Given that there is a lot of uncertainty about the current treasury proposals and spending process, I started to look for existing similar programs and found Politeia by Decred. I think it’s never wrong to learn from existing solutions and want to encourage people to share similar existing projects or solutions here (e.g. gitcoin) as well as ideas to improve the treasury spending process based on these solutions.

Politeia is running for one and half years (current numbers: discussion 2, approved 36, rejected 23, abandoned 14).

• Documentation: https://docs.decred.org/governance/politeia/overview/
• Main interface: https://proposals.decred.org/

Rough ideas to improve the Treasury Spending Process based on Politeia:

• Move the Discussion from Riot to polkassembly or similar interfaces, to make it more structured
• Run a poll + discussion before the council actually decides about a spending proposal. This way everyone can share her or his opinion, concerns, etc. and the council can make better decisions. MakerDAO has a similar feature as part of the governance dashboard (see my suggestions to integrate it here: https://kusama.polkassembly.io/post/31)
• Once the council agrees to fund a project, the budget is locked on-chain for this project.
• A separate committee (of evaluators probably mostly technical people, could be the Technical Committee at the beginning) decides about issuing the payments based on milestones. This step is not yet decentralized for Degree, but simply handled by the Decred Holdings Group at this stage (similar to Web3).
• Ideally the council agrees officially (maybe on-chain) to follow a certain process. Even if it’s not enforceable via smart contracts/oracles, it’s easier to judge council members if they don’t follow these rules (and no longer vote for them, etc.). Also people applying for treasury funding would know what to expect this way.

Again these are just quick initial ideas and open for discussion.