#58 Improve the Treasury Spending Process
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.
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one of the oldest such systems in the crypto space is the Dash budget system: https://www.dashcentral.org/budget
dash, who has had a financing program for a long time, has already created a fund to help startups get not only work done, but also receive some equity when financing a large amount. This change was connected precisely with the problems that I wrote above, when a startup does work, receives benefits from the network/Kusama and then focuses on its own interests without supporting/putting a low priority on the paid solution
I'd like to reopen this discussion. I try to separate the discussion into two big columns to organise my head better:
- Onchain processes
- Offchain processes
Regarding the first one, I have a good feeling about Emiel's proposal on bounties, that similar to an open tender, these should work as wishes from the Community to be executed by a proposer and monitored by a curator. I would like to see this happening sooner rather than later: there are many ideas out there that could use this spending mechanism to get developed. As a reminder, you can find the original discussion here: https://github.com/paritytech/substrate/issues/5713 and a first implementation here: https://github.com/paritytech/substrate/pull/5715
This idea would allow Kusama to have three usable means for funding its community:
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Tipping: used for work already done, easy to handle, proposed by any member.
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Bounties: similar to an open tender, these should work as wishes from the Community to be executed by a proposer and monitored by a curator, after working with the Treasury Committee.
-
Treasury Proposals: Any community member comes up with a proposal to spend the treasury funds. This can be accepted in full or rejected by the Council.
With regards to offchain processes (your point on moving the discussion from riot to other channels to make it structured mainly) I have been wondering for a while if a new collective could help with this. Originally, I envisioned a The Treasury Committee to become an advisory body focusing its efforts on:
- Proposing and monitoring a general allocation of resources (or Treasury Budget) approved by the council, and adapting future proposals to align with the general allocation stipulated.
- Working together with the proposer to fulfil the criteria and content expectations, guiding the proposer through the process of preparing the submission for Council consideration, kicking off the proper discussion channels and reviewing submission requisites.
- Topping up bounties with external funds, in case the approved bounty amounts are not sufficient for the work done. This can be done by Report_Awesome or any other extrinsic for this purpose to the bounty address (this would be more of an onchain thing, but trying to list the Committee's functions)
- Approving payment of tips proposed by any member of the community. The tipping approval logic will be understood as broadly as tipping someone for doing something that is beneficial to the Network, even as small as a tweet, if the consequences of it are considered beneficial.
The goal is to go from this process:
- Pre-Proposal Stage - Planning, writing, advocacy, outreach, discussion.
- Treasury Spend Proposed On-chain.
- Council either adopts or refuses the proposal.
To a structure that looks like this:
- Pre-Proposal Stage - Planning, writing, advocacy, outreach, discussion: Some essential information is to be provided by the proposer and a structure by template is to be followed to maximise the understanding of the proposal. The Treasury Committee connects with the proposer and works closely with them to make sure the proposal is rounded and has all needed information for the Council's review
- Discussion process: The proposal is submitted to the community for discussion, Q&A sessions and reflection on what the submission will imply. The Committee can at this stage join efforts with the proposer to make all information available by sharing the document from Step 1 and answer any questions pertinent to the process. Ideally, this document will leave on-chain and be shared on online forums to be discussed.
- Proposal submission: After a reasonable amount of time passed and once the community was able to discuss the proposal, the proposer submits it.
- Council adopts or rejects the proposal.
The new committee would allow a more organised discussion of the proposals, would help the proposer get organised on the information and share it with the community and would monitor and direct any discussion on live channels to forums.
Could I get your opinion on this? it would be super useful.
I like the idea of a poll or signalling intention mechanism, this would be nice and useful.
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