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First Quarter 2016 Expense Report

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Ryan Taylor

Ryan Taylor

Well-known member
Foundation Member
In an effort to provide greater transparency to the community on how proposal funds are being spent, we are providing the following financial report covering Q1 budget proposals and expenses.

The core team budget proposals for Q1 included the following:
- Core Team “Salary”
- Dash.org Reimbursement
- Liquidity providers
- Transform.PR
- Lamassu ATM Integration
- Satoshi Roundtable
- Public Awareness

Most of these budget items are pretty straightforward (e.g., reimbursements for expenses, defined contracts). However, we would like to provide more insight into each of these items. Daniel also provided valuable details on the Public Awareness budget - the only core team budget with significant spending discretion - which he manages.

There were also numerous community-sponsored budget proposals that were funded during the quarter. These included reimbursement for expenses for building and displaying the Dash soda vending machine at the The North American Bitcoin Conference, sponsorship of the Daily Decrypt, the WiFi Portal project, and interview sponsorships on JuanSGalt's Disruptek channel on YouTube. While the core team will only be reporting on the projects under its sponsorship, you can see that there were many other great efforts funded by the budget this quarter.

Core Team “Salary”

The core team is currently allocated 1,176 Dash per month for “salary”. I place “salary” in quotes because at current prices, this amount is little more than a token recognition of the work being done by the core team members, many of whom transitioned to full-time status in the last few months. During the quarter, these funds were used to recognize the contributions of 19 individuals that provided substantial support to core team initiatives. This budget is fully distributed every month.

Dash.org Reimbursement

This budget proposal was meant to run from December through March to reimburse eduffield (Evan), Minotaur (Daniel), and kot (Robert) for the purchase of the dash.org domain name late last year. The approved budget was for a total of 8,400 Dash spread over 4 months. The January through March payments distributed as expected, but due to an error, all December budgets were not paid. A new budget item this quarter replaces the missed December payment starting in April.

Liquidity Providers

The Liquidity Providers budget proposal funds the hosting of six wallets on the network – each operated by community members – which constantly mix coins. This provides users with much faster mixing times and a better user experience with our privacy features. The budget called for 140 Dash per month compensation for these community members. The funding address is controlled by yidakee (Tiago) - who administers the program - and distributed from there to the other community members providing the services. The liquidity provider proposal was voted out starting in March, so only January and February payments were made. The team of volunteers have continued to provide liquidity to the network despite the defunding of the proposal. Part of the reason it was defunded was due to the cost, as Dash’s value has appreciated so much in the last 6 months. We have resubmitted the Liquidity Provider funding request at a lower payment amount to regain support for this valuable service. If you have not already done so, please vote out the original Liquidity Providers proposal and cast your vote on the new v2 Liquidity Providers proposal.

Transform.PR

During Q1, we contracted public relations services through Transform.PR. The original intent was to have a three month contract with Transform.PR extending from January to March. The contract was denominated in USD at $6,000 / month. Funding was primarily to be provided through the Public Awareness budget, but a separate proposal of 1,100 Dash was approved beginning in January to supplement the costs. This was one of our major promotion initiatives in January 2016. The focus was on press release distribution and lobbying with the media to promote organic articles on Dash related topics. Unfortunately, the proposal was voted down before the January results were even reported, so only the first month was funded. Nonetheless, we saw a significant number of articles in a variety of publications during the month of January resulting from this proposal / contract.

Dash Increases Its Block Size as Founder Confirms Instantaneous Transactions
Dash Plans Integration into Lamassu ATMs with Bitcoin
A Conversation with Evan Duffield, Founder of Dash
Dash announces blocksize increase
Virtual Currency Developer Plans to Survive the 'Death' of Bitcoin
Dash Set to Take Cryptocurrency Ecosystem By Storm
Dash Founder: Cryptocurrency World Needs More Capacity Than Just Bitcoin
Dash To Become The First Alternative To Bitcoin Offered By The Lamassu ATM Project
Dash N 'Drink: buy sodas from vending machines with this cryptocurrency
DASH Block Size Increase Reaches Consensus in Less Than 24 hours /Cryptocurrency news
Dash Block Size Increase to 2 MB Has Been Accepted
DASH Block Size Increase Reaches Consensus in Less Than 24 hours
Dash doubles block size
The North American Bitcoin Conference 2016: Day 1
Leapfrogging Bitcoin, Dash Adopts 2MB Block Sizes
Dash’s 2nd Birthday: We Are Complementary To Bitcoin, Not A Competitor
Dash Cryptocurrency Secures Trademark Rights, Moves to Increase Block Size to 2 MB

