Hello all,
As of this writing we have about eight proposals that are currently being funded with money from "the system", with possibly one or more on the way. It is vital that we insure this money is being spent efficiently and wisely.
The case of JoeCool and HiveMegaWidget5000
Since I don't want to pick on any specific person in this post, I'm going to invent a fictional person and project.
Let's say, for the sake of argument, that HiveMegaWidget5000 (HMW5000) is generally considered to be a good and helpful project for Hive, and that will make Hive more useful and increase its price, great!
If JoeCool writes a proposal to work on HMW5000, and it will cost the system 500000 HBD, we shouldn't just blindly vote on this, even if HMW5000 is the greatest thing since sliced bread and JoeCool is indeed very cool.
It's ok to haggle
In the above case, the community should tell Joe, "hey we like your widget, but could you do it for 10000 HBD instead? Please submit a new proposal." Or maybe even PaulAmazing can offer to write HMW5000 for only 7000 HBD, undercut the guy you know?
All you aspiring developers out there, want to make some money, stop complaining and underbid these guys.
What I want to see more of
What I need to see from JoeCool is a more detailed breakdown of the work:
JoeCool: hourly wage: 40 usd
Feature A: 2 weeks: 80 hours
Feature B: 1 week: 40 hours
Feature C: 3 weeks: 120 hours
Fixing Bug X: 3 days: 24 hours
Fixing Bug Y: 1 week: 40 hours
etc...
Total hours: 304 hours * 40 usd = 12160 usd ~= 12160 HBD
And then we haggle over these numbers. Too high? Too low? There would be a discussion.
Proposal workers should post weekly updates..
JoeCool should ideally write a post once per week. In that post he would say:
This week I spent 2 days working on feature A, 2 days on feature B, and spent a day debugging X.
This would be great and add to transparancy. It's not even clear to me that our current proposal workers have done anything lately.
Open source is critical
In his proposal @howo states:
All of my work can be tracked on gitlab, I assign issues to myself so you can always see what I'm working on, and all of my code is made public and open source.
This is great, fantastic. To be fair, many of the proposals are for open source projects, so anyone go there peek at the repositories for themselves. I do support many of the open source projects and am hesitant to support closed ones.
Still would be nice to see weekly updates though.
Why many are frusterated
Hive is currently run by a oligarchy where the top people just sort of high-five each other, and pat each other on the back, and there seems to be a lack of critical examination of the proposals. They just get rubber stamped in. There is no real mechanism to vote against or flag such proposals. All one can do is vote up the Return Proposal, which may hurt the proposals you actually like. It's a strange system.
Hive needs to be run like a Business, not a group of friends hanging out.
If Hive is to succeed, then proposals need to be taken more
seriously, costs and benefits need to be weighed carefully.
Maybe there should be a proposal for some sort of oversight group. Perhaps a wealthy whale who is heavily invested in the system, that has 25 years of software experience...
hmmmmmmmmmmmmm
HMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMM
