Community Engagement Program v0.4

We are happy to announce the CEP (Community Engagement Program). The purpose of this process is to match developers with immediate and fundamental SAFE Network requirements. This will take the form of a community funded ‘kickstarter’ like process to encourage developers, designer, animators, content creators and others to bid for projects, either as teams or as individuals. MaidSafe has set aside a significant amount of MaidSafeCoin to contribute toward these projects.

Each project will be identified up front as being in demand by creating a topic within the appropriate section of the forum (RFP Ideas). Members of the community will vote and should the idea have sufficient support, it will be included in a poll (in #community:polls). The person who wins the poll will raise a Request For Proposals (RFP). This will be posted in RFPs. Teams or individuals will propose a costed solution (in MAID) for each small proposal. It is anticipated that these will be mostly small (6 weeks or less) projects and will primarily cover end-user applications, videos and animations, designs and content campaigns, but may also include core network components. People answering RFPs will have 2 weeks to do so.

This proposed process is the continuation of an experiment to see if this way of working is both effective and scalable moving forward, only by running/cycling through this way of working will we truly understand its feasibility.

It is important to note that apps made as part of the Community Engagement Program will not be safecoin earning, so they will be effectively paid as core rewards. In this sense, the term ‘core’ refers more toward features/functionality seen to be of high importance to the network, as opposed to applications as found in the most wanted app threads on the forum…etc…

Applicants will be responding to a set of requirements established initially by MaidSafe and adapted to take into account community feedback. The community themselves will of course complement and expand on this process as it becomes more established, incorporating community based proposals. It is the intention that CEP projects will be 50% funded by MaidSafe and 50% by the community. Please note: the donation of MaidSafeCoin in no way represents an investment. It is simply a voluntary contribution made by members of the community towards the direction of the project as a whole. If projects achieve less than 100% of the projected costs, it is up to them if they proceed. MaidSafe will assign a member of the company, whose skills and experience best suit the project, to oversee and act as the main point of contact.

In time, we anticipate that a number of these proposals will run in tandem, however, we intend on only running one project at a time initially as the process is established.

Process

It is suggested that keeping the approach simple and using as few new tools as possible would be advantageous. Using the forum would keep community communication in one place and will ensure maximum participation. The process will work as follows:

  • Under the Community category, three new forum categories have been created:

    • RFP Ideas

    • RFPs (Request for Proposals)

    • Proposals

  • Potential ideas for the CEP are raised in RFP Ideas. Community members can use their limited amount of votes to vote for ideas they would like to see become RFPs. Every few weeks, the top 5 ideas with the most votes will be included in a poll (in #community:polls). The voting period for the poll will last for 1 week. The person who wins the poll will document their idea and add it into the RFPs category within the forum. Each new RFP will have its own topic where the community and the prospective applicant(s) can ask questions to clarify any points.

  • An applicant has 2 weeks (application period) to submit a proposal for their chosen RFP. Proposals will be posted in Proposals and each will have its own topic within which anyone in the community will have the opportunity to question the applicants about any part of their proposal.

  • At the end of the application period, a MaidSafeCoin wallet will be set up for each of the RFP applicants. These wallets will be controlled by MaidSafe.

  • Both MaidSafe and individual members of the community will vote by sending MAID to the most compelling proposal if it is something they are willing to support. This voting period will last for 1 week.

  • The successful applicant will be the one whose wallet has collected the most MAID and the total of all wallets that relate to the new RFP will be transferred into the wallet designated for the successful applicant and paid on completion of the work and/or agreed project milestone.

Proposals

The content of each proposal is up to each applicant. Demonstrating experience, the cost, capability and competency (maybe even a proof of concept) is likely to resonate well with potential supporters. The proposal could take many forms, if you are unsure what works best Kickstarter offers some advice in this area.

The proposal should specify the abstract of the implementation plan and also a time frame for a proof of concept. Importantly, the proposal should include a budget requirement in MaidSafeCoin. Please do NOT include a donation address or similar. MaidSafe will provide the address for each applicant and the winner will receive the funds. For the avoidance of doubt this is a winner takes all system. Payment will only be made upon delivery of the project and after community acceptance via live testing on either the testnet or live network.

Funding

  • Like any other community member, MaidSafe may choose not to support any of the proposals. It may also be the case that some projects are 100% funded without MaidSafe’s support. Alternatively, there may be some projects that MaidSafe funds without community backing, if it’s desirable for the core protocols and network.

