Welcome!

It's great that you opened this question rion, thank you! Given the positive indication of 'yes', this aligns well with an idea I've had for a while that I'd love to build.

I've outlined the details in the following pre-proposal. I'd love to get an idea whether there'd be support for this: https://www.dash.org/forum/threads/pre-proposal-grassroots-crowdfunding-system.15075/

i like the idea of seed funding individuals with ideas and experience and a history of getting results. You cant centralize the ideas and functionality. But, if someone shows promise, i dont mind funding comparing results. voting yes

It's a bad idea to refer to them as "cooperatives", that's inaccurate and misleading. A cooperative is usually a 1 level business structure where all members are equal, or whatever, it's not what you are talking about.

"Sub-DOAs" is accurate but clunky "DOA teams" might be okay.

Anyway voting yes to have specialist teams getting funding from the treasury with some discretion and some accountability as to how they spend it.

Thanks for this input, bitedge. I agree that the term "cooperatives" is not a slam dunk exact fit, and may even be misleading depending on your version of the definition. You could see my struggle with which term was best to use through my presentation/documentation. None of the terms I've seen are perfect. If they catch on I'm sure the best term will emerge.

Thanks for your vote(s) of support! I very much appreciate the feedback we're all getting. I think the positive reception is due to the fact that many others have already been kicking these ideas around in their heads, hoping for something like this to emerge.

I have brought together a group of trusted community members who are currently working on something like this. It has been months in the making, stay tuned for our pre proposal in the next month or so.

It will include a review committee to recommend placement of smaller projects (software, etc) into sub DAO’s and sub DAO’s for larger projects (ATM’s or larger software projects etc) as well. It will also included oversight reports on the progress of past and future proposals to make sure goals are being met as promised.
It will most importantly include a independent oversight committee of masternode owners to keep everyone on the review committee in check. This will be a huge undertaking and should not be taken lightly. It is still a work in progress and we will seek community feedback before submitting anything.
I will not be the one who submits this proposal or be a committee reviewer myself but will be an adviser to help get it going and help with future decisions and direction. We will be taking position applications once we get the basic framework sorted out. You are free to submit an application if you would like, everyone is welcome to participate.

This review committee will work like a Yelp or a Better Business Bureau, not a gatekeeper like a government bureaucracy.
It's meant to help MNO’s make educated decisions more easily, not act as a funnel through which everything must pass or else fail. Everyone will always be free to submit anything they want as they always have.

I totally support the idea.
Evan also mentioned he wants more Dash DAOs in the future. Rion´s approach to kickstart more (smaller) projects for dash is a legit way. It also makes sense for smaller projects that dont want to work through the proposal process.

Thanks for mentioning that, rockbit. Hearing Evan say that was big boost of confidence for me. I think he was referring specifically to funding different implementations of Dash (e.g. written in Go, Python, JavaScript) but our concepts are the same. Better to have more than one team working on important things.

This has always been Evan's vision on how to scale. Eventually, the budget will become essentially tiny due to the 7% decrease each year in generation of funds. Even so most of this will be made up for in price rise, essentially, I can see the beginnings of the proposed structure being created and eventually funded more and more by DAOs, of the type Evan is proposing. In other words, these "treasury Co-ops" will break down until they become DAOs both funded by the Co-ops but more and more funded by the local community with the Co-ops eventually turning into DAOs or breaking down into the DAOs they originally supported. In other words, due to the eventual break down of the budget (the budget doesn't receive fees, it's limited to 10% of the new coins created) there is an inerrant (and quite lovely - lets never change it) killing of centralization :D

Hey there Tante. Thanks for the comment. I'm not exactly sure what distinction you're making between DAO and co-op. I mostly used the term co-op because it's a word we've had for much longer that describes very accurately how I see these groups. For some reason, to me, 'DAO' invokes a feeling of automated scripts running things (although I realize that's not accurate). It's a nerd term though. 'Co-ops' invokes a feeling of people volunteering their individual skills, but working together for the social good, and getting compensated from their *results*, not just the energy or time they expend.

