This document proposes the creation of a new organization called Dash Hive.
If you have limited time, the Overview should give you enough of an idea to cast a reasonably-informed vote. Further information is available in later sections and separate documents.
I'm proposing to create a new organization called Dash Hive. It would function closely to that of a traditional cooperative (co-op), and would be funded regularly by the Dash Treasury. This proposal is accompanied by a letter of intent (LOI), because Dash Hive plans to do a significant amount of work prior to requesting funding. This document sketches out a preliminary scope of work, a rough schedule, and an expected future budget, but requests no funds at this time. The purpose of the LOI is to express an explicit (but non-binding) partnership between Dash Hive and the Dash Treasury. It also provides us with a reasonable assurance that satisfactory work will be compensated.
Dash's payment and governance mechanism (commonly called the Dash Treasury) has been operating since August 2015. To date, most proposals involve a request for up-front payment and a promise to deliver a product or service afterwards. Many proposals have received payment but not delivered on their promises. Because most proposals use this pre-payment approach, the bulk of the risk (downside) has fallen on MNOs, with the bulk of the reward (upside) being left to treasury contractors.
Unrelated, over the past 10 months a strong community of Dash enthusiasts has emerged in Salt Lake City (SLC), Utah, USA. As the organizer of the SLC Dash meetup, comprised of nearly 200 members, I've spoken with dozens of people eager to put their talents to work for Dash. However, most are not able to spend the time to come up with proposal ideas, build a reputation in the various forums, and navigate their way through the proposal submission process, including fronting the $2,000+ cost to make the attempt to work for Dash.
Over the past year I have submitted several proposals (two passing and one receiving majority support, but falling short of the required 10% supermajority). All of my proposals (including this one) have had roughly the same goal -- to build a community of Dash users, and do so in a sustainable and decentralizing manner. My most recent proposal presented the general idea of Dash Treasury co-ops, without respect or reference to any specific group. That proposal passed, indicating a relatively positive sentiment towards the co-op scaling principle in general. This proposal takes that a step further by asking for feedback (in the form of a vote) about supporting a specific co-op, organized by me (@rion on the various Dash forums).
My main motivation in forming Dash Hive is to jump-start a concentrated, local economy of dash users, including both:
- a work force earning (at least partial) income in Dash and providing valuable products and services to Dash,
- a merchant base both supported by and supporting the workforce in economic exchange in Dash.
The best way to promote (brick & mortar) merchant adoption is to create a (local) work force. The logic is as follows:
- If someone buys dash they are unlikely to spend it
- Those who exchange dash for local currencies have, in doing so, expressed their preference to hold it
- This person values Dash more as an investment than a currency
- They will likely prefer to spend their local currency over spending dash
- Alternatively, if someone earns Dash, they are likely to spend it
- People need to consume to survive
- People will generally shop using the most convenient, inexpensive, fast, and enjoyable method available
- Using dash is all of those things, provided consumers can find merchants who offer what we need
- The greater the portion of one's income is earned in Dash, the more Dash they will need to spend
- The more consumers earn in Dash, the more support Dash-accepting merchants will get.
We have a treasury with extra funds each month, a local community (SLC) with hundreds of talented people who would love to work for dash. We should marry idle talent with idle money.
What about the potential waste/fraud/abuse that can come with dash 'handouts'? In contrast to the typical pre-payment approach taken by most proposals, Dash Hive would work on a post-payment basis, shifting all the risk from the treasury to Dash Hive -- the co-op may potentially perform work and not get paid, but the opposite (getting paid and not performing) is not possible. The LOI helps mitigate the newly placed risk on the co-op.
The initial scope of work primarily involves organizing the co-op. Members will be mostly local to the SLC metro area. In addition to organizing the co-op we will also provide one or two sample projects to give the community an idea of what kinds of things we can do for Dash. It's important to emphasize that these sample projects just illustrate kinds of things Dash Hive can do. We will start with a focus on software development, but this is only one area of service we see in our long-term vision.
One of the purposes of building a long-term team is that we can have a work force that can be solicited to build whatever the community wants over time. Instead of needing to create a team for every specific idea that comes up, Dash Hive would be an on-call resource ready to deliver. Anyone could submit a request for proposal (RFP) and tell us what you want built. From that we would make a formal proposal with a detailed scope of work, schedule for delivery, and budget with itemized costs. In order to accept RFPs we'd need to first build a tool for managing such. Developing a basic proof-of-concept for this is included in the list below.
Deliverables for this proposal include the following:
- Dash Hive meta deliverables
- Articles of Organization for Dash Hive, including membership and compensation guidelines
- List of initial members, recruited first from local meetup members interested in deeper involvment
- List of services our members can provide to Dash (member skills and availability)
- Basic website displaying information about the co-op, its key members, and current projects
- Dash Hive projects
- Paper Wallet Tool project deliverables
- Request for Proposal Tool project deliverables
The RFP tool, although built by us, could be used by any other independent team (existing or future). This is the whole idea of community-funded, open-source products - they benefit everyone.
We will commmence work on the deliverables above as soon as we see promising support during the voting. We expect to accomplish all the above in time to request remuneration in the next proposal cycle, however, it may be the cycle following that if there are unexpected complications or scope enhancements.
In general a given proposal will include the following:
- A request for funds for work completed from the prvious proposal
- Plans and budgetary estimates for future work.
In other words, the budget section of proposals will always include some kind of Past Remuneration sub-section as well as a Future Budgetary Estimate sub-section. The following is an example of the structure (content will, of course, change over time):
A considerable amount of work has been expended in building the local community to a point we are ready to propose the creation of Dash Hive. However, no compensation is expected for past, unsolicited work. This proposal only requests 5 DASH to reimburse the proposal submission fee.
In addition to not requesting any funds for this month/cycle, we also do not expect to request (m)any funds for next month/cycle either. There are extra funds left over from the TEDxSLC proposal from several months ago, just over 20 DASH. Alex's TEDxSLC proposal suggested that any extra funds could be used to support the local SLC Dash meetup. So far the meetup has not used any of those funds. We propose to re-purpose those ~20 DASH to this effort. Dash Hive will use part of the funds to sponsor meetup costs, but that won't amount to much compared to the left-over funds available. The remaining funds will be used to compensate people for accomplishing the deliverables above.
Forming Dash Hive would provide the following benefits:
- It would put idle talent to work for dash
- It would reduce overhead at both ends of treasury proposals:
- MNOs wouldn't need to vet as many people for a given work force
- Individuals wouldn't need to establish reputations before working for dash
- It would eliminate contractor delivery risk (no scams or underperforming projects possible)
- It would provide a simple path to employment for newcomers to Dash.
- It would open/expand the opportunity for MNOs to initiate RFPs
- Co-op skills and qualifications would be expanded and updated regularly
- MNOs would be able to rely on a trust-less and steadily-available workforce
- Community members could submit requests for products and services they think Dash Hive could deliver
- it would prime SLC to be a future test-bed for pilot programs
- Merchant adoption programs
- A branch office with physical, consumer-facing stores/info desks, etc
The co-op plans to start small, but scale its scopes of work and requested budget gradually, as we deliver products and administer services successfully. We are more than happy to modify our approach based on community feedback. Please comment on Dash Central with any ideas you might have for products and services you want. We welcome RFPs and are optimistic that we can find the talent to accomplish such.