  • All proposals will be costed by each applicant.

  • The project payment will be made upon completion by MaidSafe and with any community groups/admins of the CEP.

  • Part payments may be also be made in larger projects, once agreed milestones have been met.

  • The MaidSafe project lead will verify that the agreed project objectives/milestones have been met on behalf of the community. This will include running proof of concept and/or finished projects on a testnet, or on the main network if it is an application and part of this process will involve a basic security audit on the code.

  • If project proposals end up overfunded then it will be expected they also achieve any stretch goals laid out in their proposal. We also anticipate a faster more focussed delivery in this case.

  • Just to be clear, MaidSafe are not soliciting private approaches for MAID funding, proposals should only be sent in response to an RFP (Request for Proposals).

Notes

  • Features or fixes that integrate directly (e.g. static or dynamic linking) with or are part of the core libraries must adopt the dual license and the applicant must agree to the contributor agreement.

  • Any app that uses the bindings (Node.js, Java, C# or Web API) is free to choose any acceptable open source or Creative Commons license.

  • Project support may be withdrawn by the community, and/or MaidSafe, if a project misses agreed milestones, falls into a period of inactivity, or something outside the project’s control makes successful delivery untenable.

41 Likes

Hi, it’s great to see this back.

Quick question: what is the time limit to submit a new app/feature/project before the polling starts?

EDIT: I didn’t see the last update when I posted this. So then I guess my question would be, do we have an idea of when the community will be able to send its ideas and concepts for a RFP?

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I think as soon as this CEP is part way through the process @DavidMtl, once we have selected the winner of the Safecoin video. Reason being that we want to make sure the process works well before adding more. Sound OK?

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Sounds good yes. Gives me a bit more time to finish my concept :wink: .

Question: when the next CEP starts, will you define the subject of the CEP? For example, the next CEP would be for a social app, then the one after a promo video, etc. Or will the subject and objective of the next CEP be more loosely defined?

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Look forward to seeing your concept David.

The next CEP is likely to be completely open with the subject and objective to be defined by the person requesting the CEP. Should the idea garner sufficient support then you would write up the RFP and make a proposal if you were keen to carry out the work yourself or with colleagues.

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If it’s going to be a crowd funding contributing only MAID its hard to have this program when the transaction fee of maid is like $40 per transaction. So if you want to do this first need token on another network. Perhaps Waves or NEM.

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What does @maidsafe think about connecting this CEP with a marketing action group? Marketing Community Action Group

Once projects are delivering the CEP can move the project into the marketing action group for obvious reasons.

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I’ll let @SarahPentland come back on this when she gets in the office tomorrow. I think it’s great you are thinking about these things and there are a couple of things we are working on in the background (this will soon become more public) that you are likely to want to get involved in. One initial thought I have is do we need to set up a group to do this as people that like marketing and want to get involved will, and those that don’t won’t. I probably need to give it a little more thought though. Thanks again!

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Hello all!

If anybody is looking for UX/UI/Product/Visual/Graphic design help,
just ping me. I am looking for new challenges for 2018 :wink:

info@majobalko.com

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Sure.

To sway your thinking.

So my thinking behind the Action group is purely organisational. But in that comes benefits. If we can organise we should see better management of tasks and projects be they Maidsafe or community led in this marketing domain and hence higher quality results.

There is a lot to do as you understand better than anyone so better the prepared and organised group of action takers which will almost certainly guarantee results as compared without.

But also we can build all the apps features and things we want but if we don’t actively either as a whole or a cell within our group work to tell people about these things we’re not giving those apps the the attention they deserve and possibly they become a waste of energy.

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Jump in here bro Marketing Community Action Group

Once we get a couple people interested we can start.

I might actually hit you up for an image I’m thinking about for a new article I’m planning.

Do you do any of those explainer images? I forget what they are called. Infographic maybe?

I got a team for that if you want.

Can check out my SAFE-FS Instagram for some examples, and I also use them to help the Gamerbits instagram and some other crypto projects.

Can let me know if you need any image work or infographics

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Yeah I need an info graphic comparison between crypto currency mining and safecoin farming. The whole idea is to show the important bits of Info but for the viewer to see how much simpler it will be and cheaper.

