies section

1. We could also consider removing logos in the companies section in favour of only displaying logos in hall of fame to add further cachet to this category.
2. Companies would still get clickthrough URLs but are listed in the same way as individuals are.
3. This makes the section more long term sustainable, still keeping the minimum donation amount of $1,000 intact.
4. While we remove imagery from companies section, the original promise, that they "would be listed on Friends of Grin" remains.

[tromp]

What's the point of "Having made at least two donations" ?

[0xb100d]

I think a dynamic table where you can sort by first donation date, number of consecutive donations, total amount, and the other factors like pays developers, or % of profit, (even whether the org contributes to core network functionality vs more superficial involvement), etc would be simple and super effective.

That way people can "game" the list (which is good if it means people creatively sending the team money) to be at the top based on a given attribute. For example, TMGOX gets to be the top of the list for donating 100% of profits, and also near the top for number of consecutive donations, and somewhere near the top for age of earliest contributions, but will have to slowly work its way up to catch up to largest total donation (fingers crossed).

[tromp]

It seems undesirable to promote number of consecutive donations since splitting up one donation in thousands of tiny ones is rather wasteful?!

[0xmichalis]

What's the point of "Having made at least two donations" ?

I think @lehnberg mentioned the case of drive-by one-off donations ending up in the Hall of Fame. Maybe we could also use time to make it more foolproof if we are after ensuring Hall-of-Famers donations are recurring?

[tromp]

What would make one-off donations less worthy of entry in the Hall of Fame?

[lehnberg]

@tromp @Kargakis I've edited the proposal to remove the requirement of "minimum 2 donations" as it can be easily gamed and serves no real purpose therefore. Simpler is better.

@0xb100d part of the objective of the hall of fame was to find a baseline common denominator that would allow us to compare donors and donations "like-for-like" without too much subjectivity. I settled on USD donated as hard to manipulate, easily comparable, and easy to understand. In the hope it could also be considered "fair" therefore. A metric such as % of profit donated would be easy to manipulate and highly subjective.

[garyyu]

Regarding

5.Optional: Remove logos in companies section

We could be questioned by the current donators why it's able to show their logo before and removing logo now, without any discussion and communication with them.

To avoid this complexity, I prefer to hold this item and just show all logos, since we only show 10 companies on the 1st page and all remaining are in the 11th location (as a "more" item), and we already have the amount transparency.

[garyyu]

thanks for @nijynot, a PoC of this Friends page is ready here: https://nijynot.github.io/site/friends
(note: Show more seems only reveal 2 more names at a time, but it will increase it to e.g. 10 or something when it's launched)

It looks nice!

So, I would change my mind about the "Companies" and "Individuals" part: How about just keep it as before and no touch in these parts? to give small step of improvement and avoid any possible uncomfortable (from those generous old donators).

[lehnberg]

Not sure how this got closed. But leaderboard was just one of potential suggestions