The DHF and forking the Steemit ninja mine into it created a nice reserve of funds to provide incentive for further development of the hive ecosystem. With those being public funds, their use must be carefully scrutinized by the community to ensure that an equivalent dollar value is being returned. The DHF should absolutely not be viewed as an entitlement for previous contributions, as an award based upon popularity, or the spoils of winning a war against Justin Sun. As community members, we are all stewards of this fund, and must act as its comptrollers, to ensure it is being used both efficiently, and judiciously.
So we have a mechanism through which the community can agree to provide funding to various efforts, such as development, marketing, infrastructure costs, etc. You simply vote a proposal above the return proposal threshold, and voila, the HBD will start flowing when the proposal kicks off.
From there it starts to get murky. In computing we call it a black box. We can see HBD flowing out of the proposal system, and into wallets, but as a community we have little visibility into both the activities being funded on a more granular level, as well as the outputs being created.
We need criteria for continued funding of proposals. My suggestion is a tiered approach for the aggregated total of any active proposals for a particular funds recipient.
Not only do we need to have clear reporting requirements, we also need the consequences of failure to report to be clearly defined.
Any failure to submit an official report, should immediately have funding removed until a report is generated. For top tier funded proposals, failure to create a minimum of 4 daily log entries per week should result in removal of funding.
Providing official reports presents the opportunity for the funded proposal to communicate its continued value to the community. If a proposal is unable to articulate its value-add, it should not be funded.
Official reports should communicate goals, milestones, and high-level progress. It should also communicate detailed metrics.
As much info should be provided as possible so that the community can make informed decisions regarding what to support.
Top tier funded proposals should keep a daily log of their activities. One means of accomplishing this could be a Hive post which is edited every day. It should be used to provide voters a basic understanding of what was accomplished that day, and provide a basic idea of how many hours were spent on tasks.
Of course this entire post are my suggestions of how we can create visibility, accountability, while at the same time encouraging progress on Hive. Better solutions may exist. My hope is at the very least, this post or others like it can be used as a framework for discussion regarding how the community intends to manage its resources going forward.
Your feedback in the comments is of course appreciated.
