Tips and proposals are powerful features of Polkadot governance that we could fine-tune within a repository. I’d like to start this discussion to promote some formalisation to using proposals and tipping within our projects for the programming use case.
Per-issue proposals
Proposals could be set up on a per-issue basis, with the advantage of having a concrete amount of DOT dispersed to the contributor upon completion. This is in contrast to tips where there is no guarantee to how much you will receive.
Is there a good way we can communicate issue-proposals to maximise their likelihood of being accepted?
Per-issue tipping
Labels could be set up in the repo, such as tip-supported or proposal, and guidance for the size of the tip with tip-small, tip-medium and tip-large. This size is of course how much we would advocate to be tipped, with no guarantee of the final amount.
This is a bit vague, but one shortfall is that separate Github app instances of tip bot are required to configure separate tip requesters. This impacts repo admins from claiming the 20% finders fee - a reasonable demand given the mentorship required to organise and guide maintainers through issues.
README badges
Add some officially accepted badge to the top of the repo (using a tool like https://badgen.net/) to signify that it is tip or proposal supported. This simply means that the repository admins are open to / actively interacting with proposals and tipping to progress the repo.
What we don’t have currently is a dedicated portal for listing code-related freelance opportunities that these features ultimately can bring, which may make this discovery process challenging. Proposals could utilise Polkassembly - a jack of all trades platform for all things governance, but lack an optimal user experience.
I like the idea of formalizing the use of the bot @shawntabrizi created for other projects as well (of course IMO the issues/fixes should be directed towards the entire ecosystem if possible, making sure the community treasury is used for solutions that are collective).
I am not quite sure about the idea of Per-issue proposals:
with the current governance system, this would imply quite some proposals queueing on treasury queue: probably with very vague contextual information and for relatively small amounts that the Council will need to review and vote on - potentially doubling the work of the collective (the situation might be different with Gov2 of course);
There needs to be a formalised process to make sure complete contextual information is added to the governance forums for each proposal in order for the community to be able to understand the goal of the allocation.
I am wondering if:
a formalised process with a batch call (grouping many issues to be voted on together) could work.
the use of a bounty integrated with the bot could do the trick to make the process more efficient.
The tip bot I created was simply a short cut, which controls an account, which automates making the tips. To do this, I have hard coded the private key to some account in some .env file, and funded that account with some base amount of DOT to pay for the transaction fees.
Any team, can do this for themselves by simply forking and launching their version of the bot. I do not think we should continue to overload the Parity instance of the Tip Bot, which is controlled by me and other parity core developers to be used in deeper parts of the Polkadot ecosystem, since I do not represent the rest of the ecosystem. If there is another team out there that wants to start using Treasury Tips to help promote open source contributions to their project, they should just set it up, as I have done for Parity.
Now addressing a specific point:
with the advantage of having a concrete amount of DOT dispersed to the contributor upon completion
This of course totally possible, but would no longer be using the “tipping” system of Polkadot. If you want to distribute specific amounts of tokens for work, you need to use a bounty system, or your own DOT tokens to do that. The tip bot today is designed to use the tipping system on Polkadot, where the payout amount is controlled by the median tip amount recommended by the council members. Only a suggestion about whether the task was “small”, “medium”, or “large” is used to hint to the council members what might make sense.
I see, maybe it is wise to plan such formalisations around Gov2. I imagine it will be more scalable to not only use the various tracks (tipping and proposal track?), but also having many more voters and the fellowship to process them.
Batching issues per repo sounds reasonable, and something that we can streamline on the UI if we can standardise metadata. This sounds way more realistic with the current Gov setup.
Thanks for the context, indeed I should have mentioned this and add more context in the original post.
What I am envisaging is integrating both tips and treasury proposal features together in the automated fashion similar to the tip bot. After reading @RTTI-5220’s response & in the context of Github, it may make sense to have milestones supported by proposals, and use tipping the way it is being used today with issues.
I wanted to post the following as a new topic in the forum meta, but perhaps I have landed in the right place here:
I have a number of small Polkadot-native projects that I am keen to see continue, but I don’t have the time to continue working on them myself.
Also, I believe our treasury and tipping system is capable and has enough funds to provide some small incentive for open source contributors to help with these projects.
What I mainly struggle with is finding the right people, and later on encouraging them to start the (somewhat) complicated journey of seeing the project getting either funding or tipped.
Ideally, I, as a e.g. React developer, would go to a directory where I can see a list of open source polkadot-native projects that are in need of contributors. If I contribute, there would be a smooth path for either me or the project owner to request tips through council.
So, the question is: can this forum help with that in any way? Perhaps a new category where small scale projects can be pitched? What other platforms are out there for this that we can use?
PS. While writing this, I realize this is for the most part what Gitcoint bounties are. Still posting it here for brainstorming.
