Community Grants Program

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During our discussion on Harmony Hangouts #5, we came up with an idea for community grants. These grants would be given out as a reward for work that community members do on behalf of the community. The purpose is to thank productive community members and to create an incentive for people to go above and beyond. Hopefully this can help build a stronger community and cultivate more core community members in the long run.

Here are some of the things we need to discuss in order to more clearly define the community grants program:

  • Categories (ex. content, technical contribution, community member of the month)
  • Eligibility (how contributions get nominated, who are eligible for these grants)
  • Decision process (ex. by a vote, who gets to vote?)
  • Frequency of each grant (weekly/monthly)

Categories and frequency can be flexible as we try this out and adapt to what makes sense. What’s probably most important to decide on is Eligibility and Decision process.

For eligibility, I would suggest we exclude any work done by the Harmony Team or even the P-OPS team as they are already on the pay-roll so to speak. On the other hand, perhaps it makes sense for P-OPS to still receive rewards for content as that is beyond the scope of their normal work. So the rule could be that grants are only for work that goes beyond what their paid role is defined to be.

For the decision making process, I think a vote would be pretty straightforward. But how do we collect that vote, how do we allow for debate on who should receive it before the vote? And the trickiest of all, who gets a vote and how do we potentially add new members in the future? I think starting with the core group of folks who are on the weekly calls, or the people in the “ONEs” telegram channel could get a vote.

Looking forward to hearing everyone’s ideas!

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Maybe we vote on the call, or possibly in the ONEs channel? :thinking:. Possibly create a “Votes” channel on discord, or yet another channel on Telegram, and see if we can turn it into a Discord-esque Frankenstein… Lol

Seriously though, about the vote. If you set aside say, 5-15 minutes of each call, we could have 1 minute presentation, maybe followed by 2 minutes of discussion, 1 for, and 1 against… (Mind you, I’m sure these issues will have been debated in this forum and various chats… so the last minute arguments might be overboard… lol)
Then have everyone type their answer into the Zoom chat. Give a 60 second timer… And close chat for that vote.

You could run thru several issues pretty quickly, and it would be a way to pull people into the call…

Have a committee which is responsible for narrowing entries down to a reasonable number. (This number may vary from 3 to 50, potentially for simpler giveaways). I would be fine with this committee consisting of team members/ POPS personnel initially, and let the committee slowly bring people in from the community to replace themselves.

With each Bounty/ Grant, we also need a list of requirements. This list will change from one program to the next. E.g. Requirements for a community photo submission might just be having the word Harmony or the logo in frame, while requirements for a telegram bot which allowed us to give each other “XP” and level up to higher ranks would be much more detailed.

I would add another category - Giveaways. Used for promotional marketing giveaways… As prizes for best Harmony related TicToc video, Meme of the Month, Independent Article or Video of the month.

Giveaways are great ways to get in front of a lot of people. Granted, most will sell if they win… But if we can find 5-10% of them and catch their attention, that’s a win.

I also think that there should be a Category for Impact Awards. When someone does something cool for the community. Builds something, sets up a Meetup, etc.

These would be decided upon by the team at first, but anyone can recommend someone for an award. I would nominate @Shez, for creating an awesome bot which the community finds useful. This is the type of Impact Award. Something given after the fact, just for being awesome.

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Following your community grants program idea I’d like to share my vision on that. This is def could work and create a great impact on the project. One thing we should consider - it’s not a fast race.

I have seen a very interesting implementation from one crypto project team and want to share what we can take from there (unfortunately it’s not my original idea)

Community Grants Program by NW - 2 cents from NV)

Categories (ex. content, technical contribution, a community member of the month)

1. to create a standard request for a grant form. (the request should be posted on this forum in a specific branch that could be called “Grants”)

1.1 what’s a person wants to get the grant for? (it could be a proposal on marketing, development, etc - but the team should announce a list of categories that are in prior for now)

1.2 the applicant should explain his vision why this request is important and what does it bring for harmony? (for instance, translation of harmony gitbook to Chinese, coz we have lots of requests from the Chinese community for harmony nodes tech doc)

1.3 what’s an execution plan? (an applicant breaks down what’s he’s going to do and by what means - for instance, he wants to improve our website design by adding some js scripts, so write something like a dev’s tech assignment)

1.4 what are his KPI and deliverables? (translation for 100 pages, ready to use harmony gitbook in Chinese)

1.5 what’s the budget? (the applicant should break down a detailed budget for the grant: price for translated word ~ $0.05; a number of words to be translated: 10 000; total: $500 in $ONE - the issue can we fix the token price or pay accordingly to the distribution date)

1.6 what motivates you section? ( a few lines about yourself and why is he/she caring about harmony, what makes you interested to help harmony to grow)

probably I could miss smth important, so we can add more details.

