[WFC Draft] Bounty Standards

[alice_und_bob]

Following the concept of Legislation through WFCs and leaning into the discussion of Improvements for Bounty Transparency, I want to put forward a compliance standard for bounties.

I am putting this up for discussion here for 2 weeks and will put it to a WFC vote once the draft is stable. The latest version is available here: Bounty Standards - HackMD

Bounty Standards

This document lays out standards that shall apply to all bounties funded through Polkadot OpenGov. It defines how these entities evolve and how they handle budgeting, transparency, and compliance.

1. Bounty Scope and Operations

1. Bounties shall have a clearly defined scope and list of objectives by which their success can be judged by the community. Existing bounties have a 3-month grace period to define this and get it approved via a WFC proposal.
2. Funds may only spent within the boundaries of the defined scope and objectives.
3. Any change in scope or change to the curator team has to be approved by a WFC referendum.
4. Bounties shall have a 3-month grace period from the beginning of the bounty to set up operations. If after 3 months no activities happen in the bounty, the community may request the bounty to shut down or be changed.

2. Funding

1. Bounties may request a maximum of one top-up per quarter.
2. Funding requests have to include a budget for how it intends to use the funds, as well as any required transparency reports up to the time of the request.
3. A top-up request has to be put up for discussion in any of the established governance platforms or the Polkadot forum for at least 2 weeks before it is put to a vote.

3. Transparency

Bounties are required to provide the following materials for transparency:

1. Overview Page/Website
   • Scope and Objectives
   • Main contact point
   • Link to a public chat room, forum, or similar where curators are regularly available
   • A list of all current curators, with a contact point for each
   • Links to all progress reports and all other transparency materials
   • Links to relevant documentation
2. Table of Child Bounties with status, name, description, amount, beneficiary username, beneficiary address, evidence, justification signed off by a curator
3. Monthly written report posted to the Governance section of the Polkadot Forum, signed off by at least one curator
   • Current status of projects
   • Current bounty balance
   • Current plans
   • Notable changes to scope, curation team, operations…
4. Quarterly financial statement
   • Balance
   • Income and Expenses
   • Summary of curator payments
   • Summary of payments by recipient
   • available in an open format (XLSX, CSV or similar)
5. Child Bounty descriptions in Subsquare/Polkassembly that contain the same information as defined in the child bounty table

4. Curators

1. Payments to curators are only allowed once the first deliverables are done.
2. Curators may not sign payments for work that they have executed.
3. Curators have to publicly declare and document any conflicts of interest that come up during their duty.
4. Curators have to report any misbehavior or other issues that conflict with the effective and efficient operation of the bounty.

[alice_und_bob]

Question: But isn’t such a WFC pointless? It is unenforceable.

Answer: It’s not about strict enforceability. It’s about setting social norms.

The outcome of the WFC vote will show how much stakeholders care about these standards. If there is a low amount of AYEs or a low approval rate, then they care less about it. If the outcome is strong, they care more. This can inform future actions by participants of the networks.

If there is strong acceptance for a standard, bounty curators have reasons to follow them or if they deviate explain why they do so. Deviating from the standard might be acceptable under the circumstances. On the other hand, in many cases, curators might be asked to follow the standards if they want to request additional funding.

[Felix]

Well thought… think you did a great job in reflecting & looking on some best pratices from bounties in action. One thing i’d like to add is actually the accessibility of bounties.

From own epxerience, its often a challenge to get access to bounties, and accessibility is a key to provide, especially if one is funded by the treasury. Think that e.g the Events bounty does a easy yet impactful deal with maintaining async conversation on Telegram and to host weekly open session where anyone is able to join, to quickly learn and engage. Doesnt cost a lot of time, but is definitely worth it. Not sure if it has to be weekly either but should be recurring. Ideally also asking the bounties to host their events on a shared calendar so anyone has an easy overview and direct access to speak with any bounty curators when needed.

