Kusama Treasury Analysis & Reconfiguration

[sourabhniyogi]

@olanod

goals based spending is by defining treasury spend tracks not based on amounts but on the category of the spend(e.g. media, events, marketing, wallets, core tech, r&d, etc.), the limits on each track should add up to match the bandwidth you proposed, we can start with a balanced division or discuss a bit more to have a general sense of what topics could have more priority based on our short term needs(e.g. do we focus on positive revenue?), it doesn’t have to be perfect but just a starting point that would be adjusted over time.

Great idea – if possible, I would suggest tying this idea to @joepetrowski 's advice in setting up collectives with their own budgets:

1. create 4-10 collectives that map onto categories of existing proposals (e.g. “ux”, “events”, “indexing”, “bridges”, “tools”, “education” …). I also recommend a “r&d” one to allow diverse innovation that doesn’t quite fit into an existing TrackInfo
2. have the community approve quarterly (semesterly?) budgets each collective responsibly, cognizant of the revenue + income.
3. each collective spends their budget on their charter (e.g. events), and should be expected to aggregate reports to have budgets either stay the same, increase or decrease each quarter (semester).
4. collectives should devise mechanisms for spend recipients to be competitive with each other for some % of the collective’s spend (see how Moonbeam does it here). I believe around 30% should be reserved for newcomers, otherwise you end up with a stagnant military-industrial complex funding the same 3-5 beneficiaries and this community is supposed to be about innovation.

This ‘indirect democracy’ type solution has the community voting for budgets on tracks rather than proposals. In my country, I would like it to spend less on the military track and more on the education track, but I myself have little idea on how new military/education dollars should be spent on specific proposals – I’d like to leave it up to the military collective and education collective, who work with the budget that they are given.

In the same way, I may believe that the UX Tracks + Bridges Tracks should get more DOT or KSM at the expense of the Indexing Track. If the UX Collective rationally allocates their funds to Dotswap UIs at the expense of Wallet teams, and the Bridge Collective makes rational decisions about how to allocate between Snowfork, Centrifuge/Axelar, Darwinia, T3rn proposals (say) – but always within a certain budget, then you win sustainability in the aggregate (with budget controls) with rational decision making shifted to the individual collectives. You would expect the Bridge Collective members to be smart enough to know how evaluate bridge security solutions, the UX Collective to know how important different UIs are and seeing how they fit together, similarly for other collectives. Then, both the community and the N Collectives switch from lots of “yeah, this seems (un)reasonable, I guess… Aye! (nay)” one-off decisions to a smaller number of “ok, we have to allocate more here and less there because ___” both at the community level and within the collectives.

The expectation is that people would be making smaller numbers of more important decisions with this change. At the community level, people would be expected to have intuitions about how to shift budgets between tracks rather than proposals; At the collective level, people would be expected to to have super informed judgements about how to allocate finite budgets to specific proposals.