In a few days keyholders of VP (@blocktrades is dealing with the technical implementation) will implement the multisig for VP which means that it will require 3/3 vote for decisions being made for funding. That means, me, @crimsonclad and @guiltyparties will all 3 have to agree on funding expenditure. As it stands now, if nothing changes, thats the plan.
What Im going to be saying below is not something I am claiming that GP or Crim agree or disagree with. I will not pretend to speak for them, nor are they beholden to follow my idea of what VP should be doing. They will have their own vote and their approach to things. I just want to be transparent on how I will personally be approaching things.
Lordbutterfly:
What ill be doing moving forward is try and establish an actual strategy for VP spending thats conversion based. So far, in my opinion, VP was mostly reactionary which means that people would come up to VP, make a proposal and it would generally be approved if there were no serious problems with the proposal makers or the idea.
What I want to do is pinpoint what we actually want happen for Hive. Be proactive in finding opportunities. What the goals and actionable steps to achieving those goals are.
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Is it users? What kind of users and in what medium? Who are we targeting? Where are they based? Crypto speculators on CMC? Followers on X? Onboarding VZ users via irl events? Are we onboarding into communities? How do we measure that? By account creation? By activity over time? How much are we paying? Whats the return on investment? All of this needs to be established.
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Dapps, Devs? Whats the path to conversion? Are we just showing up to workshops and hoping for the best? Do we have a structured approach? Which kind of dev? Which dapp? You find them, what do you do? Whats the ultimate goal? Building on Hive? How are you taking the dev from the point of pitching Hive to having them deploy an app? If we dont know what the actual actionable path is to achieve the conversion its a waste of time even attempting it. Ive seen this many times. It just creates an illusion of value. Sure, you can fail, but you need to know how to even potentially achieve this in practice.
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Investors. Pure focus on selling Hive and HBD. Very simple work. Incredibly hard to deliver. Thats why most are avoiding it in my opinion. The ease of making a Hive account at an event irl has made most Hivers generally satisfied with a singular approach. It gives them an easy, feel good dopamine injection. And theyre not to blame. They see their effort, which is very admirable as theyre putting up their free time, lead to "something" but they generally dont observe cost to conversion ratio or long term value. That should be on SOMEONE to track. If a conference onboards 10-20 users out of which 1 stays long terms, does that justify the cost? No. If it converts into potential partnerships or investment, does that? Yes. But considering that this is very hard to do, you cant observe it on a single conference basis but over time. If over time we dont get these valuable conversions, a pivot in expenditure needs to happen.
People generally like to do cool things:
For example: Boreholes are cool, its cool giving people water. Charity is nice. But what is the goal that benefits Hive? Charity inherently doesnt deliver anything on its own. Can you onboard those you give water to? No, not really. Can it lead to more investment? Not really with whats being done with them. So the result of building boreholes doesnt justify effort or expenditure. We can make up some imaginary scenarios to justify it far into the future, but realistically you cant measure any of that and the expenditure is continual. VZ? Africa? Does spending money in VZ lead to anything. Best case scenario it onboards a few people with no excess income that are brought in that in general leads to more extraction. Whats the value of a VZ user over a US based user? