I presented this proposal at AAG yesterday and we discussed it 14-minutes: Watch
I will summarize and expand on some of the discussed points:
Do we even need a budget?
Polkadot is not an established business model with fixed in- and outflows. Polkadot is still incubating, researching a lot.
Yes, we need a budget. It’s rather a question of: what can we achieve together?
I argue that there is a spectrum between having no committed budget at all and a hard-committed budget. Both extremes are bad. A hard-committed budget doesn’t work for an ecosystem that is as agile and new as Polkadot. But no-commitment, the status that Polkadot currently is in, is equally bad, as it leads us to go forward without a bigger plan of how to collectively develop the ecosystem. We are exposed without direction to whoever proposes a spend and have to discuss the same eternal issues over and over again. It’s a waste of our valuable time.
Having at least a process that mediates discussion around what our spending priorities are, and ideally allocating soft-committed budgets is the proper way to confront the future.
The fact that Polkadot is an incubating organism doesn’t preclude the necessity of a budget. It just changes the nature of categories and allocations. Startups have a big challenge around reducing uncertainty and finding product-market fit, which puts more emphasis on Research & Development as opposed to regular production and operations. (e.g. the chain incurs operating costs of 6-7 figures on validation infrastructure, and 8 figures on research & development)
This is a journey. We are at the point of no-commitment, little knowledge and ambiguous consensus about our spending policy. We don’t know where we will land, but we can approach the issue by gathering information and sorting out where we can achieve consensus.
Sub-Treasuries
Are we going to have committees of bounty curators? Multisigs?
There are different notions of what will happen with the allocated budgets.
My input here is that we don’t need permissioned solutions for those sub-budgets. In theory we could have budget tracks that are independently voted on and just have a limited amount of tokens allocated to it. This would allow you to fight for your favorite budget tracks once a year and spend the rest of the year just looking at the budget tracks where you have the best expertise/most interest in.
But even more importantly, I wouldn’t want to engage this discussion too early. There are different ways to implement this and we shouldn’t get hung up on this. Let’s focus on the big picture first. (at least until we got some rough insight into the amount of consensus we can achieve on budgets)
We need historical data
I agree. I started a thread here that collects some historical data about Polkadot Treasaury spending.
This is the first productive field of conflict that we can aim for: What are the proper categories we should set up? I have manually put projects into categories that I have chosen. But I am sure there are competing ideas about how to properly categorize and sub-categorize spending. Let’s discuss it!
We need on-chain signalling
We have on-chain voting, but we lack on-chain signalling. On-chain signalling is a method of achieving consensus without hard votes. It is a way for token holders to signal how important an issue is for them that cannot clearly be expressing in executable on-chain referenda. Instead, it is a social coordination mechanism that allows us to determine how token holders will vote.