This year I managed to get more involved in the leadership of "The Devcoin Foundation", a virtual crypto-based organization that has the purpose of funding OpenSource developers and writers. We currently hold some internal discussions with ideas and news of my interest that I want to publicly promote in a series of posts. There we go!
Call for action
We have a renewed and fully synced troop of file custodians, let's sync our Devcoin nodes!
I recommend you to start over syncing from scratch, or you can also try this reindex method: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=233997.msg52988869#msg52988869
Also, everybody is welcome to join our brand new Telegram channel: https://t.me/Devcoins I promise it is not noisy.
Now let me share my idea to build up Devcoin. If the purpose is supporting OpenSource/FLOSS projects, let's support them straight! I'm contributing to FLOSS for more than a decade now, mainly to the Drupal project and 99% of time we did things without spending a penny. We need developers, testers, documentation, trainers, etc. The only few times we talk about money is for paying overhead and expenses of the Drupal Association, which has grown over time, but we fixed that very well from the beginning. We accept donations, we have annual memberships and a big funding event called Drupalcon happening twice a year. The Drupal project is just one example of a long list of successful projects that were able to build an structure for growth. The Devcoin project needs a similar strategy, rather than just giving money away, we can provide structure, like an incubator. Also, we have tried to support a long list of people in the past, mostly in auto-mode, which is proven wrong. Why don't we focus on one single project at a time? Focus is what will allow us to track success. Otherwise we end up having to much noise and the sense of zero results.
Let's do this once and for all, we already have one very promising project upfront: DevSTEEM, and we also have the challenge of building Devcoin back up with a growing curve, both things alone are big stuff to be proud of lifelong if we are successful. We can do more stuff if and only if we get DevSTEEM to succeeded and stay self-sustainable or if it failed definitively. In the mean time, let's give DevSTEEM the best of our efforts, and build Devcoin up!
In practical terms, I'm saying that Novacadian and me would like to see more interest from the rest of team on the "build up" battle front: DevSTEEM(which includes Devtome) once that we start winning the Operations battlefront.
... I think that plainly paying raw shares to the people we support is similar to a blind give away. If the price is high, people is happy and pursues a share, something that happens not very often. When the price is average spenders will just swap for fiat or other crypto, but most of the time price is low. For that reason we see exchanges delisting DVC one after another, because they know that more Devcoins are coming soon, so we are promoting an eternal market down trend. I find it better to first grow funds and then carefully pick who or what and with how much we are going to support. Whether an OpenSource developer or writer, I think that our help will be very welcome if we give them Devcoins that they can cash out short term. That said, I guess that it is time to evaluate keep paying ongoing shares to Bitcoin and OpenSource developers in our current situation. Also, let's have a better strategy. For example, in Google Summer of Code the OpenSource projects first share their plans, with goals and timelines, then they get funds, execute the plan and finally report their success or failure. Same thing with accelerators and similar financial institutions. It is not rocket science, we don't have to reinvent the wheel!
The closer example to what I'm saying above is our DevFund, we were holding some funds for a few rounds. Now I'm offering and paying bounties to the development team (me included). The information is public, we know who's worked what and how much the bounty was. Also, we don't have to make people wait for so long to get paid. Job done, job paid!
That is for now. Stay tuned!