Lamassu ATM Integration

We have a support contract with Deginner to integrate Dash into the Lamassu ATM network. The contract with Deginner is denominated in Dash, consisting of 12 monthly payments of 610.26 Dash each. Although the final payment will be in December 2016, the contract actually provides 24 months of support through the end of 2017, including the integration of Dash into any future releases of Lamassu’s code. A first version of the software has been released by Deginner and a working demonstration video has been posted. Additional versions are already planned which will make integration on existing machines much easier for ATM operators. Payments for these services are paid directly to Deginner each month.

Satoshi Roundtable

Daniel and Evan attended the Satoshi Roundtable in January. A budget proposal of two months at 717.70 Dash per month was approved to reimburse Evan’s and Daniel’s cost of attendance. These two payments were completed as of the March payment cycle.
 
Continued...

Public Awareness

Public Awareness is the only budget item where the core team has significant discretion on how the monies are spent. Some of the information in this post has been published before. Daniel compiled it again here for the benefit of everyone having this information in one place, including the associated expenses. These are the major components of the Public Awareness spending during the quarter:
  • 1) Public Relations. As stated earlier, we contracted public relations services with Transform.PR. The contribution from the Public Awareness budget consisted of 675.15 DASH.
  • 2) TNABC. Another major initiative we had for January was our participation in The North American Bitcoin Conference. Funding for the event was primarily provided in the November budget, which covered Evan’s and Daniel’s flight and hotel costs. However, we had some promotional expenses that were covered from the public-awareness budget and additional attendance costs.
a) Dash Banner + Brochures: $ 130.00 USD
b) Dash Stickers: 77.43 DASH
c) Tungfa Flight Reimbursement (HK-MIA) + Hotel: $1371.00 USD + $600 USD​

  • 3) 8BTC. We continued our partnership with 8BTC for Chinese PR services. Final payment of our three month agreement with 8BTC. Investment: 4 BTC.
Original Project Description from the 2015 Q4 report:

“We contracted a partnership with Chinese PR service that works with 8BTC the number 1 Chinese forum and media site for 4BTC per month, of which we have already paid the first month. This has been a breakthrough for us in China and has provided a way better sense of direction. Before we went into this program the Dash section in 8BTC was still under the Darkcoin brand, had no new content and very little attention. As a result of this program the Dash section was updated, everything related to Darkcoin was converted to Dash and they have provided a lot of guidance in our efforts to reach the Chinese audience. We also started translating and publishing any articles we got on the West campaign into 8BTC we even got our Chinese version of the video to be on an article on the front page of 8BTC. Please check for details: www.8BTC.com/dash”​


  • 4) PR and Advertising Campaign. After our relationship with the PR firm had been terminated, we ran a comprehensive PR and Advertising campaign internally. Including: Banner advertisements in different websites, International article translation and publication, podcast sponsorships and interviews.
a) CryptoMediaHub.com 3.6846 BTC
b) BTCMedia.org 13.273083 BTC
c) International Sites 2.4424 BTC

Activities:
I) Banner Advertisements (FEB-MARCH)​
Including international:​
II) More International Press / Translations Samples​

Podcasts:​

III) SovereignBTC#84 (with Daniel Diaz):
https://soundcloud.com/sovereignbtc/dan-diaz-dash-final

IV) The Tatiana Show with Daniel Diaz:
https://liberty.me/live/the-tatiana-show-dash-digital-currency/​

Printed Magazine:

V) yBitcoin Magazine
Dash Article + participation in poster of industry leaders. This magazine is distributed to 40,000+ issues printed quarterly, 200k readers. Dash appears in the current issue:
https://issuu.com/ybitcoin/docs/ybitcoinmagazine?e=10006647/34143437
https://ybitcoin.com/poster/​
  • 5) Anarchapulco. Dash participation at Anarchapulco with a keynote presentation by Juan S. Galt. There was actually a proposal to sponsor Anarchapulco which was not funded because of late submittal. The desire of the community was clear to sponsor, however, so the sponsorship was paid out of the Public Awareness budget. 140 Dash.

