Draft template for proposals
This is a rough draft of a standard template for proposals to make it easy to find important elements that are common to most proposals.
Project Title
Proposal Type: Hive service | Opensource | Closedsource | Marketing | Advertising | Hive advocacy
Principals:
Costs
- Labor:
- Equipment:
- 3rd party payments:
- Recurring costs:
Cost and expected completion date by milestone (below is just an example)
- Phase 1: Design ($3K) 2 weeks
- Phase 2: Prototype ($10K) 1 month
- Phase 3: Production ($30K) 2 month
Progress reporting: By milestone | Daily | Weekly | Monthly
Project Summary
Project description
Benefits
What happens if the proposal becomes unfunded?
What are the proposal types?
- Hive service = the principals are setting up some kind of service that benefits members of the Hive community
- Opensource = the software being developed can be modified by anyone
- Closedsource = the software's source code is not being shared (generally this really means a Hive service is being offered, but that it needs to be developed first)
- Marketing = the proposal will develop marketing material for Hive (pitch decks, whitepapers, etc)
- Advertising = the proposal will pay for some form of advertising (e.g google ads, etc)
- Hive advocacy = the proposal will pay for people to promote Hive (e.g. at conferences)
Note the above is not an exclusive set of all types of proposals, it's just a list of some common types. And also note that a proposal may be listed as several types (for example a software proposal to develop software for providing a Hive service).
What should be listed for principals?
Principals are the people who will be managing the proposal's funds (and likely doing the work too, in many cases). In the case where the work is being done by someone else, this should generally be mentioned in the Project description section. Hive acount names should be a minimum, but if they aren't well known, real names would also be nice to know (there should be some reputational consequences for failing to deliver and keeping funds).
Explanation of proposal costs
Labor will generally be the largest costs for most project.
Equipment is any long term equipment purchased either for development or for production deployment.
3rd party payments are one time payments for things other than labor or equipment (e.g. purchasing a license to operate).
Recurring costs are any regularly repeating costs that would likely need to be paid after the proposal is completed. Recurring costs might not be included in the cost of the proposal, but possibly will be funded by a recurring proposal after initial development is done. For example, if the proposal is to develop software that will provide a service to Hive, there may be recurring costs associated with maintaining a server that provides the service.
Cost by milestone
In this section, the proposers can break down their planned work into phases/milestones, including expected cost to reach each milestone and estimated time to reach each milestone.
Progress reporting
The idea of this field is to set expectations about how often the principals plan to update the community on their progress.
Project Summary
One or at most two paragraphs that quickly summarize the project. The project summary could be omitted if the Project description itself is very brief.
Project description
This is the section where the proposers can describe the details of their proposal.
Benefits
This section should just indicate any reasons why voters might want to approve the proposal.
What happens if the proposal becomes unfunded?
Due to the nature of the DHF, a proposal can be unfunded prior to completion. In this section, the proposal can indicate how the principals plan to react in that case. For example: Will they keep working on the project at a reduced rate? Will they make available any work product they have created up till that point?
Feedback wanted
Please note this is really just a "rough draft", mostly to start the conversation on what such a template might look like. Also, I don't think we should ask that the use of any particular template be "mandatory". But I do think many proposals will find it easier to get funded if they make it easier to answer the questions that will commonly be asked by voters, and a standard template could be one good way to do that.
I suggest @peakd makes this a default template available for all users. Maybe use a repo so pull requests can be made to make adjustments in the future.
Very good idea!
Via git is good as this will allow other front-ends to use it as well. But I would personally also allow users to write them as they want too. I don't like the "mandatory template" option.
I like the idea of making it available, although not mandatory!
I understand this would be a basis for anyone trying to make these kinds of proposals. I just have to announce who wants to venture into making a proposal that in the first few months you have to maintain consistency and faith in the project, although always having an open mind to make the necessary changes to adjust the methods and tools.
Thank you for this information!
I will save it in my favorites so as not to lose sight of it.
I appreciate the business-focused approach this brings to proposals. It seems complete as a rough outline. I agree that it should only be mandatory from the perspective of people choosing to not vote proposals without them. If we can agree on a standard, I would certainly save my vote in the majority of cases for people who decide to conform to it. It would be really helpful to have an example proposal that was fully vetted, because people without any business background may run into some difficulty. It should be more of an enabler for people with a comprehensive plan than a barrier to them.
