- CURRENT DEADLINE: Midnight UTC on July 25, 2020
- CURRENT ROUND BUDGET: 80mn
When you begin thinking about writing proposals, the first thing you need to understand is that writing Network Steward project proposals is not meant to be a profitable endevor. When you mine PKT, you're mining against all of the other miners, when you buy it in a private trade you're bidding against all of the other buyers, and when you apply for projects, you're competing against all of the other applicants.
Therefore you should think of making a project proposal as a partnership which allows you to expand your contributions to the PKT ecosystem.
The existing projects, both those accepted and those rejected provide a valuable resource for learning what the Network Steward is looking for. You can go to all of the projects which have been accepted and projects which failed and you'll find the project proposal in the Files changed tab and you'll find the review information in the comments.
The Network Steward maintains a list of
project ideas which are in
the overall plan for the PKT project. However, this list is not exhaustive and the Network Steward
will consider ideas not on the list nonetheless. If your idea is not listed, https://pkt.chat/ and
talk about what what your idea in the #network-steward room. Nobody has to reply, but you may
start some useful conversations.
The Network Steward process requires that a project must help the PKT ecosystem as a whole without giving any unfair advantage to anyone in it. Unfair advantage can look like any of the following:
- Charging for inflated labor costs or hours
- Using project funds to develop intellectual property which give you competitive advantage
- Using project funds to grow your business
A simple recipe for a project which does not have unfair advantage is to develop software at a competitive price and release it to the PKT community under an open source license. If this recipe doesn't work for you, there are other solutions but they will require more extensive documentation to prove that the proposal is fair.
There is a template for project proposals, use it. Make a first pass and fill in everything you're sure of, then take everything you're not sure of and make a todo list.
This is super important, if an applicant requests in a project without adaquate success criteria, the Network Steward cannot be sure that they plan on doing much of anything, and when it comes time to submit a milestone report, the Network Steward will be unable to effectively argue that the work was not done because the work was so vaguely specified that almost anything counts as success.
Success criteria should be specific and measurable: when you file your milestone report, the Network Steward will compare the results to the success criteria in order to determine whether you have achieved your objectives.
Good success criteria include:
- A user will be able to connect to a cjdns VPN from an app in the Android app store
- The address page on the block explorer will have a chart showing income per day
- With the wallet, a user will be able to pay multiple addresses in a single transaction
Bad success criteria include:
- The app works on Android
- This is completely unclear about whether the Android needs to be rooted to work, or what "works" even means at all, so as a result, a project with this criterion could technically succeed at this without doing nearly any actual work
- The block explorer will show income
- Without specifying that there is a chart, saying it will show income could just mean you can look at transactions which every block explorer supports
- The wallet will allow payment to multiple addresses
- Without specifying "in a single transaction", any wallet imaginable would support this
After you have defined the project, you will need to estimate how much time it will take. This is very important because the Network Steward will be comparing the time it takes to your success criteria in order to determine if a project is properly planned and properly specified as well as to filter out anyone who is trying to take advantage of the system by reporting inflated hours.
Currently, the Network Steward multi-sig team is also the team who does the actual evaluation of the proposals, so it is important to disclose any interactions with these people which might present a conflict of interest. There is a form in the template document to fill out in order to disclose whether there is any conflict or to affirm that there isn't.
A good project is a low-risk project, one executed by a person or team who already has plenty of experience on the topic at hand. There are three ways you can show that the risk of the project is low:
- Team qualifications: A short bio on the people involved in the project showing their qualifications for this type of work.
- Prior work: Provide examples of work done by the people involved in the application to justify that they have the capability to do this type of work, links to code projects in places like github are highly valued.
- Pre-project effort: Any plans, mockups, prototypes or other pre-project work will not only contribute to the specification of the project but will also serve to demonstrate the team's capacity to deliver the rest of the project. You can do as much pre-project work as you want and describe your work in Milestone 0 (Kickoff) which will be written as an milestones but you are writing success criteria for a success which you already achieved. If the project is accepted then pre-project work will be payable.
The Network Steward team doesn't just make decisions on a whim, there is a clearly defined process which the evaluators follow so you can evaluate your own project before they do.
- Read the acceptance process
- Review your project while asking the questions in the evaluation criteria
If you've done a good job on everything above, you will have a good project, but the difference between good and great is your willingness to make the project a better deal for the community than other applicants. There are 2 key ways you can do this:
- Reduce your person-month cost: If you can get the work done cheaper, or if you consider PKT to be worth more, then your project will stand out ahead of the others.
- Reduce the "front-loading" of the project: Asking for PKT before the first milestone is completed makes the project more risky and difficult to accept, the Network Steward will tend to prefer projects which ask for the least amount in the first period and push the majority of the payment back until after success-criteria are met.
After you have everything put together, your success criteria are awesome, your time estimates are on target, conflicts are disclosed and you have decided how hard you want to compete, it's time to submit your project.
- Use a github pull request to submit the project to this repository
- The file should be placed in the
/projectsfolder - The name of the file should conform to the naming convension
If you submit early then the Network Steward team might provide feedback but others can also see your project proposal. If you submit at the deadline then the project will be secret up until the end, but it will be evaluated as it is.