  • 6) Translation Services. As part of the maintenance of the different international social media outlets, we run a translation tip jar. 40 Dash.

  • 7) FIAT Gateways projects. Starting in late March, we communicated our intent to redirect Public Awareness funding toward development activities, and a proposal in the April budget made our recommendation official. Given the need to establish better FIAT gateway infrastructure, a new partnership was established with existing crypto companies to develop and implement open source tools for Dash that will facilitate FIAT access to users and businesses looking to implement services in the Dash ecosystem. Investment in Q1 was 1900 Dash. More details about this project: https://dashtalk.org/threads/prioritization-of-fiat-gateways.8457/

  • 8) BALANCE. There is a balance of 10.02 BTC from Q1 that will be directed towards a new Chinese PR campaign with 8BTC and coordinated by our Chinese ambassadors.
    tymtqD5.png
These are the exact numbers, but since different initiatives come denominated in different currencies and were transacted at different times the total value is difficult to value precisely. With the intent to give an approximate overall value I am going to use an average rate of 4 USD / Dash and 400 USD / BTC to be conservative.

That would give us a total approximate value of $26,799.32 USD for the Public Awareness initiatives.

We feel very pleased with the results in terms of growth of awareness during Q1 2016. We have seen the Dash project consolidate and many non-core team projects emerge from the governance system which shows the network is maturing. At this point in time the core team is focusing more on development and building access gateway infrastructure and there is now a great group of community volunteers leading the way in the PR and marketing area, although some smaller initiatives like our Chinese promotion will continue.

Questions / Comments:

We are working hard to provide the community with value and transparency to a greater extent than other crypto currencies. If you have questions, concerns, or congratulations about the budgets, feel free to reach out to me, or post comments publicly here. We are eager to hear feedback and ideas. Thanks!

Ryan Taylor
(babygiraffe)
 
AnarchicCluster said:
How does tip jar for translations work?
Click to expand...

First we tipped community members for steady translation work
by now we actually moved away from that (too complicate and not steady enough)we now have signed up community member for Translation work (20 Dash a month Flatfeet)
Chinese (covered in separate box), Russia, Portuguese, Spanish,....
 
AnarchicCluster said:
How does tip jar for translations work?
Click to expand...
tungfa said:
First we tipped community members for steady translation work
by now we actually moved away from that (too complicate and not steady enough)we now have signed up community member for Translation work (20 Dash a month Flatfeet)
Chinese (covered in separate box), Russia, Portuguese, Spanish,....
Click to expand...

I established and manage the work of English-Russian translation team (thanks Tungfa for his help!).

It works like this for us:
1. We have common budget of 20 DASH/month for Russian (so it works also for Ukraine, Kazakhstan, Belorussia, ...).
2. We decided not to use professional translators (too expensive + they don't know crypto specific - so quality of result isn't good). Instead - We have the team of 6 (nik443 , 555007 , TheFuzzStone , belovit , Grebenshchikov + me) Russian Dash community members - our English isn't perfect, but we know a lot about Dash project and proofread/edit each other - so quality of result is good.
3. I determine which materials we have to translate. After this every of our guys can declare "I want to translate this!" - so it is becoming "booked by him".
4. After translation is done - I (or another "editor" verifies/edit it and "assigns quality of initial translation from 0,5 to 1,0"). For each translation guys earn "points" = "number of characters" multiplied by the "quality".
5. In the end of each month we pay these 20 DASH - dividing this sum to all guys regarding on their "points" proportion in common "points score".

In February+March we translated more than 130.000 characters (22 articles) - more than half of them were published in popular Russian medias (for free) - the rest was published and PR-ed (forums, social networks, ...) manually in our personal blogs.

I would recommend to use this schema for all other languages as it's very effective:
1. It's competitive and friendly team/atmosphere - guys do work quickly, using their spare time the most effective way.
2. They verify each other - so the quality of translation is good.
3. There is unofficial competition - Translator like to publish his work to popular medias to cover maximum audience.
4. It is self-ballanced system - and can handle big amount of translations with even small budget for it.
5. ...
 
