Hi @KamuelBob, thank you for the question and suggestion. If you have ideas, please share them!
Was the initiative raised by the community?
I wrote this proposal to give the community pool funds back to the community, as the pool approaches 1M tokens. Specifically I believe we should give it to developers who have been working very hard to build tools and products that help grow the network.
I asked the entire community to review this proposal, collected feedback, and incorporated their ideas. I proposed a Community Awards Board (CAB) made up of community members and Akash core team members to manage the fund with total transparency.
Also, I asked the company for review and incorporated feedback from the team. One person requested that it be a multi-sig account with added security and transparency rather than an account managed by one person or entity. One person suggested that the proposal should start small, and so the proposal 9 would spend just over 10% of the pool. Another person suggested rather than this be “my” proposal we should simply share it to the community and see if everyone embraces the idea and let the community own it and submit it.
After a week of public comment and feedback, one of the most well known and respected community leaders asked to submit the proposal.
Since submitting the proposal, the idea to use a more decentralized multi-sig account owned and operated by more people was suggested by multiple people on Twitter and here in the forum and is now being incorporated into a new proposal.
If you are on the board, should you be allowed to vote to award to yourself?
It seems ethical to me that someone who applies for an award should not be signing a transaction awarding themself or their business partner funds, and they should either resign from the board or abstain from the vote.
How many developers do we expect to participate?
Let’s think about how we can scale a developer program, and how much it will cost. Can we interview every developer before we give them even $100 to get started? (A: No) If you look at the numbers in the proposal, it scales 10x at each of the four tiers from $100 to $1000 to $10,000 to $100,000. The first phase of the developer program is to deploy $100 to a very large number of developers, a number I estimate around 1,000 developers based on the traffic we see on the Community and Discord Chat. Only in later phases are we going to fund larger amounts. This ensures that the developers that receive large awards of $10k or $100k have been around for some time and already received smaller awards for $100 or $1,000, building trust one step at a time. This also means that this proposal is the first of a few proposals to continue funding this program. We started with just 10% of the funds, to see it get started and work the kinks out. Then we can come back and ask for more money once the first amount is spent appropriately and professionally. Prop 9 would fund Phase 1 and part of Phase 2.
- Phase 1: $100,000: $100 for up to 1,000 deployments
- Phase 2: $200,000: $100 for 1,000 deployments AND $1,000 for up to 100 proposals
- Phase 3: $300,000: Same as Phase 2 AND $10,000 for up to 10 projects in progress
- Phase 4: $400,000: Same as Phase 3 AND $100,000 for 1 applications
- Phase (n): $100,000 x (n): Same as Phase 3 AND $100,000 for up to (n-3) applications
Why can’t the treasury pay for this program?
The treasury is used to fund developers today, paying out awards for 5 different coding challenges. This is part of my job at Akash, and so I’ve made about 80 transactions to developers. In May, I interviewed a new developer almost every day and sent them AKT. Why? Paul Graham said do things that don’t scale. Seven (7) developers were the winners of the Solana hackathon. Thirty (30) developers applied for the Sovryn Gitcoin challenges. We have 13 submissions for the Sovrynthon Gitcoin challenges, and the winners will be announced on August 2nd. In June and July, thirty-seven (37) developers received amount of 30 AKT through the current funding process.
Open Nominations
Note that if anyone wants to be involved in the board, it’s as easy as posting a nomination for everyone to see. In the proposal I asked for nominations via email, and I propose we stick to full transparency and nominate people on the forum. I have been following robert’s rules of order. Yes, you can nominate yourself, that’s called volunteering. I asked who should be on the board and two names came up in private discussions: @baktun14 well-known for Akashlytics.com and the Desktop Deploy and @Chalabi well-known for ChandraStation.com and Moon View.
I nominate @Chalabi and @baktun14 for the Community Awards Board.
I’d like to thank the following people for contributing ideas and feedback on this proposal.
@neo @martin @amrosa @gosuri @abozanich @boz_m @tombeynon @baktun14 @neil @Michael_Akash @JasdeepSingh @jack and @Chalabi
edit: For better discourse, I’ve edited this post to redact the names of the people who suggested the ideas they contributed and just refer to them as “one person”.