The proposal improvement is highly necessary to be and also for all the voters need more clarification on how the proposal will be funded gradually or some strategies needed to be considered
This a fantastic starting point for those that may be new to proposals. kudo's!
Looks like mine. Excellent, I don't have to edit all that much.
This sounds quite reasonable to me and I do not see what to add. Now, allowing one to reduce a proposal duration or funding request would be great.
I suggest all existing proposals to update their posts if they can to incorporate this, so it is easy for voters to follow template. Once we have some standard I believe voting and understanding proposals/goals will be much easier.
I was about to suggest it! :)
Really good template. Have been thinking, that for people with no access to computer or programming skills, there would be a call for action-option, where everyone can recommend improvements, graphically talented could make promotion material etc.
Some kind of resource database would make things way easier. Planner meets the doer, would be good to consider projects, which does not need funding, just for the fun of it. So many ideas, hard to figure out where to use them.
A resource database is an excellent idea! I actually started a very primitive form of this a while back in the Hive gitlab wiki, but it's mostly limited to programmer skills, and I didn't advertise it that well either. In hindsight, this would be handled much better by a Hive community, so I've created one called Hive Skills: https://hive.blog/trending/hive-179690
Hive skills is a great idea. I've always thought we needed a talent/skills capturing area and let people know they can earn for their talents.
Another potential use of this is proposers could link to the Hive Skills posts of the principals and other Hivers who would likely be working on the proposal.
It sounds like a plan where everyone can see a well defined template to choose if that project should be funded or not.
Looks good to me, and it can always be updated if need be.
I like it. This is already an 80% solution if not higher.
I particularly like the cost summary and phases of work part.
Can we add a “back payment” segment? Meaning only a very limited part of the proposal can be funded paying for previous work. Say no more than 10%. This will discourage a lot of back payment and a clear path of point forward auditing.
This is a very standard practice in the real world.
Thank you for putting it together.
Taking a page from Simon Senik, I think it would be beneficial to start with Why. So Benefits should be first IMO.
I considered that idea when writing the draft, but I don't think it's the best way to go in practice. It's much easier to explain benefits of something after you've explained what it is, IMO.
Perhaps, and I see no reason why you couldn't do both, but if you don't explain the "Why" before you explain the "How", you leave the audience to guess that on their own or even worse, to not know.
I guess what I'm trying to get at is that they should define the problem first. That way you can more readily understand the reasons certain things are needed.
For example, I happen to know why you made this post because I witnessed the conversation you had on your other thread. You stated that sometimes the proposals are hard to understand. So to you and me, this proposal makes sense because we know what problem it fixes...we know "why" it is being suggested.
Others may simply view it as more bureaucracy being introduced into the process with no benefit and write it off on a glance without reading all the way to the end.
I don't think we're really far apart on this, as I kind of assumed that the root "why" should be addressed in the project summary, before the detailed description.
My intent with the benefits section was that someone could go into details about why their particular solution meets the more general need, which could only be explained easily after explaining the details of their solution.
support
support
Oh, this is a terrific template, and not so rough. I think it would be better if there’s a mandatory template that is set by the community. The template could be on GitHub, so that it could be updates from time to time.
No other changes matter until we can vote against a proposal. Until everyone, for or against, has a voice I won't be voting for any changes...
Money, it's a crime
Share it fairly but don't take a slice of my pie
Money, so they say
Is the root of all evil today
But if you ask for a rise it's no surprise that they're giving none away
Thanks for the draft template. I made a draft of a proposal with it:
https://hive.blog/hive-167922/@riskdebonair/so-you-want-to-take-over-the-world-hive-draft-proposal-feedback-and-people-wanted
Hey man i read this and remembered your account system development in the past and think this is a great bussiness oportunity to you.
here the news in cointelegraph, good luck.
https://cointelegraph.com/news/irs-seeks-third-party-contractors-to-help-with-taxpayers-crypto-calculations
@blocktrades this is a good development. It's good it's going to be made available.
Regards
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Yep! A very good one here, although all of ours are kicked off with an executive summary first that details the reasons for an application, such as "The Problem" and the "Solution".
But I see that you have sections in that will reveal this.
Would be great if everyone could adopt this template!
I would like to suggest the following:
Type of funding being requested. (aka "category")
i) Advance payment
ii) Ongoing cost reimbursements.
ii) Claim/One time cost reimbursement. (cover costs after the fact)
These are literally the three types of funding requests that are applicable in any project arena and if it is made clear straight from the word "GO" as to which of the three is being requested, then we are ensuring that those of us who are voting KNOW this key piece of information.
