I went through all your ideas. Thank you very much for this awesome active dispute so far, guys. I condensed all concerns to one central issue:
How to allow an active and easy democratic process for budget decisions with raising amount of proposals?
The issues:
1. We will have 10-20 proposals per month in the near future
2. With high amounts of proposals it's illusional to do the discussion in multiple threads of the Dashtalk forum (untructured, unprofessional information process)
3. Information get lost. To cope with this we need one central place to be.
4. Budget review, discussion and voting has to be easy for high voting participation
5. From finance and technical perspective it's not possible to do proposal presentation & discussion on a "decentralized platform" within reasonable time and money
Possible solutions:
1. Core team puts up a +10k USD proposal to create a new "centralized" platform (compareable to Dashwhale)
2. Core team looses focus and implements a "decentralized" proposal presentation and discussion feature. To my opinion technically challenging if not impossible within reasonable time. Somebody external will charge about 50-500k USD
3. Sit and wait. Ignoring the issues outlined above decreases quality of the democratic process, leading to a) malallocation of funds b) loss of ideas c) loss of central discussion issues by time => hurting DASH investor value
4. Monetize Dashwhale like any other website. Monetizing Dashwhale a regular way hurts open access to the platform and impairs democratic process (ads, highlighted proposals)
5. Invest 2% of the total budget for 6 month to see, if Dashwhale can solve these issues relevant for every masternode owner and every DASH owner.
Best,
Rango
Voting: mnbudget vote-many 4f8b12279629b8126ba7b1a378cd3ef6e3bb88d7fb04cb6db424edf4c95f6780 yes no
Would it be possible to separate the budget proposal aspect of the website from the masternode monitoring part of Dashwhale? Maybe having separate sites and a more appropriate domain name for the budget proposal site would be a good idea. At the moment it seems to me like work on the masternode monitoring would be subsidised by the blockchain but most of the arguments we're hearing for this proposal refer to the budget proposal work.
I think you're probably right in saying that a decentralised platform for discussion of budget proposals would be costly and time consuming. My opinion is that ultimately it should be the goal too, but for now a centralised solution, be that Dashwhale, DashTalk etc. is fine. That said, I don't think the centralised platform dedicated to budget proposal discussions should be privy to information about which users cast which votes. I know it's not necessary to cast your votes there, but I feel a separating of functions would make things much clearer - I think it would be a mistake for new users to believe they have to vote on Dashwhale.
I'm really caught in two minds about this proposal! Ultimately, I admire greatly what Rango has achieved, however, I see it as a commercial venture and one for which Rango needs to find a commercial business model with which to fund it - should he wish to develop it further. I don't doubt that the site is beneficial to the ecosystem as a whole, but it does set a dangerous precedent should a centralised commercial venture such as this gain blockchain funding.
I haven't made a decision which way to vote yet. I'm going to wait and see, hopefully we'll have some more discussion on the matter
Walter
P.S. I'm a masternode owner and I'm a happy user of dashwhale. I'd certainly consider paying a subscription for such a service if that was what's required to 'make it pay' for Rango. Do I think that my usage of the dashwhale website (an associated costs) should be 'socialised' and funded by the network as a whole? This is the bit that doesn't sit well with me imho...
