POLITEIA DIGEST January 20 - January 30 2023
5 new proposals coming up for vote in February and 3 approved from the previous month. Let's look at each of these in more depth.
Treasury balance: 840,481 DCR (approx +8,210 DCR/month) - $19.4 million (+$189K/month) based on $23.03 DCR price
New Proposals
Published Jan 23 by tiagoad | 14 comments
This proposal requests $17,300 for a front end redesign of Timestamply, a web application which provides a timestamping service using dcrtime on the backend. The work was completed by @sænder (design, $2,800) and @tiagoalvesdulce (development, $14,500). The scope of work included a new logo and design, light and dark modes, multiple languages and many other improvements, and references a number of GitHub pull requests. The development work is broken down by number of hours per pull request, totalling 290 hours or approx 5.5 FTE, billed at $50/hr.
Preview of the new design is available here, it will replace the current version at timestamp.decred.org. Those testing the preview website should note that it is running with a test database and does not have the hashes timestamped on the main instance.
All of the comments on the proposal are positive, including some from developers and users.
Published Jan 23 by alphaday, last edited Jan 30 | 5 comments
This proposal requests $2,200 to produce a Decred version of the Alphaday “dashboard”, where information from various widgets can be arranged on one screen as a “tab killer” dealing death to the cluttered browser bars of crypto fans everywhere. The budget is broken down into “upfront costs” of $1,000 for development such as including Decred resources as optional widgets for dashboards, and $100 per month for an analyst to check the dashboard daily and ensure it is working correctly.
Comments pointed out that the proposal was initially requesting USDC and an up-front payment, both of which would have been problematic. The proposal was edited to change to requesting DCR amounts, which is also not appropriate.
Decred Content and Asset Translations 2023
Published Jan 27 by kozel, last edited Jan 29 | 4 comments
This proposal requests a budget of $33,000 for a year’s funding of translation work, and opens with a summary of the recently concluded third phase of the translation program where a budget of $20,000 was requested and $11,355.33 was spent. @bee keeps track of translations in an indexcovering text and video work, as well as tracking software translation status. Most of the effort goes into translating Decred Journal and updates to the decred.org website, during the previous phase new languages were added, such as Greek and German. For this proposal, the list of previously approved contractors has been left out, due to issues with perceived “ownership” of certain languages’ translation work or complacency. Also greater use will be made of the CMS temporary contractor functionality, so there is less of a need for prospective contributors to have an established record of translating to join the proposal.
Early comments on the proposal concern whether translation work should have its own proposal or be incorporated in the proposals of whatever needs to be translated, and whether to start translating video subtitles.
Proposals under discussion
Published Jan 18 by laurent | 58 comments (+36)
Recap: This proposal requests a budget of $26,033 for sponsorship of a professional race car driver as they compete in the 2023 BGDC races driving a Honda Civic Type R. The proposal would have Decred as the sole sponsor, with the car being painted in Decred colours and with the Decred logo. The Decred-liveried Honda Civic would feature in 5 races around Europe, and the sponsorship money would cover all associated costs aside from car depreciation and repairs following the event. 40% of the budget is being requested as an up-front payment, with the remainder to be paid out in four 15% instalments over the course of the year.
The comments on this proposal are mostly questioning the legitimacy or value of the offer, whether it is from a real racing driver and whether it would be a cost effective way to spend funds if the offer is legitimate. @laurent added various documents to “uploadnow” and linked to them in comments, but as of Jan 30 the links appear to be dead and the folder empty. Some comments have asked about lower cost sponsorship options, to which @laurent has indicated that prices start at 1500 euros for a 25x5 cm sticker.
Rick Red Revival: Research and assorted other tasks
Published Jan 18 by richard-red, last edited Jan 28 | 28 comments (+24)
Recap: This proposal requests a budget of $32,500 for one year of work covering a variety of domains and tasks. It includes a research component which follows on from the “Open Source Research” proposal series, and a number of other components, along with approximate and maximum spending limits per component. The research component has an estimated spend of $10,000 and would include Politeia data collection and analysis as well as research on other communities’ governance. Politeia moderation and running the @pi_crumbs Twitter account has an estimate of $1,800. $5,000 is earmarked for quality assurance type testing of Decred software and writing issues, tutorials and reviews. There are also some more novel categories with budgets, with an estimated $2,000 to be spent on producing more Clay Stakey stop-motion animations, $1,000 for novelty graphics in the @BisonContent style, as well as a $2,000 miscellaneous heading to cover general helping out not covered elsewhere. Of the total budget, $2,500 is requested as payment in arrears for Politeia moderation ($1,000) and the already produced Clay Stakey ($1,000) and Bison Content ($500).
Many comments on the proposal question or discuss its varied makeup, whether tasks like research and admin should sit alongside clay animation and memes in a proposal. Some commenters would prefer to see the wide-ranging proposal as a number of more specific proposals, and for funding to be tied to domains and teams rather than an individual - whereas others are interested to explore the pros and cons structuring a proposal and work around an individual. In response to comments about the value of different components, the Clay Stakey component was cut in half and part of the request for retrospective payment shifted to Bison Content.
Approved proposals
Published Jan 9 by peter_zen, last edited Jan 18 | 15 comments (+1)
Final voting figures: 84% Yes votes, 47% turnout of eligible tickets.
Recap: This proposal requested $1,960 to integrate DCRDEX into the Umbrel app store. Umbrel is a Linux-based operating system for running a personal server in one’s home using x86 or Raspberry Pi computers, it has some popularity with crypto users because of the fit between self-custody and self-hosting. peter_zen is an established DCRDEX contributor who is proposing to complete the work to configure DCRDEX for Umbrel and submit it to the app store, where it would be easily installable by any Umbrel user. The proposal originally requested $1,000 but was edited to add additional work to investigate some of the issues raised and monitoring/support, bringing the budget to $1,960.
Published Jan 9 by exitus | 10 comments (+2)
Final voting figures: 83% Yes votes, 55% turnout of eligible tickets.
Recap: This proposal requested a budget of $45,600 to continue and expand the work of the Decred Video team (Decred Society, Exitus, Karamble, Tivra). For the previous proposal the total billed was $27,026, this proposal increases the monthly limit from $3,200 to $3,800. Major developments this year were the launch of “State of the Market” series which is filling the void left by Decred in Depth, and Tivra’s recent test runs with Twitter Spaces.
Decred Arabia Communications and Content 2023
Published Jan 12 by arij, last edited Jan 17 | 4 comments (+3)
Final voting figures: 75% Yes votes, 49% turnout of eligible tickets.
Recap: This proposal requested a budget of $13,000 to continue with the established program and team led by arij. The previous proposal spent $3,140 (~30% of budget), and members attended 5 events, with a further 2 after the proposal ended ($450 is being requested to cover these). The proposal includes a table of 6 planned events and associated expenses, as well as a budget of $2,100 for the production of 3 videos.
About this issue
Content for this edition was authored by @richardred with fixes by @bee.
Image credit: @sænder
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