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Thank you for the report. Most of this is pretty nice and does a good job at explaining things. I do have some questions and comments (I'm sure you expected me too).

1) It was not 'unfortunate' as you say that Transform PR was voted out. The masternode owners spoke up and the core team should respect that vote and keep personal bias out of public expense reports.
Y54dJqo.png


2) Transform PR was paid 1775.15 Total DASH (please correct me if I am wrong). How long did they perform services for us? 1 month? 2 months? 3 months? Was the intention to always pay the 675 Dash to Transform PR in addition to the 3300 Dash they were supposed to get? Or did the 675 Dash only get paid once the Transform PR proposal was voted out of the system? Had the transform PR budget continued would the 675 dash still have been paid to TPR in addition to the 3300 Dash?

3) Below you will see two people getting paid or reimbursed for costs accrued for big events. I would like all of you out there reading this to ask yourself a couple questions. Was it more effective to pay Juan 140 Dash $800 to do a huge speech and interview numerous people while representing DASH at Anarchapulco, or sending tungfa to Miami? for $1971? I personally witnessed the effectiveness of Juan's efforts, we all did because he posted results all over these forums and other social media outlets. What were the results of Tungfa's efforts in Miami? Was it really necessary to send him? Was this a vacation or was this something that the people running the public awareness fund thought would be effective? Also you phrase this as Reimbursement. Was the plane ticket and hotel purchased with the intentions of getting paid back or were they purchased before hand, and then somebody realized that they could pay him back from public awareness funds?

This is important. Investors who want to put money into Dash will look at expense reports to get an idea of how core team members spend budgets. If we spend budgets to sponsor trips for people that are not effective at these conferences, that is a huge red flag for investors. Tungfa does a lot of great things for this community and I appreciate all the efforts he puts in. But so do a lot of people, and we cant just send everybody on trips.

babygiraffe said:
Continued...

Public Awareness
Tungfa Flight Reimbursement (HK-MIA) + Hotel: $1371.00 USD + $600 USD
Anarchapulco.
Dash participation at Anarchapulco with a keynote presentation by Juan S. Galt. There was actually a proposal to sponsor Anarchapulco which was not funded because of late submittal. The desire of the community was clear to sponsor, however, so the sponsorship was paid out of the Public Awareness budget. 140 Dash.
Click to expand...
 
buster said:
1) It was not 'unfortunate' as you say that Transform PR was voted out. The masternode owners spoke up and the core team should respect that vote and keep personal bias out of public expense reports.
Click to expand...
I'm glad you found the report helpful. To respond to the concern, I understand where you are coming from, and I actually disagree that opinions have no place in any report to the community. To clarify my statement, I do think that the community's wishes were respected. After voting the project in and initiating it, the community voted it out and the project was shuttered. I think the "unfortunate" parts were that 1) we weren't able to report the first month's results before it was voted down, and 2) we breached a contract with a third party (fortunately they agreed to release us from our contract). I think it appropriate to point out in reports where I think we performed poorly and where I think we executed well, and why. I think I could have been clearer about why I think the defunding was unfortunate above.

How long did they perform services for us? 1 month? 2 months? 3 months?
Click to expand...

They performed services for approximately one month. The contract officially started on January 11th, 2016, but much of the planning activities were actually performed before the contract was officially signed. By February 5th the project had essentially already been shut down and a report was issued here: https://dashtalk.org/threads/transform-pr-project-closure-report.7962/

Was the intention to always pay the 675 Dash to Transform PR in addition to the 3300 Dash they were supposed to get? Or did the 675 Dash only get paid once the Transform PR proposal was voted out of the system? Had the transform PR budget continued would the 675 dash still have been paid to TPR in addition to the 3300 Dash?
Click to expand...

