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.