Proposal for a Bounty Management Forum
There has been a lot of talk about wanting Steemit.com development to be completed faster. Two months ago, @ned proposed a great idea that would help speed up the Steemit.com development process - bounties. Unfortunately, I feel that we as a community dropped the ball on delivering a key feature that Steemit, Inc. needed to incentivize more development. We have created all kinds of awesome apps, but we never gave Ned his bounty management system!
Several users (myself, @knircky, and @dantheman included) have been creating 'informal' bounties to incentivize the community to complete various tasks, but a formalized bounty system would drastically increase participation in the bounty process.
I know the main reason that the bounty system died was that the bounty milestone payments for 2 and 3 were not enough to cover the amount of work required to implement the systems being proposed.
What I propose is that instead of developing a full-blown 'ideal' bounty management system (with all the bells-and-whistles), we just create something basic. Let's not let awesome be the enemy of good. At this point something is better than nothing. As long as it works and does the job, it's better than what we currently have!
Here is the proposal for a simple / easy to build bounty management system:
Bounty Fund Raising Posts
- User creates a post with whatever subject and content they want
- User defines the collection period: 24h or 24h + 30d
- User defines a unique bounty ID (example: "MyNewBounty")
Note - this does not need to be unique across all user's bounties - just the bounties that this user has created. - The community can upvote the post to contribute to the bounty
- The community can transfer SBD/STEEM to the user with the bounty ID as the memo to contribute to the bounty as well
Bounty Proposal Posts
- User creates a post with whatever subject and content they want.
- User defines the details of the bounty, including the bounty amount and payment terms.
- The community can discuss and participate in the bounty via the comments.
Bounty Definition Posts
- User creates a "decline payout" post to add the bounty into the bounty system
- The bounty definition post should use a unique tag (defined by the developer)
- The subject must follow a specific format, defined by the developer who implements the system
- The body must follow a specific format, defined by the developer who implements the system
- As part of the body, the content will include name/value token pairs that define:
The bounty subject
The bounty amount
An expiration date after which the bounty will be automatically closed (required)
The bounty id (unique across all the user's bounties)
A link to the bounty post describing the bounty
Bounty Status Update Posts
- User creates "decline payout" posts to update the status of the bounty as needed
- The bounty status update posts should use a unique tag (defined by the developer)
- The subject must follow a specific format, defined by the developer who implements the system
- The body must follow a specific format, defined by the developer who implements the system
- As part of the body, the content will include a value that defines the status:
Raising Funds
Open
Locked (another user is exclusively working on it, a bounty claim is being evaluated, etc.)
Completed
Void
Front End Bounty UI
- The bounty UI would collect and process all "Bounty Definition" and "Bounty Status Update" posts from the blockchain
- The bounty UI would render all of the bounties in an easy to view manner
- The bounty UI would show the reputation of the user proposing the bounty
- The bounty UI could be linked to from either the hamburger menu or the Steemit App Center
- Ideally filters and sorting should be included
- A page where the user can generate the markdown text for the "Bounty Definition" and "Bounty Status Update" posts by entering the necessary parameters into a form.
Payments, Disputes, Etc.
- The purpose of the Bounty Management Forum will just be to display the bounties. It will not handle payments or milestone verification at all.
- Users are transparently interacting with other members of the community through the blockchain. (Hopefully that will be good enough.)
This is a rough proposal, and there are still a few details that would need to be worked out. I think it provides the framework for a system that could be developed relatively easily in ~2 weeks though.
I know that the original "milestone 1" bounty is no longer available. I am just creating it in the hopes that a community developer can take it and run with it to complete milestones 2 and 3, which as far as I know are still unclaimed.
A bounty management system would be great; I doubt a custom one needs to be built, though. Is there not an existing service we could use?
I'm not very familiar with what all is out there as far as bounty management systems, but this post from one of the users in the community seemed to do a pretty good job reviewing the main existing sites.
[Edit] It seemed like what @ned was looking for though was something that could tie into STEEM/SBD, and be linked to from Steemit.
We can ultimately just pay in STEEM/SBD, but that part is going to happen manually anyway so the bounty management app doesn't need to explicitly support it.
I'll check out that post.
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This sounds a good start to me, in particular as anyone is always welcome to interact at any level.
It is a fairly big project in itself but it would facilitate faster fund accumulation for development projects. It could be implemented in the witness or spun on a side chain.
Ah, I haven't even thought about development for too long. All SteemFEST in fact. I need to do something about my laptop...
It should be able to be it's own standalone site, similar to many of the Steem tools apps. It might sound difficult, but it's actually a lot less coding than a lot of the apps the community has already developed. Someone who knows how to query the blockchain and build a simple UI should be able to put it together fairly quickly.
Now this is a change I like. Let's do it.
Sounds great! And I love the ending the word "open proposal".
I was just about to comment when reading this part:
I agree, at least now we have a start. and this start can be upgraded further when needed by the community in an open-source platform. :) Hope it gets more attention this time, that's probably what it needs the most! Now would be a better time to experiment with these things than ever considering we are still in beta. :)
Exactly! :)
You are always thinking about the community and how to make it better! I appreciate you so much! I'm not a developer or programmer but I understand incentives. Hopefully a good amount of people will support this. I would be willing to donate the funds from some of my posts to help Steemit become a better place!
You're awesome too @merej99! The community benefits a ton from having you here :)