Welcome!

This proposal is for a bounty fund that I can pay to 3rd party developers to flesh-out and help incubate Dash Platform tools, web resources and pilot Dapps.
 
Right now the only (major) development on Platform is from Core (DCG), who are responsible for developing the underlying protocol and two reference Dapps (DPNS and DashPay).
 
Platform is also only on a testnet with limited features (EvoNet), but I think we should start incubating 3rd party developers and Dapps with what we have available and grow that inline with Core’s release activities, so that we are building skillsets, roadtesting Platform with real commercial usecases (to iterate developer experience and requirements back to Core) and we should start this now so we are ready and well prepared for market when Mainnet is released.
 
I think that bounties is going to be the best way to start this off with an informal, organic arrangement that incentivises devs to try EvoNet and get familiar with it’s concepts and opportunities using a structure that is low-cost, fast-moving and flexible at solving commercial problems, i.e. how to best leverage value from Platform’s abilitiy for DAPI integrations / Dapps, and bounties will be an effective way to do that.
 
Recently various non-Core devs (including myself) have been testing EvoNet, creating web resources, some tools and some Dapp ideas / proposals / code and these funds will be used for standard bounties (posting a requirements specification, specifying a reward denominated in Dash, and rewarding Dash to a winner) to accelerate that process.
 
I would determine the bounties myself (in collaboration with other devs who are contributing) and pay the winners from this fund. Any unclaimed bounty funds would rollover for future bounties, and the only rules are that DCG devs or myself aren't eligible for any rewards from the fund; they are exclusively for 3rd parties who deliver digital works with full source code on Github.com licensed under MIT that satisfy requirements that I specify that I will post on Reddit, Dash Forum, the Discords and I will also list them on a new section in the Platform resource website I created at: https://dashdevs.org/
 
In terms of proposal discussion, I will answer questions that I believe are genuine and not leading into troll discussions or politics as I am only here to add value to Dash and I am not paid by anyone within Dash or receiving any rewards from the blockchain for any of the work I am doing; If awarded I will administer and pay 100% (minus the proposal fee) of the funds, unmixed, directly to 3rd parties who deliver tangible work for Dash, as detailed above. All transactions can be publicly audited from the blockchain and all payees will be contactable community members and Github users. Therefore everything here should be publicly auditable, however, if there are reasonable questions relating to any auditing people want to do that's fine.
 
Andy Freer
Dash Developer

EDIT: March 17th 2020 - BOUNTY RESERVATIONS

Update - so bounties have been progressing nicely, with a small (but growing at a nice and manageable pace) community of devs helping to define, complete, and give feedback on the bounty process.... different devs have made a discord, a dashdevs.org domain, a website (which I did), and various tools / contributions, so it's decentralized and pretty cool as a starting point.

Bounty board: https://trello.com/b/FPJzDcok/dash-bounty-board

What I’m learning from the bounty process is that all the bounties are actually being taken (and actually proposed in many cases) by known devs from the community we’re growing.  These are non-core devs who have coalesced on the Dapp Devs discord as it’s the main venue where Platform development is being discussed so actually we tend to know who is doing bounties and people are growing skillsets / reputations and collaborating, rather than what I antcipicated more of random unknown people just completing and claiming bounties without much interaction.

The main feedback from bounty devs I’ve had is that they’re reticent to take on bounties that are open to everyone (for the more involved bounties) as they put a lot of work in without knowing someone else is going to come in and win the bounty instead and I’ve actually had to circumvent this by paying a couple of bounties from my own funds so far (as I felt I needed to adhere to the very specific terms agreed here).

While I think competition is healthy and for some types of bounties a free-for-all approach is beneficial preferential, our main goal is obviously to use the network funds to incentivise people to add value to Dash and Platform through development tasks, and I’ve learned more about the best way to do that since my initial assumptions before we had an actual Platform dev community in place (as we do now).   So, however we achieve our main goal, I want to be a bit flexible and adapt to the experience we’re being with the bounties and devs we have now, to ensure that the devs who are contributing and working have the right incentives and produce the work we want either on their own or collaboratively with other devs to produce the most value for the least cost to the network.

To solve this in the short term, I’m going to add a ‘Reserved’ feature to bounties from today, that will work like this:

 - I can add a ‘Reserved’ status to Open Bounties (on the Trello Board)
 - I can allocate Reserved bounties to 1 or more devs (who have proven contributions already, i.e. reputations, mainly within the Dapp Dev Discord community)
 - Reserve bounties can only be claimed by the allocated devs within a time limit (that I will monitor depending on the bounty and communications on the discord)
 - If Reserved bounties aren’t completed, their reservations will be cancelled, and they can be opened up publicly or allocated to new devs who want to reserve them
 - Every other aspect of the bounty outside of reservation stays the same (as per the existing proposal terms)

If the proposal continues to pass this month, I’ll take this as approval of the addition of reservations, else I’ll remove them (if devs complete reserved bounties this month and the network votes no here, I’ll reimburse them from my own funds so the network funds won’t be used for that)

The other main feedback i've had is that I should have asked for more funds in the proposal... my answer to that is I think it's fine to start off where we have, because we need to stay value focused which means finding out the best way to spend funds and only scaling that inline with our ability to deliver efficiently with an organic structure. I want to keep this incentive based, and flexible, no fixed costs etc.  But some of the bounties that have come up are quite involved (for example the Platform Console app that DCG devs have asked me to do because they don't have the bandwidth, secondly various Contract dapps like Memo and a Hello World intro series)... so those would need more funds than the current bounty fund could handle and i'd be interested on feedback in doing a supplemental proposal to the network for these at some point.

Thanks
Andy