A little bit more than a month ago, we (STEMsocial) made a proposal to help us with the development of our opensource app. For now, we are far from getting funded and got very little feedback about what is not very appealing with our plans.
As already mentioned elsewhere, we discussed a lot about the amount of funding to request, the duration of the funding and how to effectively proceed (one long proposal vs. several shorter ones).
We finally decided to request 120 HBD / day during 1.25 year, which was the estimated duration to make our app minimally viable. In our initial proposal, we included a one-year to-do list justifying this funding and the proposal duration.
One of the comments to the initial proposal mentioned that our to-do list this was a little bit messy and that a detailed roadmap for the project would be good. We agreed upon this and proceeded, as detailed in this post.
In the latter post, we described what the STEMsocial project was aiming at for the next year, both at the level of the development of the app and beyond. Whilst the plans for the first half of the year are quite well defined, it is a bit too early to provide very detailed plans for Q3 and Q4 (as a lot depends on the success/failure of what will be effectively done earlier on the year).
Maybe a proposal lasting until the end of August would have been better? Most probably, but this is too late to be changed as the length and amount related to our proposal are frozen. I however do not see this as a blocking point, as will be detailed below.
I would like now to discuss a little bit the total amount of funding that we requested (more than 50,000 HBD in total, although one should keep in mind that 1 HBD was half its today value at the time of submission). While this may seem a lot, we were not expecting to be funded over the entire period (as gathering enough support to be above the threshold takes time). Moreover, we wanted to include some funding for 1.5 years of earlier work on the app, as detailed in the second part of this post.
In order to get the flexibility for the funding management, we created a dedicated account, @stemsocial-dev, aiming at paying the developers for the work effectively done during any given week.
The corresponding salary is to be discussed, but we can imagine something like 15-20 HBD/hour. The idea is not to provide a full salary (that would be much more expensive), but instead a compensation for the work done for the project.
Also, there is for now only one developer working on the app (myself), but I hope to officially get our designer (@glass.wolf) on board, as well as @mobbs (for global design discussions). And the doors of our team are open! There are so many things to do (see the roadmap).
With the above terms, it is quite likely that we won’t use entirety what we may get. This was also planned from the very beginning as this could allow us to get some flexibility for 2021 (we do not plan to submit a new proposal every year). We were considering using the left-over for further developments if needed, or return it to the DHF if not.
Despite not being funded, we continued to work as planned, as can be seen by investigating the post history of this account. The most recent updates are from Apr 20th and May 7th. To sum them up: we have deployed an MVP for a new post editor, started the migration from Steem to Hive (that is basically finished and deployed since yesterday), integrated the STEMsocial community and fixed several bugs.
From the discussions I had with several people during the last month, it would have probably been better to submit a proposal extending until September and covering the period where the plans are super concrete. Similarly, requesting an amount of 70 HBD/day would have been better. We could then have made a more concrete proposal after September for the next part.
A potential way to go through that would be to keep the current proposal and remove it at the end of September, returning the left-over to the DHF if any. This requires of course trusting us, but we hope we won’t have to demonstrate that again, being on the chain for almost four years… We could also consider submitting another proposal (with the reduced properties introduced above), which has the drawback that we will have to go back to our present supporters and ask to re-support.
However, even with one of the two above options, is there any chance to get supported by the DHF at all? Things are still unclear to us and this is the purpose of this post. Feel free to ask questions or raise any criticism. We will be glad to answer (and hopefully convince you to support us).
We are eagerly looking for any feedback!