Submitting Smart Proposals

It's been a while since I felt inclined to write. I have decided to break my one-month holiday from #Steemit. It's been a very hot summer here and pretty much made sitting and writing not so appealing. A lot has happened in the crypto space and loads of development from #SmartCash which I shall only list here as it's been well covered by our team here on #Steemit.

• Release of 1.2.0 - Frequent payments to #SmartNodes
• The creation of more Hive Teams including the QA Hive
• Release of 1.2.4 - Ability to vote on proposal within the node client wallet
• Release of #SmartCard - #SmartCash debit card /cold wallet
• Release of #SmartPay - Android POS (Point of Sale) app
• Smartcash added to Changelly Exchange - Smartcash can be purchased with any other coin or token on Changelly
• Smartcash Buy/ Sell Instantly button integrated to CMC CoinMarketCap
• Smartcard webwallet integration with Changelly - You can buy smarts directly from your webwallet
• Release of NFC (Near Field Communication) abilities on the SmartCard - This allows you pay with an NFC enabled card by just touching the device.
• Third party wallets - Ethos and Edge
  This list goes on and I am sure I have missed a few things, since I am doing this from memory.

With the release of 1.2.4 which now gives us the ability to vote directly from the wallet, there has been an obvious increase in participation on proposal voting. The result is that the standard which each proposal has to meet to get voted YES is significantly higher than before. What I have seen lately is, a high number of what I consider "incomplete proposals" or what I have heard referred to as "Money Grab" submissions which just seem to loop between being rejected and repeated.

The opinions expressed here are entirely mine, this is me answering the question - ***what do you look for in a proposal? There are 2 parts to what I look for. They are:

1. The Person or Persons behind the Proposal

• How active is the person in the #smartcash community - discord, telegram, steemit, twitter or the smartcash forum. I then read the person's previous posts to get a sense of what their views are, and how long they have been a part of the community, or have been involved with cryptocurrency. I feel more confident with someone that has a basic understanding of #smartcash's key features.
• Personality: I watch how they address members who ask questions on the pre-proposal thread; are they dismissive, rude or aggressive rather than answering the concerns raised? Do they attack or try to intimidate critics? Based on my observation, writers of properly-written proposals are tolerant of criticism of their ideas and take time to communicate their ideas to those who do not understand.

Comment:

Responses:

Result:

2. The Proposal

There are simple things I expect to see. I will use a illustration of fixing a wooden chair.

• OBJECTIVES What is the objective, reason or purpose of the Proposal. I expect Proposals to solve a problem. If your Proposal does not solve a problem or bridge a gap, you likely will not get my YES vote

Proposal to Fix 100 chairs as most of our chairs are broken and during our meeting many people have no where to sit

• SOLUTION How do you plan to fix or solve this problem

I am a Certified Wood Technologist and will take on this job with my team of 10 others, each of whom will fix 10 chairs under my close supervision and this will take us 2 days

• MONITORING How can the community track your progress? Do you have any milestones?

There will be a Facebook live stream daily and anyone can watch us work and keep track of our progress and we will have a countdown board update twice a day.

• DELIVERABLES What are your deliverables? By this I want to know at the end of your project what will the community have that it did not have before? What value will your proposal add? How many new merchants were adopted? How many new members added or wallets downloaded or even how many #smartcards where created

On the last day of my proposal I will deliver 100 fixed and polished chairs to the hall at least 30 minutes before our weekly meeting venue.**

• MEASURABLE - Now this is where there is an obvious gap and why I not a fan of Airdrops or freebies. There has to be a way to measure your efforts and the impact of your work. You may say but it's an event, there are event apps that record attendance and give you various stats. The dangers of not having proposals that have a way to measure their efforts means you real can not say what works and to what extent your objective has been achieved. For outreach events I would like to see some follow up on how many people actually came onboard as a result of coming to your event. Back to my example:

My team and I will fix and restore the chairs to their original states which if we had to replace will cost $500 each 50000 in total.

• Budget - Now this is where many seem to struggle. A good budget should itemize every expense. This is not the place to summarize be very detail. Using my frictional proposal to fix 100 chairs. Please do NOTdo this:
  Materials & Labour - 5000
  Instead do this:

With this amount of details it becomes clear where the money is going and it inspires confidence. Remember just because you know what you plan to do does not mean other do.

CONCLUSION

Proposals with unrealistically wide scope are likely to to fail or make little on no impact in the scheme of things. A good example of this can be illustrated with Alberta, a province in Canada. To travel from south to north can be up to up to 8 hours and the time it takes to get to the closest province at least a day's drive to the next capital city. Now it will make more sense for me to put in a proposal to reach my city of one million people than to put in a proposal to reach all of Canada or all of my Province. It is better to have a focused and targeted approach. Do not over-reach or over-promise and under-deliver; this will harm your reputation and those associated with you. Finally be honest about what you can do, do not over-sell your abilities to "impress" the community. The community will be impressed with results, not empty promises remember how long it took you to feel confident about cryptocurrencies (assuming you are!) Do you really want me to believe you can get a stranger who comes to your event to be transformed to the point of understanding wallets and everything about #smartcash in a few hours?

If all your proposal did was tell people about #smartcash and give them tokens, please do not use the word adoption its only adoption when these people start to use #smartcash or become part of the community, actively contributing to making it better for all.