Proposal - Dash Watch
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Summary: Finish creating an organization and website called Dash Watch (dashwatch.org) which tracks each proposal’s status and performance fulfilling its scope, schedule, budget, and communication goals. Dashwatch.org will have a wide array of filtering, tagging, and sorting options so that you can instantly view all proposals listed by date, payout amount, proposer, tag, status as well as each of the performance metrics mentioned above. This will enable masternodes to quickly spot the proposals that are under-performing. Eventually we will allow proposers themselves to enter in their project’s accomplishments, updates, timeline and milestones and have it feed into a global timeline/calendar for the entire proposal ecosystem.
This project will require at least one full-time developer and at least one other full-time employee to assist in outreach, data collection, verification, entry, in addition to me as project manager. This a rather large undertaking, however, we want to do this thoroughly and professionally. We believe this is a much needed step for the ever-growing 2 million dollar per month proposal ecosystem. I will oversee the application design and development, the proposer outreach, as well as the data collection, verification, entry, and reporting. I will be accountable to continue to innovate the platform to meet masternodes’ needs. It will be Dash Watch’s responsibility to actively seek the most accurate, relevant, and up-to-date information on all ongoing proposals at least monthly.
About me
You may know me as paragon from Slack or Discord. I've been an active community member and big believer in Dash since late last year. In April, I paid for one of the developers I employ to build http://www.dash.dog which is a website and software that monitors Dash's price and network in real-time.
I hope the community is willing to respect that I’d like to keep my identity private because of existing business endeavors, but I have personally met and spent time with various members of the core team. Ryan Taylor gave me the initial encouragement to follow through on my vision for this concept. Philipp Engelhorn, Jeff Smith, and Robert Wiecko have also all individually spoken to me about this project and encouraged me to carry it out. They felt it was particularly important that this be done by someone outside of Core which I agree with. As far as my background, I have started and run a successful online business managing over 25 employees for the last several years which I’m currently phasing out of. I’ve envisioned, funded, and overseen the development of an advanced internet tools software suite and corresponding website as well as a web platform for peer-to-peer asset trading. I have extensive experience hiring developers, conceiving and building software and web platforms, managing and getting along with various types of people, and seeing projects through to completion. I’m confident that I have the skills necessary to carry out this project professionally, however, please feel free to contact me personally if you’d like to see proof of my previous work.
What are we proposing to do?
Finish building a small team and website called Dash Watch to follow up with and track the status of all the various approved proposals. We will publish factual and objective information only in the performance metrics and proposal updates, and we will source our information. We will only cover approved proposals unlike previous ideas which sought to evaluate proposals before approval. We believe strongly that in order for the masternodes to form the best collective consensus, we should stay out of the business of giving our opinion and let the masternodes form independent opinions themselves.
Proposals on our website will all be sortable and filterable by name, proposer, status, start date, last update, Dash amount, total USD amount paid at payout/s, the various performance metrics mentioned above, etc. Each proposal owner will have his own profile that shows his history across all proposals. We will also create the above-mentioned tagging system so that one could quickly, for example, find all proposals of a specific type such as those related to Debit Cards, exchange integration, YouTube ads, ATM’s, POS systems, or meetups for example.
Motivation & Background
With 20+ proposals being approved by the DAO each month and that expected to grow exponentially, it is increasingly important for the Dash community to be more vigilant and informed about its investments. All Dash holders deserve to be able to track the progress of the treasury’s investments so that they can learn from the proposals which are successful and those that aren't, and properly recognize those who have done a stellar job and be made aware of those who haven't. We believe the inability to quickly assess the status of ongoing proposals or to track a proposer’s history has led to lower accountability, missed deadlines, inefficiencies, and losses that are preventable. If approved by the community, Dash Watch should serve as a powerful tool to diminish the probability that the network suffers these consequences in the future.
