Updated Zealy Q4 Proposal

Original proposal can be found here and the original Q4 proposal discussion can be found here. The current discussion which was crafted with community feedback over the past 2 weeks can be found here.

After receiving your feedback over the past few days, here are some high-level changes that incorporate almost all feedback. The only feedback that we did not implement was increasing the rewards on Zealy missions. With the missions that we have had, it has been hard keeping users happy and approving only good submissions. Higher rewards will be available through contests with limited winners instead, such as game jams and contests highlighting active contributors. A majority of the responses was in favour of us having a higher misc. budget but wanted the misc. budget to be more clearly defined. The scope of the proposal was deemed by most to be good enough.

High-level overview:

• The rewards budget lowered from $4000/mo to $1000/mo.
• The total monthly budget is lowered from $9,500/mo + 10% overage to $6,500/mo + 10% overage.
• The role budget is unchanged and the roles will help the contributor program by hosting additional meetings, reviewing code, and paying out rewards if needed.
• The misc. budget is split up into more specific budget items.
• The scope of Zealy will be small, with limited rewards and missions, only meant as a small carrot for those who already wants to get involved. We will stop paying the Zealy subscription to save costs as we do not primarily focus on this anymore.
• We will increase focus on contests outside of Zealy. Monthly SWAG/AKT prizes for active contributors will be offered and contests such as game jams will be hosted.

Success criteria for Q4:

• A minimum of 1 game jam/other contests hosted. In the future, we are hoping to have a framework in place where this can grow to be monthly or bi-monthly.
• A minimum of 2 monthly contest winners winning SWAG and AKT for November and December. We are hoping to have more contests than this that make contributors feel encouraged to get involved more than they have had. If the program continues, there will continue as monthly contests.
• Review times below 2 weeks for Zealy missions.
• Timely collaboration when needed with the Contributions Program for reviews, sending payments, and hosting meetings.
• Joining SIG-community calls monthly, reporting quickly on progress and answering all questions related to the proposal. Quarterly reports will continue to be sent out.
• The platform demo being open-sourced and starting work on creating a meeting group and rebuilding AkashVPN.
• A SWAG contest being hosted and SWAG being produced.

Key figures such as average WG/SIG participation counts, total missions completed, and total reviews done for the Contributions Program will be collected and reported on to help people gauge the success of the program but no official goals are being set for these figures.

Funding:

• Total request: $21,450 including overages for the period of November 1st - January 31st.
  • Monthly request: $6,500 USD + fees
    • Roles: $4,000 USD (same budget but added and changed responsibilities inside the group)
    • Mission rewards: $1,000 USD or less in AKT.
    • Contest prizes: $1,000 USD or less in AKT.
    • SWAG: $500 USD or less. SWAG is to be given out to contest winners, program team members, and at events if team members participate on them.

If the program does not pass 3 revisions of a proposal or is inactive for 3 months, all funds will get returned just as mentioned in the Q3 proposal. Budgets do not mix with each other and will not roll over to the next month. We always base budgets in dollar amounts, prioritizing role budgets, so AKT being spent may vary over the months. The one exception is that we use the budget to create deposits for the proposals. A 10% buffer will be added to the proposal and a 5% conversion fee will be added to fiat payments such as the role payments.

Timeline

Since we do not want the program to stop running, we are going on-chain again on Monday. Thanks for getting involved in the discussion quickly now that the last proposal did not pass. In the future, it would be great to have all opinions be written publicly on the discussion or mentioned in the SIG-community call or the Steering Committee call so that feedback can be worked on directly, without rushing the proposal. Keep in mind that we are open towards changing the program with your feedback as time goes on, we are happy to change the program to fit into what the community wants it to be.