The contract was actually $6,000 per month. Part was to be paid out of the Public Awareness budget. The January budget proposal details can be found at the following link and states "This proposal is only asking for partial funding of 1100 DASH for 3 months to complete the required budget as the currently existing PR budget will now be mostly dedicated to this program with Michael for the next 3 months and will cover most of the expenses".
https://dashtalk.org/threads/january-2016-budget-proposal.7392/

3) Below you will see two people getting paid or reimbursed for costs accrued for big events. I would like all of you out there reading this to ask yourself a couple questions. Was it more effective to pay Juan 140 Dash $800 to do a huge speech and interview numerous people while representing DASH at Anarchapulco, or sending tungfa to Miami? for $1971? I personally witnessed the effectiveness of Juan's efforts, we all did because he posted results all over these forums and other social media outlets. What were the results of Tungfa's efforts in Miami? Was it really necessary to send him? Was this a vacation or was this something that the people running the public awareness fund thought would be effective? Also you phrase this as Reimbursement. Was the plane ticket and hotel purchased with the intentions of getting paid back or were they purchased before hand, and then somebody realized that they could pay him back from public awareness funds?
Click to expand...
I appreciate and understand the message that we need to be mindful of travel costs, and are open to feedback (supportive or otherwise) on how we are doing. That's the whole point of being transparent. I would point out a couple of additional pieces of information on this situation that is relevant:
1) The conference attendance itself was only one benefit of having tungfa attend. We also benefited from the rare opportunity to meet in person as a team to have meetings in the mornings and evenings, to discuss roadmaps, coordinate strategy, etc. Much of the current strategy and focus was developed through brainstorming and working dinners, etc during those three days.
2) Many members of the core team attended the conference and paid their own way to get there. Those that lived in Florida were able to attend for minimal personal cost. I personally paid my own hotel and flights. We could have chosen to supplement a small portion of everyone's flight and hotel instead of directing our support completely toward tungfa attending. I volunteered to attend at my own expense to allow budget to be directed elsewhere, otherwise he would not have been able to make it. These decisions were made beforehand to directly answer your question. This was NOT a situation where tungfa realized after the fact that he might be able to get reimbursed. I used the word "reimbursed" because that is exactly what it was. Dash did not buy the plane tickets and hotels directly... it simply paid back the individuals that paid directly for those items on their own.
3) Days were very long and we worked hard while there. I assure you this was anything but a "vacation". We all paid our own meals out, ground transportation, and incidental expenses. So this was far from a boondoggle.
4) I believe we needed everyone that came, if not more. Our booth was busy from the start to the end of the conference and I personally watched as patrons that we could have engaged walked past because we were too busy.
5) Tunfa's flight was the cheapest option vs. sending kot or flare from Europe, so we were mindful of the costs and prioritized. It would have been great to use as an opportunity to get the whole core team together at once, but that proved cost prohibitive.
6) I don't think the right lens to view this is "was xxxx's presentation a better use of funds than yyyy"? There will always be some investments that provide lots of value and some that provide less. It will be very hard to match the effectiveness of spending 140 Dash on Juan's presentation. For 140 Dash, we couldn't even afford to send one person to Miami, let alone obtain a booth for two days. That doesn't mean it wasn't an effective use of funds. There will always be only one use of funds that ended up with the title of "most effective" (and maybe in 2016 Juan ends up with that title). Holding all other expenses to that standard is illogical.

I hope that additional context and thoughts are helpful. We look forward to additional feedback.

EDIT: calling Minotaur for any corrections to the above information. I would like him to confirm my understanding before considering this absolutely correct.
 
We should be trying to save money on each expense. Tungfa's fight at $1371....was this really the best price available! Use hotwire.com, kayak.com, travelocity.com....can we at least try to use the discount booking sites. Just a quick search found a similar flight at about half that cost.

That total to bring Tungfa of $1971 is a pretty big piece of the budget considering the Instantx Soda machine budget was $2,500(which included 3 people attending the show). The masternodes should be deciding how these expenses are paid - not a bulk fund that is handing out reimbursements. We are in April and reimbursing a January expense...seems odd.

Hopefully we reconsider events like the Satoshi Roundtable. I didn't see much publicity for Dash or really any benefit other than 'networking'. Sending 2 people just seems like it is twice as bad. There was one benefit from this event. We created the dashroundtable.org site to mock the Satoshi Roundtable....it turned into a podcast that is doing really well now thanks to Buster, Oaxaca, and Fernando.