Scope
While our initial goal is to create the user-friendly web interface offering an overview of how all proposals are progressing and where the problems are. Longer-term, assuming significant adoption of the platform, we plan on allowing the proposers to have logins tied to their proposer ID in order to directly update the community. They’ll be able to update their specific proposal’s accomplishments, budget utilization, schedule adherence, along with the overall timeline and milestones directly and efficiently. If the community would like, however, we could still verify the accuracy of this information to the best of our ability.
The entered timelines and milestones of each proposal will automatically feed into a master calendar and or timeline of the entire Dash proposal system. This will allow anyone to readily determine key upcoming dates and developments.
Currently, many of the proposal databases have inaccurate payment dates along with missing proposals, and some have no data or incomplete data before version 12.1. This has made our job obtaining a complete and fully accurate dataset quite a bit more difficult as we must spend time not only locating the needed data across the various resources but then also verifying it. It will be part of this project to aggregate the most complete and accurate database to date of approved proposals including as many details as possible such as less commonly collected information like payout addresses.
Initially, our proposal data will start covering proposals from Feb, 2017 which is when 12.1 was released. Data prior to that is not as uniform, reliable, or complete, but as soon as we complete higher priority tasks, we will begin inputting all available data going back to the beginning of the proposal system and we will continue to track each proposal’s status, scope, schedule, and budget along with their latest update monthly. Because all proposal data drops off the blockchain after that month’s budget cycle, going forward, we plan to (thanks to coingun’s help) retrieve all available proposal data directly from the blockchain to ensure we have the most complete and accurate database possible.
Dash Watch will not just be a useful tool but we will strive to be the eyes and ears for the masternodes who can't be expected to monitor the progress of all proposals. We will make sure that those receiving funding are followed diligently and that they know they will be held publicly accountable to deliver on their promises. However, we primarily want to be a resource to relay the overwhelming number of dedicated hard-working Dash contractors whose proposals are adding great value currently or hold tremendous promise in the near future. By more clearly exposing this, we expect people will better appreciate Dash’s vastly underestimated potential. We will also help keep Dashforcenews in the loop of all pertinent discoveries for enhanced coverage of proposals.
Deliverables
I have already personally invested $9,400 hiring two people to initiate development and data collection and am actively seeking community feedback on the pre-alpha version of the product which I will show in an attached video. We estimate this will take 3 months to have a polished finished product that we’ll be proud to present the community with, however, we will have a functional website with intermediate versions and plenty of valuable information long before that.
Milestones
Itemized Costs
Total Costs Requested
Web Site / Application Development ~160-200hrs/month @ 50$/hr = $9,000/mo
Full-time senior developer highly experienced in postgresql, graphql, react.js, node.js etc
Custom-built database architecture and backend to suit our needs which will be a foundation from which we can create many proprietary features to suit masternodes
Custom-built Postgres permission structure that will allow different users to view and or modify the appropriate fields to them
Blockchain communication and JSON parsing of proposal data
Linking of proposer ID to login credentials on Dash Watch to allow proposer to modify his proposal’s updates/progress, timeline/calendar and milestones
Global timeline and calendar feature for the entire proposal ecosystem
Publicly accessible APIs so others can tap into our database
Flexible, sorting, filtering, and tagging options for all proposals
Proposer Outreach & Communication
~80hrs/ month @~50/hr = $4000
Track down and establish a channel of regular communication with all active proposal owners by whatever means possible
Solicitation of status and progress information from each proposal owner once a month via whatever medium is convenient to them (eg discord, forum, email, skype, sms, telegram, phone call, etc)
Database Data Verification and Proposer update information Verification and Summarisation
~80hrs/month @~50/hr = $4000
Verifying we aggregate the most accurate database information from all database resources.
Accurately classifying all proposals under our five metrics and tagging each appropriately enable advanced filtering capability
Verifying all the new monthly information provided by the proposal owners about their proposals is accurate, summarising it into 1-2 sentences and inputting it into our database. If you would like to see more in depth reports on each proposal please let us know.
