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 sizeable 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 in 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.