I agree with this proposal but in addition to a distributed model, not instead of it. I think these kinds of co-ops gaining market share is probably inevitable (and good), but it would still be ideal for individuals to have their voices heard. Our network is not yet so big that we need to start weeding out or filtering away people with proposals to share.

I agree, kalon. Individuals should still go to the treasury if they are willing and able, and I would actually prefer to see more of that. I think that without the *option* to apply to a co-op/sub-DAO, many will simply turn away, when they could have helped.

I agree, it has to be as well as our existing system. That way we can ease our way in slowly. Budget Holders will handle a list of small proposals all of the same type. Larger proposals would be outside their budget.

Is a good idea. I agree to see the possibilities.

Thanks, blockchaintech!

This has always been Evan's vision. And it seems the wisest move for such a large project.

Rion,
I am deeply impressed that you took the time and put in the effort to think this through as a philosophical presentation far in advance of a critical problem arising. We all know one will come in time.

I have two clear observations to share. two things that have already presented themselves, at least in my mind.
#1 The axiom "absolute power corrupts absolutely" is still true and even more so in the society in which we live today. It's true that the most efficient form of government is a dictatorship but unfortunately we realize the inevitability of grand abuse.
#2 As is becoming clear with the increase in the budget's value the funding proposals will also increase proportionally in their complexity.
A good example of this is the current cannabis integration which requests substantial funding. I am not able, nor are most others able, to vet out the integrity of the proposal owner and so we risk being scammed on a grand scale with no legal recourse. How can we possibly know if the work being done is not worth a fraction of the payment?
I envision, as you propose, a level of distributed hierarchy where teams can specialize and properly research proposals for submission. This however can not be dictated or created in a vacuum but rather needs to grow and develop naturally (organically for all you younger folks) by individuals who have a compelling idea. I think we have two excellent examples in Dash: Detailed and DashForce.
What I need is a way to be assured that complex and expensive proposals are being vetted to provide accurate value by trusted members who understand or specialize in that area of endevour. Otherwise we are just a bunch of suckers looking for the next scammer.

Yes, I'm sure we'll have many scaling challenges to come. We can't run the victory lap just yet, and we need to foresee problems before they become such. I like to throw the word 'tends' into the 'power corrupts' dictum. Power tends to corrupt. It's not always the case, but the safest road is to not allow concentrations of power if we can avoid it.

It would have been interesting to see how well the Alt36 proposal would have flown had Core not endorsed it. I'm personally not a fan of endorsements from Core. I'd much rather see them act as escrow agent, if anything. Even that function I feel should be performed by a non-Core group who specialize in either escrow services, endorsement services, or both. Like any service, they should get paid for doing it, according to how well they perform.

"I'm personally not a fan of endorsements from Core. I'd much rather see them act as escrow agent, if anything. Even that function I feel should be performed by a non-Core group who specialize in either escrow services, endorsement services, or both. Like any service, they should get paid for doing it, according to how well they perform." @rion could not agree with this more.

This actually sparked an idea for me that I do see as a current problem we have been having.

I see we are funding third parties and like you said no one knows if they will actually go through with their intentions, and also they are just given a handout. Well as an opportunity I see us creating what I might want to call the Kickstarter of Dash

Think of it like the kickstarter of Dash, anyone who would like to start a business can go through us and propose their idea and can receive funding for it. On top of this, we plan on recieving the funding back from these third parties, making us want to do in depth research on these people to make sure we will get our money back. It will be completely open to anyone and anyone can view money given/money received to see if we are making good investments or poor investments.

Iv been wanting to do something for Dash forever and constantly trying to come up with how I could help grow Dash. I think this would be an awesome project to go into that helps solve a problem I see. And solves the problem of not being as centralized as well (:

If you like the idea give it a thumbs up! Any inputs On it?