I will just make a comment about needing Tungfa because the booth was busy. We had Evan and Daniel their SOs, BabyG, Moo, Camo, Me. Plus we had Node40 guys, Rango and father. We had plenty of people, but some chose to view presentations which wasn't a problem. The people that wanted to talk with Dash got the chance. It was busy, but I think it would be that way no matter how many people we had at the booth. If we could be at 2 of these conferences with half the people we would do better than trying to talk to everyone attending each (and maybe that 2nd one is near Tungfa).

I am only pointing out what I see are some faults so that we can improve. No disrespect to Tungfa or justifications needed.
 
Solarminer said:
We are in April and reimbursing a January expense...seems odd.
Click to expand...
Thank you for the comments. I would clarify... This is a report covering the period January to March. Tungfa is NOT being reimbursed in April for a January expense.
 
babygiraffe said:
Thank you for the comments. I would clarify... This is a report covering the period January to March. Tungfa is NOT being reimbursed in April for a January expense.
Click to expand...

I guess "First Quarter" in the title should have been a good hint for me. Thanks for clarifying.
 
babygiraffe said:
I'm glad you found the report helpful. To respond to the concern, I understand where you are coming from, and I actually disagree that opinions have no place in any report to the community. To clarify my statement, I do think that the community's wishes were respected. After voting the project in and initiating it, the community voted it out and the project was shuttered. I think the "unfortunate" parts were that 1) we weren't able to report the first month's results before it was voted down, and 2) we breached a contract with a third party (fortunately they agreed to release us from our contract). I think it appropriate to point out in reports where I think we performed poorly and where I think we executed well, and why. I think I could have been clearer about why I think the defunding was unfortunate above.



They performed services for approximately one month. The contract officially started on January 11th, 2016, but much of the planning activities were actually performed before the contract was officially signed. By February 5th the project had essentially already been shut down and a report was issued here: https://dashtalk.org/threads/transform-pr-project-closure-report.7962/



The contract was actually $6,000 per month. Part was to be paid out of the Public Awareness budget. The January budget proposal details can be found at the following link and states "This proposal is only asking for partial funding of 1100 DASH for 3 months to complete the required budget as the currently existing PR budget will now be mostly dedicated to this program with Michael for the next 3 months and will cover most of the expenses".
https://dashtalk.org/threads/january-2016-budget-proposal.7392/


I appreciate and understand the message that we need to be mindful of travel costs, and are open to feedback (supportive or otherwise) on how we are doing. That's the whole point of being transparent. I would point out a couple of additional pieces of information on this situation that is relevant:
1) The conference attendance itself was only one benefit of having tungfa attend. We also benefited from the rare opportunity to meet in person as a team to have meetings in the mornings and evenings, to discuss roadmaps, coordinate strategy, etc. Much of the current strategy and focus was developed through brainstorming and working dinners, etc during those three days.
2) Many members of the core team attended the conference and paid their own way to get there. Those that lived in Florida were able to attend for minimal personal cost. I personally paid my own hotel and flights. We could have chosen to supplement a small portion of everyone's flight and hotel instead of directing our support completely toward tungfa attending. I volunteered to attend at my own expense to allow budget to be directed elsewhere, otherwise he would not have been able to make it. These decisions were made beforehand to directly answer your question. This was NOT a situation where tungfa realized after the fact that he might be able to get reimbursed. I used the word "reimbursed" because that is exactly what it was. Dash did not buy the plane tickets and hotels directly... it simply paid back the individuals that paid directly for those items on their own.
3) Days were very long and we worked hard while there. I assure you this was anything but a "vacation". We all paid our own meals out, ground transportation, and incidental expenses. So this was far from a boondoggle.
4) I believe we needed everyone that came, if not more. Our booth was busy from the start to the end of the conference and I personally watched as patrons that we could have engaged walked past because we were too busy.
5) Tunfa's flight was the cheapest option vs. sending kot or flare from Europe, so we were mindful of the costs and prioritized. It would have been great to use as an opportunity to get the whole core team together at once, but that proved cost prohibitive.
6) I don't think the right lens to view this is "was xxxx's presentation a better use of funds than yyyy"? There will always be some investments that provide lots of value and some that provide less. It will be very hard to match the effectiveness of spending 140 Dash on Juan's presentation. For 140 Dash, we couldn't even afford to send one person to Miami, let alone obtain a booth for two days. That doesn't mean it wasn't an effective use of funds. There will always be only one use of funds that ended up with the title of "most effective" (and maybe in 2016 Juan ends up with that title). Holding all other expenses to that standard is illogical.