Project management
$4500
Reimbursement for proposal work
Recruiting/hiring
Managing the project’s staff and helping do the work
Ensuring all work is carried out thoroughly, completely, accurately, and respectfully of proposers and masternodes
Frequent community outreach for feedback and discussion on how to improve our offering
Unforeseen Expenses
$1500
This accounts for minor unpredictable setbacks such as the need to add or replace staff, to redesign or rebuild application features, to redo or reverify data-related tasks, and or due to price fluctuation/slippage
TOTAL
$23,000 or ~54 Dash/mo for 3 months
Terms
We are requesting a monthly payment of ~54 DASH for the first three months to accomplish this scope of work. Any excess funding will be rolled over and used to lessen the amount requested on future proposals, however, if there is a significant price drop we will request funding for the shortfall. For this endeavor to be a success, it will require both long-term endorsement from the DAO to gain proposer cooperation with us and ongoing funding to pay those who are needed to continue working on this. The development costs should diminish precipitously after the first three months assuming no further features are desired, but the proposal outreach and documentation costs will likely increase as our treasury expenditure and number of proposals per month tracked increases. We will be continuously upgrading and improving our application’s featureset as well as the completeness, accuracy, uniformity, and presentation of the information we collect. We will request feedback from the community regarding additional features, more and/or greater-depth coverage, etc. The amount of work required on an ongoing basis may change over time and that will dictate the monthly cost which we will refrain from trying to predict now and will simply request at the appropriate time.
Closing
We believe Dash Watch’s existence informing the masternodes and public about the status of all proposals will encourage proposers to keep their promises and hold themselves to higher standards than they may have without any oversight.
We hope that you see the value in this work and that you will allow us to provide this service. Thank you for your time reading this through, please leave any and all suggestions, modifications, and feedback. Thank you!
Click the Vimeo button at the bottom right of the video window to enlarge or watch full screen
Summary: Finish creating an organization and website called Dash Watch (dashwatch.org) which tracks each proposal’s status and performance fulfilling its scope, schedule, budget, and communication goals. Dashwatch.org will have a wide array of filtering, tagging, and sorting options so that you can instantly view all proposals listed by date, payout amount, proposer, tag, status as well as each of the performance metrics mentioned above. This will enable masternodes to quickly spot the proposals that are under-performing. Eventually we will allow proposers themselves to enter in their project’s accomplishments, updates, timeline and milestones and have it feed into a global timeline/calendar for the entire proposal ecosystem.
This project will require at least one full-time developer and at least one other full-time employee to assist in outreach, data collection, verification, entry, in addition to me as project manager. This a rather large undertaking, however, we want to do this thoroughly and professionally. We believe this is a much needed step for the ever-growing 2 million dollar per month proposal ecosystem. I will oversee the application design and development, the proposer outreach, as well as the data collection, verification, entry, and reporting. I will be accountable to continue to innovate the platform to meet masternodes’ needs. It will be Dash Watch’s responsibility to actively seek the most accurate, relevant, and up-to-date information on all ongoing proposals at least monthly.
About me
You may know me as paragon from Slack or Discord. I've been an active community member and big believer in Dash since late last year. In April, I paid for one of the developers I employ to build http://www.dash.dog which is a website and software that monitors Dash's price and network in real-time.
I hope the community is willing to respect that I’d like to keep my identity private because of existing business endeavors, but I have personally met and spent time with various members of the core team. Ryan Taylor gave me the initial encouragement to follow through on my vision for this concept. Philipp Engelhorn, Jeff Smith, and Robert Wiecko have also all individually spoken to me about this project and encouraged me to carry it out. They felt it was particularly important that this be done by someone outside of Core which I agree with. As far as my background, I have started and run a successful online business managing over 25 employees for the last several years which I’m currently phasing out of. I’ve envisioned, funded, and overseen the development of an advanced internet tools software suite and corresponding website as well as a web platform for peer-to-peer asset trading. I have extensive experience hiring developers, conceiving and building software and web platforms, managing and getting along with various types of people, and seeing projects through to completion. I’m confident that I have the skills necessary to carry out this project professionally, however, please feel free to contact me personally if you’d like to see proof of my previous work.
What are we proposing to do?