[sodazone]

A rough consensus on bounty standards is much needed for the ecosystem. Wondering if we can go beyond voting to signal it, maybe embracing some social dynamics in the spirit of RFC 7282 - On Consensus and Humming in the IETF. Thoughts?

[lilymendzdev]

Excellent, this is something important for transparency in OpenGov; if I may, I’d like to add a few more points:

1. Criteria for curation (amounts by category), clearly shared from the beginning.
2. At least one team member should take on the role of secretary or assistant, responsible for gathering all information and keeping data up-to-date (social media, website, etc.). Perhaps this is more internal to the bounty, but I think many current bounties lack someone to carry out these tasks.

They could use the Bounty #17: Community Events website as a reference, which has almost all the information on their Notion. It may be a bit outdated, but this bounty, along with the Anti-Scam one, are the ones that share the most grouped information in one place.

Hopefully, the community will support this initiative, and we’ll be on our way to greater transparency in bounties, encouraging more people to join, participate, and contribute to the ecosystem.

[HopeClary]

I did this for the sun-settled Games Bounty. Team decided on a name, we secured all social media. I personally bought all of the URL bundles for Games Polkadot. I now own something I will never use as the bounty was rugged. No one was paid, as per other bounties and I wasn’t reimbursed for the purchases. However, I would do it again because it showed me all that was wrong. Too many bounties pop off and die unknown to many because we lack a central location to the bounties. I personally don’t even know all that are in existence. I only know 0f 3, Games, Events & Marketing. Additionally, more than half of the volunteer team Ghosted (no pun intended ) didn’t vote, or show face on meetings. I needed to replace several for those who volunteered to quit and others who just exited without saying a word to anyone. We received active skilled curators the last month of the bounty.

My greatest concern is delay of curator turnover. Our bounty got off the ground because a handful of us actively participated, but failed to fly in the end because the funding wasn’t controlled by all the active curators.

[wabkebab]

• Links to all progress reports and all other transparency materials

As bounties are sovereign, I think that the criteria approving or rejecting one project inside the bounty scope should be reported publicly, every month in the report or better, within the proposal comments.

Also, having standarised public criteria of the points that proposals are going to evaluate, improves standarization and transparency.

[alice_und_bob]

this is a really good RFC. thanks for that!

I wrote something in that direction recently, but this is helping a lot right now. Thanks!

[alice_und_bob]

Added an official communication channel as a requirement

[alice_und_bob]

@lilymendzdev

• Criteria for curation (amounts by category), clearly shared from the beginning.

added this

@lilymendzdev

• At least one team member should take on the role of secretary or assistant, responsible for gathering all information and keeping data up-to-date (social media, website, etc.). Perhaps this is more internal to the bounty, but I think many current bounties lack someone to carry out these tasks.

I am a bit hesitant to add suggestions about internal operations since there are numerous of those and it would quickly escalate and might provide a reason for discussions that are missing the main points of this doc.

I would rather suggest creating separate documents for suggestions and best practices.

[alice_und_bob]

The bounty you refer to was very degenerate in its inception (quasi-random selection of curators). The problems could also turn up in other instances, but I wouldn’t use it as a baseline model.

Touching on the point you brought up yesterday in AAG, that bounties might get into emergencies where they require quick changes, I think it should become obvious that these are situations where bounty curators could just go to OpenGov and resolve the situation.

Or in the case of spent funds, maybe request a tip to cover for initial costs. I think in many situations OpenGov might show understanding if the spending was reasonable and in good faith.

[alice_und_bob]

@wabkebab

As bounties are sovereign, I think that the criteria approving or rejecting one project inside the bounty scope should be reported publicly, every month in the report or better, within the proposal comments.

I think this is covered here, would you agree?

3. Table of Child Bounties with status, name, description, amount, beneficiary username, beneficiary address, evidence, justification signed off by a curator

[wabkebab]

Actually, my two ideas are linked:

If the judging criteria is public, then there is a known standard base of how everyone will be scored or justified.

