RE: A proposal about proposals
First, I don't think that vision ever worked very well, and second, we need a new vision that fits the current platform.
I agree the old model was questionable, but an atmosphere of growth and excitement tends to mask those sort of flaws, so they're more apparent now.
Meanwhile, the software libraries for open source development are slowly decaying while this fund sits there, untapped.
Are they decaying? Or just not being actively developed? Personally I suspect that the exchanges are not super keen on supporting Steem hard forks so any development would probably have to deliver some good benefits.
So, to me, the question is whether we - as a community - can find a way to modernize that doesn't require Steemit to sit in the first chair?
Maybe the problem would be easier to consider from the other direction. Maybe instead of trying to figure out a workaround to the "who decides?" question, if we had some solid ideas for what development was actually needed (eg what new features, etc.) and got community buyin on what should be implemented then maybe it would be easier to get consensus on who to fund to implement them.
I'm not worried as much about the blockchain itself (at least until there's a security exploit), but rather the supporting software that developers need like the cli wallet, steem-python, steemdb.io, steem-js. etc...
I guess one could argue that it's not decaying, but just not being maintained, but I see it as a form of decay when the underlying Open Source libraries are falling out of support, and the tools can't be operated on the latest operating system versions.
Agreed, but I'm not even thinking about new features at this point. First we need to manage the basic "blocking and tackling". I think that just getting software libraries up to date would make the platform more attractive to developers. I could be wrong, but I think there would be fairly broad consensus that these things are needed. After that, we can start thinking more about new features.
Here's an idea that potentially looks more decentralized: a person with a good reputation in the community can create a proposal that's something like "I want to offer a dev bounty for [insert needed dev support here]". The proposal gets funded, they accumulate the funds in their wallet, and they just hold it there until they're ready to pay out the bounty. An aspiring dev (if they exist) then doesn't have to face the nebulous "how do we convince people to pay us for this?" question, they have the face the potentially more tractable "what do I need to do to satisfy X's bounty?" question.
This might give the unilateral decision-making clarity of a CEO, but it doesn't have to look like the CEO of the whole blockchain, it's just one person among many running their own DAO-funded project.
Yeah, I've thought about that as a possibility, too. It's definitely a reasonable idea. Along the same lines, another possibility I have considered would be for an influential stakeholder to publish a "Request for Proposal" (RFP) in order to attract someone who could fulfill a need to submit their own proposal.
The drawback to the bounty is that you have to trust someone to hold the funds (unless it's mixed with some sort of escrow/multisig arrangement). The drawback to the RFP is that the person publishing the RFP may not be able to guarantee that any proposal would be approved.