The Decentralized Hive Fund (DHF) strikes me as a supply-driven system. This means that an individual can decide what service they'd like to offer the community, and offer it to the community for a proposed price. While there is nothing inherently bad about this approach, it does not take into consideration community demand, and it does not create a competitive environment. It creates an environment where the community at large waits eagerly like baby birds, to be fed features they may or may not even care about. Funding decisions are often made according to popularity, or based upon the will of a few large stakeholders.
The community itself should be able to create a proposal request (RFP) for which suppliers can make bids. The winner of the bid would get the payout from the DHF. For those who may be unaware an RFP is:
A request for proposal (RFP) is a document that solicits proposal, often made through a bidding process, by an agency or company interested in procurement of a commodity, service, or valuable asset, to potential suppliers to submit business proposals. [src]
As an independent consultant, a potential customer would generate an RFP, for which myself and other consultants can write proposals. Proposals can differ widely in terms of price and technical parameters. The customer would collect all proposals by a certain date, and then decide which one they like the best, and award a contract to that consultant.
For a hive-centric example: One thing that is sorely lacking is a simple open source tool change your hive owner key trustlessly. You can either trust a front end like PeakD to do it, or you can attempt to jump down the rabbit hole of running your own node or scripting it yourself. Lack of easy password management is a huge gap as far as I'm concerned. Sure I could float the idea to this dev or that dev to submit a proposal, that may or may not get funded. What if the community at large decided this was something that they wanted? What if they want something else? Does it make sense for devs to chase pet projects, if it's really not something the community wants? Shouldn't the community be able to drive requirements instead of an individualistic or top-down approach?
Your thoughts?