Yes, this is inside justification - but i suggest to be more precise ( on how this justification should be made).

[lilymendzdev]

It’s sad that this happened, but as you mentioned, you now have the experience and will be able to organize a new bounty better. Perhaps you might be interested; I started a discussion in the forum about a central site where you can find information on all bounties, and I have managed to attract the attention of DaBlock, with whom we will work on a landing page that collects information on all the bounties there. That’s why this referendum is perfect.

[HopeClary]

Sorry, but I am not in agreement with your opinion. It takes a lot of time to dedicate ones self to participate in things within Polkadot. You have to outweigh the emotional cost verse the financial. Going for a Tip request for $30 dollar’s plus tax, wasn’t the point I was trying to suggest. I was trying to search on the Polkadot website the tracks for WFC and their timelines. Sadly there is no search yet. I am a HUGE advocate for meeting people where they’re. Having multiple places to search for things feels chaotic to me. However, we all have different perspectives and I can appreciate that.

My suggestion is bounties should have their own track. On this track it should last 1 week for approval or denial. Here you can remove and add curators and post financials once a month in addition to what has been funded, what child bounties are active and what milestones have been missed or achieved for the work funded by the bounty.

Appreciate you hearing my opinion.

[replghost]

In some sense, this is adding a level of human-level bureaucracy to bounties and a lot more inflexibility to bounty operations. It’s not bad per se, but I think the higher-level question is how to get to better bounties and better decision-making (both in accuracy and impact for the network). Adding rules/bureaucracy is one way to achieve that, and I fully believe that will need to be implemented over time. For now this seems like the stick in the “carrot and stick” approach, but with no carrot

Is there a case that has been made that these specific rules and improvements are designed in a way that they have maximum impact for effectiveness and minimum negatives? For instance, negatives might be that they throw bounties into confusion, are not enforceable, etc. Some bounties may not have the manpower, experience or compensated time/budget to perform all of these things based on how they were set up.

An alternate way to implement the same end goal is to incrementally improve bounties over time, and even set up an inspirational example to follow. For example, the event bounty is great at organizing things and communicating their decisions. Could we build up one or two bounties to be the gold standard (iterating on the points and reporting as needed), and then encourage other bounties to match this standard? This would be a positive team-based approach that celebrates wins and enables.

In addition, could we build up technology/product to help accomplish some of these tasks so that they aren’t replicated on every bounty in a manual way? E.g. the quarterly financial info looks like it could be pulled mostly from the blockchain, and the other reporting could be streamlined in the software that is being built, or we could put out an RFP for a bounty system that we all work together on designing.

Looking for ways for this to be participatory and inclusive, because that leads to buy-in which is needed.

From a legal/precedent perspective, this is a new step in OpenGov, because it aims to be one referendum that retroactively applies across a number of referendums that were previously passed by token holders.

What should happen in bounties where this work is not budgeted for previously? And at least theoretically, bounty curators are chosen for their subject matter expertise and decision-making. Should curators perform these tasks, or should some non-curator administrators perform them, in a similar way that ogtracker follows up on opengov?

[DAOplomats]

The Ideal case of such implementation will be having onchain tools, that can enforce the standards. These Bounty groups could be considered subDAOs directly under the control of token holders and the Opengov.
We probably need more DAO tooling to implement such things.

[lilymendzdev]

I understand your point of view, but I don’t believe, for example, that organizing the information on a simple Notion page would generate an extraordinary expense (again referring to Bounty #17), in case they can’t create a website (which would indeed generate a cost).

Honestly, I think it’s necessary for the team to share certain information openly; there are bounties where some curators don’t even have an on-chain identity.

Everything described in the post is just about being organized, copying data from one place to another, and that’s it. Payments for curators, beneficiaries, etc., can easily be managed in a Spreadsheet document.

These are things that help with transparency in OpenGov.