I like the idea. I would say start small and carve off a very simple, low-risk chunk of that idea. Build on top as it gains recognition. Happy to bat around ideas with you on Slack about it.

Yes, I think this is a great idea. Distributing funds into smaller, focused groups should be encouraged when it makes sense.

Thanks, Tyler. I hope this encourages additional groups to organize and submit collective proposals.

Thanks for putting in this proposal, I think it is worthwhile for the network to be talking about this.
I completely support this idea in principle, so I will be voting yes.

However, the yes vote should not be construed to imply anything about recommending any particular actions to be taken to address it. The emergence of non-core teams (DashForce and Dash:Detailed) has only just started happening and I expect that this will continue. However if you were to take the core team for example, and observe that the lion's share of treasury funding is going through the core team, it isn't a simple question about how or whether certain functions that the core team currently handles should be distributed or offloaded to another team.

It will be interesting to see what sorts of teams start emerging in addition to the ones we have now. I am of the opinion that if we *can* be more distributed without having a significant negative impact, then we probably should.

Thanks Troy. One of the main reasons I made another video and changed course from my pre-proposals was to de-couple the general idea of "how should we scale" from any specifics of "who should we employ" and "what work should we break apart".

The purpose here is to get a general read on MNO (and community) sentiment regarding (de)centralization.

Interesting question. I agree we should promote the emergence of more entities like dashforce that can complement the core team.
It could also take the form of what Ryan suggests in his latest core team salary proposal; breaking things up into more fine grained core proposals. Then it would still fall under the core team, but with funds ear-marked by decentralized governance. Slightly different balance of centralization.

I actually like the new model of one comprehensive Core budget. It simplifies things, both for them and for us. There are ways to express discontent with specific things Core does besides having separate proposals.

I agree with this system. I always had the feeling like what happens if a accidental death might happen to a leader of Core, that Dash would just plumit like any other business would. My thoughts on it are that once evolution is created there will be more access for other groups to work on Dash protocol.

An example is the App Store. With this we can fund developers to create apps for us that will be free for all and completely decentralized systems.

I think right now no one knows what else they can improve other then the wallet or what kind of systems we would like created. But great question

Since Core works from GitHub, most of what they do is public and accessible. What's been missing is explicit encouragement from MNOs to start complementary groups (competing in some cases) that also get funding.

I see many development opportunities, but I think we first need to establish a welcoming (easy-to-enter), open, communal, and incentivized alternative to Core to house such projects. That was my idea behind github.com/dashcommunity. I have big plans for it.

This is a very interesting document. Will have to think about and many thanks for putting the work into it.

Thanks, roger. Thoughts are still evolving. I'd like to hear more of your thoughts over on Slack if you're there.

Quick question: Where did you get the data on the salary break down from? I've read on the forum that generally the Core team does not disclose individual salaries.

I don't have any data about specific salaries. The data I used was all public data from dashvotetracker's history page. I imported it into a spreadsheet and did a rough analysis. They were rough calcs, but I think generally accurate.

Clearly I am going to like the idea in principle. I have already proposed the idea of Funded Budget Holders, which you can read here...

https://www.dash.org/forum/threads/funded-budget-holders.13923/

You will notice that it got more yes votes than no votes, so that wasn't terrible.

Thanks, kevmate. I read your proposal. Looks good. We're pretty much on the same page.

Technologov online. I want to go into "distributed" way. And there is only one way to achieve this: lower the fee.

Actually this is completely untrue. Lowering the fee is not "the only way". Technologov, please realize that there are literally millions of entities in this world who are very capable of adding a valuable service to the Dash DAO for whom 5 Dash is nothing. As the coin grows in value it is likely and natural to attract these types of highly capable, and in many cases, well established companies.

I'd like to see co-ops and a lower proposal fee, but I think the proposal fee lowering needs to happen a bit later. 1 DASH will be a good number to arrive at long-term. 1 is a nice, simple number.