Deepfunding Blog

Community driven

Our product- and process roadmap is an integral part of the Deep Funding program, and there is much to tell. However, the most important thing about this is that the roadmap is not fixed. We want Deep Funding to be a genuinely community-driven program. This community involvement is about reviewing the projects and giving constructive feedback. But another critical part is about developing the best processes and tools to facilitate Deep Funding itself. 

We are here to learn together what works and doesn’t work for Deep Funding and, in fact, community-driven governance in general! We will use or develop the tools we think we need,  and evaluate how they hold up in practice. Some of these feature requests may find their way into the program as a proposal for the community to vote on and/or be built by a community-led team!

Main goals

We want to develop good processes and tools to achieve the following main goals: 

1. Getting a constant supply of decent/high quality and good fit proposals
2. Having continuous & constructive community involvement
3. Prepare for scalability in the event of growing popularity

This can be translated as creating a system with high usability, transparency, and automation.

Community incentives

An important and ongoing topic will be building the right incentives for the community to be active and constructive in the ecosystem. The role of the community is a crucial one. If we can incentivize the right people to give good and valuable feedback that alone could be a reason to submit a proposal! And of course, we want to make sure the ‘best’ proposals will surface and be awarded the funding they require.  For this, we need our community members to read and review the proposals that come in, rate them, help improve them and weed out any accidental or purposeful errors.  And, of course, finally to vote on them, so they get rewarded. This is a lot of work, especially if the Deep Funding program will grow over time in popularity and -hopefully- in funding resources.

While some of the incentives may be immaterial (recognition, getting in touch with promising teams and cool ideas, learning), we will also apply some material rewards in the shape of AGIX tokens. A likely scenario is that people who contribute most will also get the highest reward.  But to define the details of this mechanism, and to build, and improve it will require a decent amount of thinking, development, and testing. We intend to apply a “weighted liquid rank reputation” system that assigns weights to different tasks and criteria to build a dynamic reputation index that is fair, and transparent and serves the stated goals. 

We have decided not to add rewards yet to this first round. This will give us a somewhat ‘neutral’ starting point to build on. But the activities done by our community members may well find their way into future versions of the reputation system, so the value created by those actions will (likely) not be lost. (nothing is certain, we may run into migration issues when switching system or discover that the actions we record are not representative somehow) 

Best of Breed strategy

Another side of starting a community-driven program is that (almost by definition) things will not be perfect at the start. We will launch our program with a ‘best of breed’ strategy using available tools rather than developing them from scratch. This has the advantage of starting quickly with a reasonably sizable functional scope. This also means that we are somewhat limited by tools that were not custom-built for our particular use cases. With this starting point, we have several options to continue:

• We can switch one tool for another if we find a better one, without much interference to other components of the end-to-end solution.
• We can co-create with the suppliers of the tools and motivate them to add the functionality we need 
• We can build additional functionality on top of our toolset ourselves or rebuild the whole solution if we have good reasons to do so. (But surely that is not the best use of our resources at the start of this project!)

Software stack at the start of the program

WordPress: 

• We have launched this WordPress site as an easy way to publish Deep Funding content. 
• As next steps we can either migrate awarded projects to WordPress or leave them in Swae, depending on the available functionalities and user-friendliness.

Swae.io

We looked at several options to facilitate the submission of proposals and interactions with the community on this. This goes from basic solutions such as a standalone forum to building features into WordPress to several off-the-shelf solutions like Swae.
We chose Swae because of many reasons, including: 

• Rich formatting options when creating proposals
• Their affinity with AI-supported tooling such as the NLP writing tools they already have built-in. 
• The support for anonymous contributions
• Their way of tracking interactions could be a solid starting point for interaction with our envisioned “Weighted liquid rank reputation” system. (More on that below). 
• Most importantly, the willingness of Swae to collaborate with us in developing their platform, which gives us (‘us’ being SNET foundation AND community) an opportunity to enhance their roadmap or even co-create with them on the development of elaborate new features.

Tooling to be determined:

• We plan to build some lightweight features that enable the community and us to track the progress and allow a continued dialog between the project team and the community. 

Our own voting portal 

Also, here we looked at some third party options but ultimately chose our own voting portal because:

• Security and reliability are crucial.
• We want good and equal treatment of tokens in wallets, in our staking portal, and liquidity pools. This is not an obvious thing.
• We want to be able to have some control over who can file a new proposition to vote on
• We want the flexibility to implement different voting systems to experiment with. As a good example, for the first round already, we will upgrade our voting portal to support grade voting (giving a grade from 1-10) instead of a simple yes/no answer. 

Other tooling

While the above is currently the main stack for the program itself, we will also be using Discord for community interactions, other social media channels (youtube!), Mailchimp for sending out newsletters, and so on.

Flexibility

As stated at the beginning of this page, the roadmap is not fixed. We will keep an open mind on our tooling and continuously improve it.

Take WordPress as an example: While we don’t expect significant downsides for just publishing information, if we would like to develop more and more functionality on top of it, we might want to evaluate if WordPress is also the best option as a platform to continue to build upon. But in case we would exchange this for another solution, we will still be able to continue with Swae and our voting portal. 

For Swae.io, on the other hand, while we are very enthusiastic about them and their solution, we will test it in public and assess the learnings from that. We will list all desired improvements and evaluate the implementation scope, speed, and quality. While we hope and expect this will turn out to be a great partnership, our ‘best of breed’ approach would still leave us room to deviate from this path with limited impact. We can decide to test another application, or we can move gradually to developing more functionality dedicated to our use cases. (But of course, we prefer to see it succeed!)

Future developments

We already have a long list of ideas that would be cool to develop, like ‘Weighted liquid rank reputation’, Liquid democracy, Wallet login, Project governance tools, and more. Any expertise in the Community on these subjects is very welcome. And, as mentioned above, eventually, I expect to see some of the desired improvements appear as proposals for Deep Funding that we can all give feedback and vote upon.