Category Rule Approaches

Different potential rules that the category could adopt for small and early stage ideas

Only allow unfunded individuals or teams to submit proposals

This rule could be used to give more focus and support for newcomers and individuals or teams that have not ever received funding in the ecosystem.

Advantages

  • Lower competition - Certain community members will benefit from lower competition and it will become easier for them to get funding due to this rule.

Issues

  • Difficult to moderate - It will be difficult to prevent people from making new accounts to then submit proposals as fake newcomers unless the identity of all funded proposals is checked. This may be fine in the short term but can be an expensive process to scale.

  • Excludes existing community - Existing funded community members may have small ideas, experiments and initiatives that are worth being considered and potentially funded. With this guideline they would have to use another funding categorisation.

  • Increases risks around proposal quality - This rule would create an exclusive form of categorisation. The effectiveness of the category would rely on the proposals being of a sufficient quality from those eligible to submit proposals. This issue is at least somewhat limited in downside risk due to the smaller amounts of funds that would be distributed to each proposal.

Summary

  • If there is an issue with funding too many existing community members who have previously got funded over those which haven’t when using this type of categorisation a rule for the category such as this one could be introduced to try and prevent that. This rule may ultimately not be needed if no issue emerges where existing funded community members request and receive too much funding from this category.

  • Another approach to explore, if necessary, would be to make it just a guideline that the category is aimed for newcomers and see how the community responds to proposals from established community members.

Minimum proposal budgets for other idea categories

This rule would look to have a small maximum budget for proposals in this smaller ideas based category and a minimum budget on the remaining other idea categories. If this rule was adopted then this category would be the only categorisation where smaller proposals can be funded.

Advantages

  • Prevents proposer submission complexity - For smaller proposals the proposers won’t need to compare whether to submit the proposal into a larger idea category and a category aimed at smaller ideas at the submission stage.

  • Prevents overlapping categorisations - This rule would mean proposals would be placed into a single categorisation. This would help remove the game theory that would be created in situations where proposals can be submitted in multiple places.

  • Easy to moderate and enforce - This rule can be easily enforced on chain for when the process looks to become fully decentralised and run on smart contracts.

Issues

  • Increases competition - By pushing all small budget sizes proposals into this category the amount of competition will increase.

  • Increased voting complexity - Pushing a larger amount of the smaller proposals that cover any form of idea in a single categorisation will increase the decision complexity when voting on which proposals should be funded. Due to this it will be important to think about what the maximum budget is for this category that is then used as the minimum in the other categories. The higher that value is the more competition this category could expect.

Summary

  • Preventing overlapping categorisations and reducing proposer submission complexity is good for making the process more efficient and simple. However the issues caused by applying this potential rule could be problematic for the voter in terms of the voting complexity they must handle if a larger amount of proposals all go through a single categorisation.

  • If this rule was adopted then it would make sense to keep the maximum budget smaller for a proposal in the small ideas category so to not make the decision complexity and competition between proposals too high.

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