Proposal to create Dash Watch, a team and web app that facilitates treasury proposal reviews/updates.
This proposal requests a one-time payment of 45 DASH to fund a new program called Dash Watch. Dash Watch is a web application and proposal review team aimed at providing greater insight into how treasury funds are used. Dash's informal pre-proposal process aims to gather information before a project is funded. Dash Watch aims to gather data (e.g. deliverable milestones, project updates, proposal reviews, etc) after a proposal has been funded - it can be thought of as a post-proposal process. This information will help the Dash community track funded proposals. This will shine a light on treasury contractors, either for bad or for good.
Over the last several months, I often wished there were a way to keep up-to-date with how all of the various exciting approved proposals were going, and I thought that if I did, perhaps others did as well. Dash Force has done a great job covering many of these proposals, but there are simply too many at this point for them to cover them all. I would like to get the community's feedback about the idea of building a small team and website called dashwatch.org to follow up with and thoroughly document approved/ongoing proposals at least once per month if not weekly on behalf of the Dash DAO. In addition to updates and overall progress reports, we would try to include regular video or phone interviews when possible with those responsible for carrying out proposals. If the community wants, we would also design a place on this website for interactive discussion between proposal owners and community members for better communication and transparency.
You may know me from slack, but in case you don't, I've been an active community member and big believer in Dash since last year. I paid for one of the developers I employ to build http://www.dash.dog which monitors Dash's price and network in real-time. I've really enjoyed getting to know all of you and being part of the first successful self-funding DAO in history and I'm sure all of you cherish this opportunity as much as I do.
Dash Watch will somewhat serve the role of a protector and guardian of the generous Dash DAO and a researcher of how all proposals are advancing. Dash is a very giving community but none of us wants to be taken advantage of. We will strive to be the eyes and ears for the masternodes who can't be expected to monitor all proposals. We will be making sure that those receiving funding are followed dilligently and that they know they are going to be held publicly accountable to deliver on their promises. However, we want to mostly be a source of positivity to relay the overwhelming number of dedicated Dash contractors whose proposals are adding great value currently and or which hold tremendous promise in the near future. By fully documenting this, we expect those less familiar with Dash to better appreciate its vastly underestimated potential, and we will also be keeping Dashforcenews completely in the loop of all the significant discoveries we make for enhanced media coverage.
At least to start, unless the community feels otherwise, we would not intend to spend too much time posting updates on Dash Core/Force proposals since they are both very busy, have overwhelming support and the work they are doing is much more apparent than that of other proposals. However, please let us know if you feel differently about this as our goal is solely to spend our time in the way that best serves the masternodes and the network.
With around 20+ proposals getting approved by the DAO each month and that expected only to grow as our budget grows, it is increasingly important for the Dash community to be kept more informed about the proposals that it invests in. All Dash holders deserve to be able to track the progress of the network's investments so they can learn from the proposals which are successful and those that aren't, adjust their vote/s accordingly, properly recognize those who have done a stellar job and be made aware of those who haven't.
We will strive to publish as factual information as possible in these progress reports rather than opinions, and we will only cover approved proposals unlike previous ideas which sought to evaluate proposals before approval. We believe strongly that in order for the masternodes to form the best collective consensus, we should stay out of the business of giving our opinion and let the masternodes form independent opinions themselves given the objective information that we intend to supply them with.
- Publicly accessible store of (pre- and post-) proposal data (database)
- API to access data (back-end application)
- Web application to view proposal data (front-end application)
- Initial review of key subset of existing proposals (sample proposal review)
- Deliverable 1 (database): 2017.10.07
- Deliverable 2 (back-end app): 2017.10.14
- Deliverable 3 (front-end app): 2017.10.21
- Deliverable 4 (sample review): 2017.10.28
This will effectively be a full-time job for me and and one other and likely part-time for the web developer, however, since we cannot predict exactly how much work it will take upfront, we will give our best estimate and any excess will be used to fund future months.
Pay will be spread between 3 people with varying salaries depending on skill level to communicate with and formally document in detail the progress of ongoing proposals with interviews when permitted all published as frequently as possible to dashwatch.org
This will include the cost to do the outreach and solication of updates on all of the last 6 months of approved and ongoing proposals, the writeup of all the progress into easy-to-follow reports, the interviews we will try to schedule as often as we can on behalf of the network, and building and maintaining the website.
| Item | Cost | Units | Comment |
|---|---|---|---|
| Labor | 40 | DASH | Initial MVP application & sample review (400 man-hours) |
| Proposal fee | 5 | DASH | Reimburse fee to submit this proposal |
| Total | 45 | DASH | Equates to $12,000 + $1,500 = $13,500 (USD) |
We are requesting a single, one-time payment of 45 DASH to accomplish this scope of work. For this program to be a success it will need long-term support. On-going support would include proposal reviews and database population. We will get feedback from the community regarding how we should procede in the future (additional features, more and/or greater-depth reivews, etc).
To conclude, currently, masternodes do not have a quick and easy way to assess the staus of all the proposals they have voted for and to exercise oversight over them. We believe this will lead to lower accountability, missed deadlines, inefficiencies, preventable monetary waste and loss, and the network likely being taken advantage of repeatedly, and we do not want to see this happen.
Just as an example, when I brought this idea up to troydash in Slack, it made him remember Roberto Azar's proposal for a full-time support chat/staff on the dash.org website many months ago which was approved but never carried out due to issues with Core. Troy publicly paged Roberto Azar when I brought this idea up and Roberto promptly responded that he was sorry he was unable to do the job but that he was more than willing to return the funds to Core. This is an example how a relatively small amount of due dilligence can yield a surprisingly significant return for the network, and yes the network is now expected to be receiving back all of that money, but it would be dashwatch.org's job to follow up and make sure these types of things happen.
As we said above, we believe masternodes absolutely deserve to have as much information as possible at their disposal on the status of approved proposals so they can better determine what to maintain or discontinue their support for but also so that they can learn from their past successes and failures what types of proposals are most likely to produce a worthwhile return for Dash.