I like this initiative, it embraces the Kusama spirit of experimentation offering a low tech solution to solve several issues we experience with treasury spends, I see it more as an MVP that can help us gather feedback from the community and proposers before we deploy a more specialized fully decentralized solution.
One topic we can try to make better from the get-go that is the main concern people see with bounties in general is its centralization around curators and feeling forced to go through them as gatekeepers of the funds. Curation should be seen as a service, something proposers chose not because they have to but because they see a good value in the service and will be well regarded by the community. Also curators shouldn’t be so static instead they could be chosen dynamically for each proposal from a big pool of curators, a curation community, that is diverse enough, where experience and rank are taken into consideration and token holders can ultimately control its fate.
This kind of solution would ideally involve specialized pallets, perhaps a new instance of the ranked collective pallet and even a whole parachain specialized in curation as it is a topic that is general enough that could benefit not only governance but any other use cases(e.g. curation is an important part of Virto’s p2p marketplaces to filter out bad quality goods or services). But before deploying an army of developers the low tech solution I would suggest instead of proposing a bounty is to abuse proxies and multi-sigs.
It’s surprising how far you can get with proxies, you can set up entire organizations like that and the curation community can be formed this way initially.
One possible flow I imagine could be:
- A proposer submits a spend proposal and as payout account sets a pure proxy provided by the curation community, their actual payment address and other metadata can be a system.remark part of the same proposal.
- The curation community is a pure proxy(that controls other payout pure proxies of proposals) and chooses N curators for this proposal(assigned as a multi-sig) depending on the track or extra content provided in the remark(e.g. specifying its a media related )
- Optionally the main proxy of the curation community can automate the decision process with a simple bot that is a time delayed proxy that reads data from an external source like a ranked collective abstraction built on Statemine using a uniques collection.
- The chosen curators do their job sending payments to proposers whenever they complete their milestones.
- Optionally curators offer the extra service of managing assets and send payments already in a stable coin of choice(e.g. USDT) so proposers don’t have to worry about it. Curators could use trading instead of fees to make a profit and be rewarded for their services.
- Project is completed and curators are removed from the pure proxy that can be destroyed or reused for future proposals.
If bootstrapping the curation community this way proves successful and the ecosystem sees value in this approach we can later turn it into a specialized solution.