Efficient

Suggested idea funding categories are more efficient for all stakeholders in the funding process

Why is it important?

The more efficient that funding categorisation is for voters, proposers and assessors the more time and resources the community will have to spend on more impactful areas of the ecosystem. Freeing up community capacity and resources means increasing the speed that the ecosystem can evolve and improve.

Challenge settings

• Very time consuming for challenge teams - Proposing a challenge in the funding process is time consuming. First they have to define the challenges to include and then also must spend the time to work out what a sensible budget weighting is. An issue with changing categorisation such as with challenge setting is the budget weighting can take a large amount of time as it becomes increasingly difficult to determine what budget is sensible if the number of challenges increases along with the complexity of the ecosystem. Because challenges are a competing form of categorisation the challenge teams may also have to spend time communicating with other similar challenges to try and collaborate and reduce duplication.

• Time consuming for proposers - Challenge settings increase the amount of time for proposers to go through the funding process. Challenge settings encourage changing categorisation and results in the proposer needing to learn about all the new challenges in each and every funding round to work out if they can submit a proposal and in which challenges.

• More time consuming for assessors - By using changing categorisation a number of the assessors will be required to review all the challenges in each funding round and review whether they meet the challenge setting criteria. This reduces the time assessors have available to help review the other submitted proposals requesting funds.

• Very time consuming for voter - Changing categorisation and competing categorisation for voters means that in every funding round they must review and vote on a list of different challenges to include in the next round. This is a time consuming process and gives voters less time to spend reviewing proposals who are requesting funding.

• Time consuming handling malicious actors - As challenge settings are a competitive approach to categorisation that are defined each funding round by the community there is an easy entrance for malicious actors to submit numerous challenge proposals to consistently try and game of break the funding process. Giving people this ability makes the funding process less efficient as more time is required to moderate and remove categorisations that were made with bad intentions.

Funding categories

• Very efficient for category teams - Funding categories mean category teams would not need to spend time drafting up categorisations each funding round which would save significant time. This is due to funding categories being both recurring and inclusive forms of categorisation which remove the need to add new categorisations and spend further time determining sensible budget weightings. Funding categories mean no time needs to be spent by category teams on justifying categorisations as this effort is already done up front with inclusive and broad categorisation. Inclusive and recurring categorisation also means saving time for category teams by removing the need for them to deal with preventing duplicate categorisations defined by other teams.

• Very efficient for proposer - Recurring categorisation helps proposers by giving them predictable categorisations to use in each and every funding round that they only have to learn once. Broad and inclusive categorisation means that there are less categorisations for proposers to learn which saves them time when going through the process and deciding where to submit proposals.

• Very efficient for assessor - By using recurring categorisation that is defined up front and rarely changed there would not be a need to assess the categorisations every funding round. This saves the assessor significant time that they can now just use on proposal submissions. Another benefit for assessors is they will be able to learn the recurring categorisations and keep applying that understanding to the assessment of proposals rather than having to learn about a new categorisation each funding round.

• Efficient for voter - Recurring funding categorisations means the voter will not need to spend time learning about the new categorisations every funding round and can instead spend that time reviewing proposals. Broad categorisation for the funding categories means reducing the time needed to determine what budget weightings would be sensible to use for each of the categorisations. This saves voters time as the fewer the categories there are the fewer the budget weighting decisions they will need to make.

• Removes time cost of malicious actors - Using recurring categories over changing community created ones helps removes the possibility for malicious actors to try and game or break the funding allocation system. Recurring categorisations removes the possibility of people writing and promoting challenges that aren't in the best interests of the wider community. Time saved from removing this issue can now be spent elsewhere in the funding process.

Summary

• Funding categories offers a significant increase in efficiency over challenge settings. Funding categories use recurring and inclusive categorisation which removes the time previously needed to propose, assess and vote on a large amount of competing and new categorisations each funding round. Funding categories simplify the process into just needing the voters to determine the budget weightings to apply to each of the categories.