Eligibility (how contributions get nominated, who are eligible for these grants)

As we are a decentralised community and the consensus for the billions team - I think everyone from our community is eligible to submit his proposal.

Decision process (ex. by a vote, who gets to vote?)

Mu guess to create a Voters branch - the group of 5-10 ppl form the team and active community members, one of them is a chairman (10 could be a very big number I think). They approve every submission by voting.

5 votes in total

4-5 votes “for” - approved for a grant

1-3 votes “for” - not approved for a grant

How to vote: leave your vote comment under the submission on this forum or a chairman should leave his comment with the final decision, disclosing a number of “for” and “against” votes.

Frequency of each grant

I think 1 month it’s a good time for common grants. 1 month is enough to get results and to prove claimed KPI. But we have to be flexible in terms of different grants, for instance, translations could be done faster than 1 month.

Looking forward to hearing your thoughts.

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Hey @nickw

I promised to join the discussion, sorry for being late.

Discourse has a great plugin for voting and also a usable user level implementation, so for example we could create votings for everyone, active members only or just for the staff.

Imo this is a great opportunity to organize decisiom making here based on reputation.

About grant categories: I think there should be two main categories above the topics: Community grants (small and frequent) and DAO bounties (bigger contributions, based on elected proposals)

Eligibility: I prefer to keep most of the DAO bounties open for everyone without voting, but some needs to be addressed to trusted members only.

I have created a document for technology bounty proposals: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/16zL_Bu4SylZb15_l8I3p1chJPu2gmH6vLK885idHaNU/edit?usp=sharing

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Hey all,

I think community grants will be boosting the community to another level, or at least I hope it will.

About Eligibility, everyone needs to eligible for the community grants, although I can imagine P-OPS will be excluded for some of these. I would like to propose even that P-OPS need to be involved in the decision process, this will leave more room for the Harmony team to work on the protocol and the products and when we need a decision or advice we can always get that later.
I would start with weekly grants on documentation or social media (YouTube, twitter, Tik Tok etc etc) that one would be easy and can be nominated by the marketing team (top 3 or 5 to choose from) and most of use see those anyway…
Then we can do monthly grants on bigger things like the telegram Bot or the works @raz is working on currently, the person behind that also can be the ONE-MVP community member of the month, maybe we can also create some hall of fame here on discourse.

Think we can work this out very well together!

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Speaking of grants, running a node in test phases should be also somehow incentivized, the tests started on 6 March, I’ve setup mine for the first time on 5 March, 1 month passed since then. Unfortunately I didn’t had free credit for vultr and I’ve paid from my pocket until now 36$. In my position we can have and other users, and don’t take my message like a complain, but a validator spotlight cant grants you a seat :100:… The tests can hold another month and soon users that will remain without free credit can chose to give up and close their nodes since they will start paying for vps from their pockets, isn’t stipulated nowhere how much the users will gone be incentivized in P3, just that 50% from their tokens will gone be converted in real ONEs. Running a node and helping on this tests in my opinion is also a technical contribution, I’ve seen often bugs and improvements added bcoz of this users running their node. Like some ppl say just my 2cents"… Have a good day/afternoon/night all :pray:…

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I absolutely agree C7. Many users have found bugs by just the process of setting up the node. You have found many bugs over the last month some more severe than others, but consistently finding them to say the least. In terms of what type of reward/bounty and what would warrant it is beyond me. I signed up to run a node on test net to be involved, learn and prepare for OS. I never was expecting a reward or payment for this as I was trying to do my part by helping the network, team and in return I would also benefit.

In regard to the rewards and bounties for devs helping build out Harmony and/or building on Harmony I find that with utmost importance. Just like Harmony had a capital raise to get started this could help some amazing devs breakout into the industry and help our cause for near and long term. Not everyone is willing to work on Harmony just to be part of the community. In the real world it takes $$$$ and that is okay! It will be beneficial to both parties involved. To provide incentives for other dreamers/builders/devs/projects to come work/launch on the chain could really start to form long term relationships and help with the utility aspect of the coin which in turn would help with the valuation as well.

If you are the smartest in the room you are in the wrong room SOOOO LETS GET MORE INTO THE ROOM SMARTER THAN US!!

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