It needs to look cartoony but professional and it’ll be posted on medium along with my new article.

I imagined it side by side comparison.

The article targets people who want to mine but can’t because it’s too expensive or too hard but they still want to enter crypto and they want to make money in the process.

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Yes I could help you with infographics as well :wink: ping me a message or info@majobalko.com

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I think it’s a great idea. I really hope to see Maidsafe improve in marketing a lot and i’d like to help you!

Hey everyone, today we added a new category called #community:ideas and updated the following parts of the OP:

Each project will be identified up front as being in demand by creating a topic within the appropriate section of the forum (#community:ideas). Members of the community will vote and should the idea have sufficient support, it will be included in a poll (in #community:polls). The person who wins the poll will raise a Request For Proposals (RFP). This will be posted in RFPs.

[…]

  • Potential ideas for the CEP are raised in #community:ideas. Community members can use their limited amount of votes to vote for ideas they would like to see become RFPs. Every few weeks, the top 5 ideas with the most votes will be included in a poll (in #community:polls). The voting period for the poll will last for 1 week. The person who wins the poll will document their idea and add it into the RFPs category within the forum. Each new RFP will have its own topic where the community and the prospective applicant(s) can ask questions to clarify any points.

The advantage of this approach is that people who want to suggest ideas won’t need to include a poll in the topic they create (instead, MaidSafe will take care of creating polls that include the ideas with the most votes) and also it will be much easier for us to see which ideas have more community support (because we will be able to sort the list of topics in the Ideas category by number of votes). With individual polls in each topic, it would be a bit harder to figure out which ideas have more community support (since we would have to compare the results of each poll individually).

We will be testing out this new approach for the next CEP. We have made a few decisions that we think might work well as a starting point.

Every few weeks, the top 5 ideas with the most votes will be included in a poll (in #community:polls).

Depending on the number of ideas that are submitted, we might do polls for selecting new RFPs more often and on a regular basis (e.g. every 2 weeks). Initially, we think we should just do 1 poll every few weeks for the first few times we run through the process. We would rather start small and scale up initially as going too fast with too many projects could turn a bit messy if we don’t stay on top of things.

Also, a poll might include more than 5 options (e.g. we could include the top 10 ideas with the most votes) if many ideas are submitted around the same time.

Community members can use their limited amount of votes to vote for ideas they would like to see become RFPs.

The way the Discourse Voting plugin works is that each topic in the #community:ideas category will have a Vote button next to it:

Forum users have a limited amount of votes that they can use to vote for ideas they would like to see become RFPs. If a user runs out of votes, they can cancel some of their active votes by clicking on the Vote button again. This will let them reclaim one of their votes. They’ll then be able to use it to vote for another idea.

Also, when a topic in #community:ideas is closed or archived (e.g. because an idea that was suggested by a community member won one of the polls and got submitted as an RFP), the votes are released to the users and can be applied to other ideas.

Here are the initial settings we chose for the Voting plugin:

Trust level 1 users can have 5 active votes at a given time, while trust level 2 users and above can have 10 active votes. The reason for this is to make it a bit harder for people to vote using multiple accounts (reaching trust level 1 is a lot easier compared to reaching trust level 2).

Please keep in mind that these settings are just a starting point and we are definitely open to making changes to them based on feedback we receive from the community :slightly_smiling_face:

Feel free to let us know if you have any questions about this process.

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Here’s what I think could be a topic worth discussing: funding specific marketing initiatives (e.g. a community sponsored winner’s purse for the upcoming SAFE Network hackathon) or reigniting the Community Engagement Program (e.g. to develop standard content to distribute at meetups, raise funds to support new exchange listings, etc.). These would be specific, auxiliary initiatives that people could willingly choose to support.

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I’d be happy to add to that pot :slightly_smiling_face:

I know there are more apps being developed within the community but many seem to prefer working under the radar which gives the impression that no one is developing for SAFE (clearly not true) and because of this I would really like to see more open development.

I can at the same time understand the hesitation in some circumstances but If you are developing an app for SAFE you should consider sharing it will only help gain excitement for SAFE and your app simultaneously.

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I can add to that that I will advertise your SAFE app with posters when the time has come :slight_smile:

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Can’t wait to share the new logo and possibly some infographics with you in the next couple months @Dimitar. Really appreciate you’d do that for SAFE apps!

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