I hope that additional context and thoughts are helpful. We look forward to additional feedback.

EDIT: calling Minotaur for any corrections to the above information. I would like him to confirm my understanding before considering this absolutely correct.
Click to expand...


Thank you for kindly responding to all of my concerns and questions, it means a lot. I will digest this for now as I am not 100% sure I agree with everything being said, if any subsequent questions should arise Ill post them here.

I do have one more comment though regarding the effectiveness of Juan v Tungfa. It might not be logical to compare the two and how effective they were, but it should be noted that those funds used for tungfa's trip could have been spent on something better, or not spent at all? I've heard reports from other attendee's that it wasn't really necessary for anyone to be there except for maybe Evan and Daniel. So the reports vary on how effective other team members actually were at the conference. I have no first hand knowledge of this because I was not there.
 
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buster said:
I do have one more comment though regarding the effectiveness of Juan v Tungfa. It might not be logical to compare the two and how effective they were, but it should be noted that those funds used for tungfa's trip could have been spent on something better, or not spent at all?
Click to expand...

I see you. But it reminds me:

A person can live without water 3 days. Water is cheap.
A person can live without food 3 weeks. Food is expensive.
So water is more "effective" for people! So... But it doesn't mean we shouldn't buy food - we need them both in fact. :smile:
 
alex-ru said:
I see you. But it reminds me:

A person can live without water 3 days. Water is cheap.
A person can live without food 3 weeks. Food is expensive.
So water is more "effective" for people! So... But it doesn't mean we shouldn't buy food - we need them both in fact. :smile:
Click to expand...

You are missing my point.
The question you need to ask is,
Did we actually NEED tungfa like we need food? I don't really think we did. Tungfa being there was not life or death.

The 1700$ $1971 we spent on tungfa could have been spent on something better or not spent at all. Was it actually necessary for Tungfa to be there? What ever it was that he accomplished there, could someone who was already there have done that? Did paying for his trip to this conference yield any positive results aside from the fact that he got to meet the rest of the core team in person? Like new merchants, user adoption, professional images of the conference and people attending (he is a photographer), anything? Can you show me tangible results as Juan has with his presentations/interviews? If you can show me those results I would love to see them.

*edit I want you all to know I am pretty close with Tungfa and do not mean to put him on blast. This is just a perfect example of where I will not shut up. If it hurts feelings, or gets people upset well I am sorry. My intentions here are to get clear information for the community.
 
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buster said:
You are missing my point.
The question you need to ask is,
Did we actually NEED tungfa like we need food? I don't really think we did. Tungfa being there was not life or death.
The 1700$ we spent on tungfa could have been spent on something better or not spent at all.
Click to expand...

There may be many opinions about it...

My opinion is: for such a project like Dash - If main "Press & Marketing manager" (Tungfa) has never (for two years already!) met face-to-face with Lead Developer (Evan) and Business Development Manager (Daniel) - it is a serious issue...
This issue harms all of us (the most efficient interaction in the team was not achieved). So for me 1971$ doesn't looks like "too much" to solve this issue (regardless of how cheap we can solve some other issues)... IMO
 
alex-ru said:
There may be many opinions about it...

My opinion is: for such a project like Dash - If main "Press & Marketing manager" (Tungfa) has never (for two years already!) met face-to-face with Lead Developer (Evan) and Business Development Manager (Daniel) - it is a serious issue...
This issue harms all of us (the most efficient interaction in the team was not achieved). So for me 1700$ doesn't looks like "too much" to solve this issue (regardless of how cheap we can solve some other issues)... IMO
Click to expand...

Yeah I'm not seeing that as an issue like you are, thanks for your input though. If you can find that tangible evidence I would love to see it.
Also it's $1971 not $1700, I edited my response because of that typo.
 
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