Second recommendation/sharing of thoughts:
Key Performance Indicators (KPI) be incorporated into the template.
(this was mentioned to me by GP ages ago in a conversation)
Without KPI we do not have a standardized means of ensuring that stake holders have a crystal clear means of tracking anything.
These are applicable for all three of the funding categories listed in the first part of this comment.
With the addition that a "Claim/One time cost reimbursement" should in addition to KPI provide crystal clear evidence of costs involved. Without which no such claim should be considered acceptable by any professional business standards.
For now, that is about all that comes to mind as constructive suggestions to the formal template.
& it is a great idea to get this out into the open, so that our administrative DHF business practices start to meet the standards expected in the competitive markets.
Great move, fully support it.
Cheers.
Some good ideas here, but I have some questions/thoughts about them:
For the KPI section: first I should state that I personally hate "business speak" terms like KPI. As an example of why I don't like it, I've been running a successful business for 30 years, and I didn't know the term "KPI". So in my opinion, most business terms should be avoided whenever there's normal words for the same thing, especially when we're making proposals that will be voted on by people that likely aren't business majors.
Nonetheless, I think the concept you're getting at here is good, at least for some proposals. If I understand the KPI concept, it means establishing measurements for the success of a project. For some proposals, this may be easy to do. For example, if you create an advertising proposal and the proposal is able to track referrals in some way, then that should probably be mentioned in the proposal.
On the other hand, I think for a lot of proposals, the measurement of its success is going to be much more difficult to measure in numbers. I'm not disagreeing that it's nice when we can make such a measurement, since it makes the whole process more "scientific" and easy to make judgements about its success, but I think it's probably too much to expect every proposal is going to be able to suggest such a set of measurements.
Answer 1.
Advance payment would cover all proposals that are for those endeavours which are not yet a fully functioning viable functioning working/tangible product or service.
Literally a payment for something that is only in the planning phase or pre-completion phase.
Answer 2.
There is no reason why a proposal couldn't be made for multiple categories. It is left to the discretion of the party submitting the proposal.
Open ended discussion:
"KPI"
Fully understand where you are coming from. As I transparently stated, GP brought that to my attention and it was the first time that I myself came into contact with that acronym too.
However, because it was brought up, it lead me to check it out via our good friend Google and in less than a few minutes it was clear what he meant.
The fact that the term already exists and has a very clear purpose (definition) makes it somewhat easier for those submitting a proposal to list what their "units of measurement" are.
Again, it is left to the discretion of the party submitting the proposal.
There is no reason for us to reinvent the wheel, as this is a highly competitive business environment which we are in and so too are the proposals competing with each other for the votes/approvals of our stake holders (aka community).
Each and every party submitting a proposal has the freedom and liberty to express themselves however they feel is best and by using defined terms that have very clear purposes it actually makes everything all the more clearer/transparent.
If we start reinventing the wheel, then we shall definitely have a bumpy road ahead of us.
i.e. it took me literally seconds to get the following:
Again, we are in a very competitive business here and although we do not necessarily expect every individual to be "business orientated" or familiar with all the terms used in business, that should be no reason for us to avoid good business practices in utilizing well defined terms that already exist.
Especially those, such as this one, which are simple to comprehend and make everything about the proposals being submitted all the more transparent.
We can't expect transparency if we do not insist upon it.
If we insist upon it, then we need to clearly/definitively insist upon the means.
"Key Performance Indicators - KPI" are defined, understood and by all means make every voters/stake holders life much easier when assessing proposals.
Why would anyone vote on something for which it is unclear/non definitive as to 'How the voter can clearly see what is being achieved and how it is being achieved.'
idk, it is up to those voting to decide what they wish to implement.
I think that I have made some constructive suggestions in the initial reply and elaborated on them (tried to further justify them) here in this comment.
Whatever the case may be, I am satisfied that anyone reading this shall think about it and understand that we are looking for means of ensuring all proposals are transparently auditable by those who need to vote on them.
I sincerely hope that this post and all its comments will be read throughout the entire life of Hive as this type of approach as this post here is what shall set us apart from 'the others':
Transparent, open and public policy making procedures.
Cheers.
I will need to keep coming back to this as I write.
This will help me a lot as I continue to write and re write this proposal I have been working on. The formatting of the proposal has proven to be the hardest part and leads to excessive text on my part.
Thanks.
I am really interested in learning more about proposals any communities out there that would be able to help out ?