Edited 09/20 to change recipient/custodian to Foundation.
Attributes
- Authors: @b3n @Ming
- Recipients: Contributors via the Foundation
- Category: Bounties
- Asking Amount: $10k USD of POKT, $5k to be immediately converted to USDC
“None of us is as smart as all of us” - Ken Blanchard
Summary
TLDR: We are seeking a small grant to prototype and test an incentive reward mechanism for community ideas and suggestions.
Each day on this forum and numerous Telegram and Discord channels, the community discusses how to make Pocket Network a foundational piece of infrastructure. Primarily these discussions focus on high-value, strategic proposals and grants for significant undertakings.
But there are other smaller, but perhaps no less impactful, ways to empower the community and core teams to create value collaboratively. Smaller, because nothing is too small when you want to build a culture of the highest quality, and no less impactful because every incremental improvement adds up and ultimately compounds over time. This statement is not just a hope - it is outlined in the theory of Marginal Gains:
Marginal Gains theory outlines compounding effects that lead to highly differential outcomes, and the approach has realised numerous real-world results. It espouses first principles thinking by breaking things into components to find new opportunities.
Our ambition for this proposal is to incentivise everyone in the Pocket community to share their knowledge, context, and creativity to help Pocket make gains at any scale that add up to a big difference over time.
How it works
We share thoughts and feedback through numerous channels but generally speaking, it is difficult to answer:
- If I want to share feedback to help Pocket improve, where do I go?
- What are the most important improvements the community and core team want to see?
Our mechanism aims to incentivise the behaviour of sharing ideas or opportunities in a more structured and transparent way.
The mechanism creates a shared “Community Suggestions” funnel in Dework: https://app.dework.xyz/pokt-network/suggestions
Any community member can provide a suggestion here, and through an automation with Discord, it will be added to a #suggestions channel and our community suggestions backlog.
In the suggestions backlog, community members can further participate by upvoting suggestions they think are valuable. The core team will use this feedback as input for their own improvement efforts and backlog. When specific community-recommended suggestions are activated or actioned, the core team will have the ability to reward the individual who provided this suggestion with a discretionary amount of $POKT.
Note: PEP 40 provides further explanation of how actionable work can also be bountied back to the community for completion.
Motivation/Rationale
The main motivation is to seek out and action efficiency opportunities and suggestions from the wider community and embed in Pocket Network a focus on continuous improvement and quality.
That said, there are numerous second-order benefits to experimenting with an incentive mechanism like this, including:
- Reduce the friction for anybody to participate in helping improve Pocket
- Provide opportunities for the community to share their creativity and innovation and signal their general sentiment
- Create richer, more specific, and actionable feedback for different teams
- Encourage and reward people who make helpful suggestions to Pocket without the explicit expectation of a quid-pro-quo for participating
Budget
We seek an equivalent budget of $10k USD of POKT for a 4-month experiment. Candidly, we do not know if this will be an appropriate budget, but we intend this experiment to happen very publicly and to provide monthly updates of how the funds are being deployed. We also welcome here now further discussion from the community as to whether this budget seems reasonable.
To add, we think there are numerous hypothetical examples of security or sales improvement suggestions that might be deserving of the whole $10,000USD budget on their own, but for now, we want to focus on increasing the volume of small improvement suggestions and to fine-tune the mechanism to most effectively leverage this budget for the Pocket ecosystem over time.
Dissenting opinions
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The budget is too small to do anything meaningful
This is a prototype and test. If successful, we will return to increase or expand the budget
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People should provide suggestions without being rewarded or incentivised
Yes, and we hope they will continue to do so. But this is a small way to recognise those people without creating an expectation of reward and to drive some engagement as we stand up this mechanism
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There are better ways to spend $10k
Everyone can always debate this. Or, now, they can add a better idea to the suggestions mechanism, and people can upvote if they agree
Copyright
Copyright and related rights waived via CC0.