While currently the Splinterlands company is the only one able to submit proposals for official SPS stakeholder voting, eventually the goal is to open that up to anyone once we can ensure that it can be handled in an orderly and organized manner. Until the full community proposals system can be developed, we would like to try out a simpler, informal version that will allow the community to begin putting forth their proposals for consideration for a formal governance vote.
The process that we will be trying out for community proposals is described below. As soon as this post is published, community members may begin submitting proposals following the steps below for consideration.
null from the same account that will be publishing the proposal post and note the Hive blockchain transaction ID of the transfer (can be found on https://hiveblocks.com and will be added to the Currency Activity page on the Splinterlands website shortly)The 100k DEC fee for submitting proposals is necessary to avoid spam and to help ensure that proposals are serious and worth the time to read and consider. The fee may be adjusted (either up or down) in the future if agreed by the community via a proposal vote. Please note that this fee will not be refunded FOR ANY REASON. The fee is burned and is not sent to any wallet address from which it can be recovered. Please think carefully before submitting a proposal and paying the fee.
The SPS DAO (comprised of staked SPS token holders) has complete control over the SPS, VOUCHER, and LICENSE tokens. For everything else, the community may still propose changes, but it is ultimately up to the Splinterlands team whether or not to put those community proposals up for official voting - regardless of the outcome of the informal voting via upvotes and downvotes on the post.
Additionally, proposals must contain all of the details necessary for implementation in order to be considered for an official vote. Vague or unclear proposals will not be accepted as it won't be clear what exactly stakeholders are voting for and we won't be able to ensure that we can actually implement it correctly.
During the informal voting period, the author may make edits to the proposal post to clarify things or make changes to some of the smaller proposal details requested by the community. If a proposal requires very significant edits that fundamentally alter the concept being proposed, those should instead be made as an entirely new proposal, which also means paying the fee again. Proposals should be well thought-out and detailed before being posted and the edit feature should not be a way to sneak additional items in without paying the fee again.
Also, if we suspect that edits have been made at the last minute or in any way in an attempt to trick the stakeholders, that proposal will not continue to formal voting and the fee will not be refunded. A full history of all edits to posts are always available on the Hive blockchain, so it is not possible to hide changes.
Similarly, proposals should focus on one concept or change each. A group of changes that all work together towards a single goal is fine, but any proposal that appears to contain multiple, unrelated changes as a way to attempt to squeeze multiple things under one proposal fee will not be approved to move to formal voting.
Finally, please keep in mind that the Splinterlands team will still be in control of timing and resources necessary for implementing the changes from any approved proposals. We have an extremely full roadmap and will do our best to slot in any new proposal projects that come up as quickly as reasonably possible.
It will also be possible for the community to vote for DAO funds to be spent to hire third-party developers to build certain features that can be done independently of the Splinterlands team. The Splinterlands team looks forward to more third-party development in the ecosystem and would be happy to help with such projects when and where we are able.
The Splinterlands team will do our best to work with proposal authors to ensure that all of the required information is included during the informal voting period and that all of the other guidelines are met. 
The Splinterlands team would like to create a simple website / tool that allows the community to view all of the Hive posts with the #spsproposal tag that are available for informal voting and that shows the total staked SPS voting for and against it so that the community can easily see the current status of any community proposals over the 7 day informal voting period.
That being said, we currently have a lot on our plate and may not be able to get to that for some time. In the meantime, if any third-party developers would like to take a shot at building such a tool please reach out and we would be happy to provide any help we can. All of the necessary information should be publicly available and accessible.
We are very excited to start experimenting with a system for community proposals and we look forward to being able to vote on ideas from the community in a more organized and formal way than we have been able to in the past.
Please keep in mind that this is just a first attempt at doing something like this, and we expect there to be some issues and hiccups as we first get it going. We plan to work with the community to make any necessary changes and adjustments to the process and ultimately we plan to use the learnings from this in building out a full, formalized community proposal system which no longer needs any input or gatekeeping from the Splinterlands organization.
Additionally, we would like to note that any proposals coming from the Splinterlands company will also be done through this new system, and they will be treated no differently than proposals created by anyone else.
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NOTE: All rewards from this post will be burned.