Finish building a small team and website called Dash Watch to follow up with and track the status of all the various approved proposals. We will publish factual and objective information only in the performance metrics and proposal updates, and we will source our information. We will only cover approved proposals unlike previous ideas which sought to evaluate proposals before approval. We believe strongly that in order for the masternodes to form the best collective consensus, we should stay out of the business of giving our opinion and let the masternodes form independent opinions themselves.
Proposals on our website will all be sortable and filterable by name, proposer, status, start date, last update, Dash amount, total USD amount paid at payout/s, the various performance metrics mentioned above, etc. Each proposal owner will have his own profile that shows his history across all proposals. We will also create the above-mentioned tagging system so that one could quickly, for example, find all proposals of a specific type such as those related to Debit Cards, exchange integration, YouTube ads, ATM’s, POS systems, or meetups for example.
Motivation & Background
With 20+ proposals being approved by the DAO each month and that expected to grow exponentially, it is increasingly important for the Dash community to be more vigilant and informed about its investments. All Dash holders deserve to be able to track the progress of the treasury’s investments so that they can learn from the proposals which are successful and those that aren't, and properly recognize those who have done a stellar job and be made aware of those who haven't. We believe the inability to quickly assess the status of ongoing proposals or to track a proposer’s history has led to lower accountability, missed deadlines, inefficiencies, and losses that are preventable. If approved by the community, Dash Watch should serve as a powerful tool to diminish the probability that the network suffers these consequences in the future.
Scope
While our initial goal is to create the user-friendly web interface offering an overview of how all proposals are progressing and where the problems are. Longer-term, assuming significant adoption of the platform, we plan on allowing the proposers to have logins tied to their proposer ID in order to directly update the community. They’ll be able to update their specific proposal’s accomplishments, budget utilization, schedule adherence, along with the overall timeline and milestones directly and efficiently. If the community would like, however, we could still verify the accuracy of this information to the best of our ability.
The entered timelines and milestones of each proposal will automatically feed into a master calendar and or timeline of the entire Dash proposal system. This will allow anyone to readily determine key upcoming dates and developments.
Currently, many of the proposal databases have inaccurate payment dates along with missing proposals, and some have no data or incomplete data before version 12.1. This has made our job obtaining a complete and fully accurate dataset quite a bit more difficult as we must spend time not only locating the needed data across the various resources but then also verifying it. It will be part of this project to aggregate the most complete and accurate database to date of approved proposals including as many details as possible such as less commonly collected information like payout addresses.
Initially, our proposal data will start covering proposals from Feb, 2017 which is when 12.1 was released. Data prior to that is not as uniform, reliable, or complete, but as soon as we complete higher priority tasks, we will begin inputting all available data going back to the beginning of the proposal system and we will continue to track each proposal’s status, scope, schedule, and budget along with their latest update monthly. Because all proposal data drops off the blockchain after that month’s budget cycle, going forward, we plan to (thanks to coingun’s help) retrieve all available proposal data directly from the blockchain to ensure we have the most complete and accurate database possible.
Dash Watch will not just be a useful tool but we will strive to be the eyes and ears for the masternodes who can't be expected to monitor the progress of all proposals. We will make sure that those receiving funding are followed diligently and that they know they will be held publicly accountable to deliver on their promises. However, we primarily want to be a resource to relay the overwhelming number of dedicated hard-working Dash contractors whose proposals are adding great value currently or hold tremendous promise in the near future. By more clearly exposing this, we expect people will better appreciate Dash’s vastly underestimated potential. We will also help keep Dashforcenews in the loop of all pertinent discoveries for enhanced coverage of proposals.
Deliverables
- Database containing all approved proposals with filtering and tagging ability going back to early 2017 to start (database)
- Web application to view proposal data and progress (front-end application)
- Fully built database and web application displaying proposal status along with objective metrics with sources cited of the last 8-10 months of proposals
I have already personally invested $9,400 hiring two people to initiate development and data collection and am actively seeking community feedback on the pre-alpha version of the product which I will show in an attached video. We estimate this will take 3 months to have a polished finished product that we’ll be proud to present the community with, however, we will have a functional website with intermediate versions and plenty of valuable information long before that.
