With great respect to TGF and to the entire team which has come forward to develop and support the chain, we will still need to be absolutely neutral when looking at this proposal, as we have done earlier for TR’s and Faffy’s proposal. With TR, we have not only been neutral, we have been overtly critical sometimes. Thus, it is our responsibility to look at this proposal as reasonably as possible, while being objective and critical at the same time.
The following points should cover most of my criticism with the proposition:
- Contractual Obligation - The community is at the precipice of making another important decision for community pool spending without a “legal” contractual obligation outlined on a legally binding agreement between both parties (the development team and the community). I believe TGF was made for this very purpose: to handle the legal obligations for teams being vetted for future spend proposals.
Thus, it should be a requirement of the entire team to:
- Be KYC verified (doxxed) with either TGF or any other third party KYC Verification platform
- Sign a contract with either TGF (on a legally binding agreement paper ratified by one or more jurisdictions in the world), or one of the members of the community who reside in the same jurisdiction as one of the members of the development team
- Project Budget & Allocation - I did check the average salary of a blockchain developer in the US, and it is high, between ~$112,000-147,000 USD per year. We have just approved a spending proposal (Prop 11030) which has a significant budget at $150,000 USD. I understand that there are various proposals lined up which should replenish the CP over the next one year, but to ensure that we can fund as many projects as possible over the course of the next one year, we would like to request you to minimize costs (maybe cut medical, home and other allowances from the salary) and reduce the salary for the 2 full-time and/or 2 part-time developers to the lower side of the average salary of blockchain developers in the US, i.e. ~$112,000 USD per year.
As a clause, you may add to the proposal that the salary of every team member being remunerated from the CP will be increased between 8-10% depending upon the final decision of the Oversight Committee at the end of one year. This would be like a promotion (salary hike) based on performance.
- Replacement Team Members - At the event of any unavoidable circumstance, if any team members were to leave, we would request you to let us know the specifics of who, how and when those members shall be replaced by either the development team or TGF if such an event were to occur in the future.
The proposal does not have any clause to restrain any team member from leaving the project in the next one year or even in the next one month. We would request you to discuss & decide among yourselves, and add such a clause which indicates clearly the term of employment of each member of the team. It is unclear whether this is a long-term employment proposition or a project proposal for only the next 3 months, because if the proposal is for future work as well, then the proposal should outlined that clearly and provide a brief of the work which will be done by the team in the future. Currently, we need a team to commit to 1-2 years of development on the chain.
- Fuzzy Decentralized Structure - The proposal does not clearly mention who is leading the development team and/or the entire team at large. It does not mention whether TGF is completely responsible for all tasks to be completed by the team which is doing the development. Finally, it has the same issue as with TR since this is a completely decentralized structure with an oversight committee (in the case of TR, even though TGF is in touch with them, we have still not been able to resolve the issues raised by the community regarding non-transparency of development and funds).
The issue with a decentralized structure of a development is that, it is unclear who is leading the development team. There is at least a SCRUM Master in an Agile-type development spree of 3 months (divided into periods of one month each). If the leader of the development team were to leave the project, then this not only causes delay in achieving current development goals but affects future development plans as well.
As an example, one of the members mentioned in this team has left one DAO (which has has just been funded) and is now working with a different team (with a different funding proposal). There is no guarantee (reason mentioned in Point 1) that such an incident will not occur with this development team as well. Only after Zaradar had left TR, we got to know who was leading development and what was the structure like factually. The community did not ask the right questions at the right time, which is why we are currently facing multiple issues after approving Proposal No. 11030.
- TGF Funding - You have mentioned that “*Additional budgets may be requested for infrastructure and L2 wallet providers/partners to assist during these stages.” While I agree with this proposition, we would like to request you to consider funding additional infrastructure costs from TGF funds because this is a project which is directly controlled financially by TGF (you have mentioned that the funds will be deposited in a multi-sig wallet signed by members of TGF). Also, this deals with core L1 development, something that the TGF is made for I believe.
If the additional costs cannot be compensated by TGF, then please consider approaching AWS for Nonprofits | AWS because TGF is a non-profit organization and even if it is not, Terra Luna Classic is an open source project and the costs for the infrastructural requirement can be satisfied by AWS Non-profits. There are similar offerings by most large competitors (such as GCP, etc.). This minimizes costs by ~$800 USD per month or ~$9,600 USD per year, so we should definitely try.