Looking at the Steem Alliance Structure Proposals and Why I'm Not Participating with the Oracle-D Task

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So, I've been somewhat following Steem Alliance's progress since it was first announced on this blog post. I have to admit that I hadn't actually looked that closely into it, since that particular blog post contained a full transcript from Discord, which made it way too long and difficult to easily grasp what had been said.

Then, a couple of days ago @oracle-D launched their open task, with the goal of incentivizing people to write a non-biased overview of all the different proposals. Immediately after that task was launched, I received various PMs on Discord, asking me whether I was going to be writing a post for this task & what exactly The Steem Alliance was all about.

At that point, I still thought that I was just going to go over every proposal and complete a neutral comparison post about it in no time. Oh boy, was I wrong about that!

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The Intro

This is were the first signs of trouble appeared, I tried answering a simple question for my introduction to Steem Alliance's Structure Proposals.

Why do we have to vote?

While this question is answered in this blog post made over 2 months ago. I really had to dig in order to find it, as far as I know no other references were made in the subsequent Steem Alliance blog posts.

Just learning about what Steem Alliance stands for was no easy task. All the information was very spread out and reading through single blog posts was kinda hit or miss.

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The Structure Proposals

Okay, so it was a little bit difficult to grasp what Steem Alliance was all about, no big deal, that's why they want people working on this task for Oracle-D.

It wasn't until I started comparing each Structure Proposal, that I encountered a real problem for me to continue writing my comparison post. For this particular Oracle-D task, we had to compare the different proposals using different parameters.

Example:

• Main Goals (What does the foundation want to achieve?)
• Primary Structure (Non Profit/For Profit etc)
• Leadership Structure (If there is leadership, how is it structured? Who chooses the head and tail of the directive group?)
• Decision-Making (How will decisions within the foundation be made? And by who?)
• Funding Allocation (Who will be approving funding and how will it be distributed?)
• Community Involvement (How will the community be involved, if at all?)
• Transparency/Accountability (How will the foundation ensure transparency and how will the community be able to hold them accountable?)

Source: Oracle-D Task

When I went on to gather that data from each individual proposal, my head started to spin a little. When I went on to look at how some of the other task participants had compiled this overload of information, I noticed that they were having trouble as well.

The only person who had managed to create a perfect comparison chart, was my buddy @bozz. He did an amazing job, but even his chart doesn't exactly make you that much wiser about Steem Alliance's Structure Proposals. He also mentioned to me what a pain it was to find the correct information to fill in all the parameters.

_{Source: @bozz task entry}

The information presented on this chart isn't exactly easy to comprehend straight away, which I can assure you, is not due to @bozz his writing.

That's the main problem with this initiative, at least when trying to complete the Oracle-D task. You spend an enormous amount of time trying to compile this information into a readable article and the end result is still something that's way too complicated for people to understand. I can only assume that this would have played a very big part in why so few people decided to register to vote.

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Improvements

I mean, it's a bit late to come up with improvements, but it still might be useful to know that a lot of people would benefit from having everything explained in a more comprehensible manner.

If you want the attention of the average Steemian, it might be better to write shorter announcement posts and focus on using language that conveys key concepts fast and easy. This should also be applicable to the Structure Proposals themselves.

What also surprised me, was that most of the Structure Proposals were issuing proposals with an incredibly wide scope. I honestly would have expected more fine-tuned ideas that related to one particular aspect of Steem. This is just an observation, not really a critique.

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Conclusion

I personally found that trying to understand everything presented by the Steem Alliance, would be too big of a time-sink for me personally, which is why I chose not to write an article for the Oracle-D task.

Looking at some of the DMs I've received and how many task entries have been submitted so far, I think that I'm not the only one who came to the same conclusion.

I did notice some interesting proposals in the end, some of which might have a big impact on Steem in the future. Although I did notice a lot of overlap between some projects. Time will tell I guess...

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