Milestones
- Deliverable 1 Backend significantly advanced, finalized database architecture, blockchain proposal data parsing and importing: (2017.12.15)
- Deliverable 2 Front-end app significantly advanced: (2018.01.15)
- Deliverable 3 Full and vetted dataset on each proposal post 12.1: (2018.02.01)
- Deliverable 4 - Finished backend with login capability for all proposers and visual timeline/calendar for each proposal and the entire proposal system. Fully polished and optimized UI with all features enabled presenting the entire verified proposal dataset: (2018.02.30)
Itemized Costs
Total Costs Requested
Web Site / Application Development ~160-200hrs/month @ 50$/hr = $9,000/mo
Full-time senior developer highly experienced in postgresql, graphql, react.js, node.js etc
Custom-built database architecture and backend to suit our needs which will be a foundation from which we can create many proprietary features to suit masternodes
Custom-built Postgres permission structure that will allow different users to view and or modify the appropriate fields to them
Blockchain communication and JSON parsing of proposal data
Linking of proposer ID to login credentials on Dash Watch to allow proposer to modify his proposal’s updates/progress, timeline/calendar and milestones
Global timeline and calendar feature for the entire proposal ecosystem
Publicly accessible APIs so others can tap into our database
Flexible, sorting, filtering, and tagging options for all proposals
Proposer Outreach & Communication
~80hrs/ month @~50/hr = $4000
Track down and establish a channel of regular communication with all active proposal owners by whatever means possible
Solicitation of status and progress information from each proposal owner once a month via whatever medium is convenient to them (eg discord, forum, email, skype, sms, telegram, phone call, etc)
Database Data Verification and Proposer update information Verification and Summarisation
~80hrs/month @~50/hr = $4000
Verifying we aggregate the most accurate database information from all database resources.
Accurately classifying all proposals under our five metrics and tagging each appropriately enable advanced filtering capability
Verifying all the new monthly information provided by the proposal owners about their proposals is accurate, summarising it into 1-2 sentences and inputting it into our database. If you would like to see more in depth reports on each proposal please let us know.
Project management
$4500
Reimbursement for proposal work
Recruiting/hiring
Managing the project’s staff and helping do the work
Ensuring all work is carried out thoroughly, completely, accurately, and respectfully of proposers and masternodes
Frequent community outreach for feedback and discussion on how to improve our offering
Unforeseen Expenses
$1500
This accounts for minor unpredictable setbacks such as the need to add or replace staff, to redesign or rebuild application features, to redo or reverify data-related tasks, and or due to price fluctuation/slippage
TOTAL
$23,000 or ~54 Dash/mo for 3 months
Terms
We are requesting a monthly payment of ~54 DASH for the first three months to accomplish this scope of work. Any excess funding will be rolled over and used to lessen the amount requested on future proposals, however, if there is a significant price drop we will request funding for the shortfall. For this endeavor to be a success, it will require both long-term endorsement from the DAO to gain proposer cooperation with us and ongoing funding to pay those who are needed to continue working on this. The development costs should diminish precipitously after the first three months assuming no further features are desired, but the proposal outreach and documentation costs will likely increase as our treasury expenditure and number of proposals per month tracked increases. We will be continuously upgrading and improving our application’s featureset as well as the completeness, accuracy, uniformity, and presentation of the information we collect. We will request feedback from the community regarding additional features, more and/or greater-depth coverage, etc. The amount of work required on an ongoing basis may change over time and that will dictate the monthly cost which we will refrain from trying to predict now and will simply request at the appropriate time.
Closing
We believe Dash Watch’s existence informing the masternodes and public about the status of all proposals will encourage proposers to keep their promises and hold themselves to higher standards than they may have without any oversight.
We hope that you see the value in this work and that you will allow us to provide this service. Thank you for your time reading this through, please leave any and all suggestions, modifications, and feedback. Thank you!
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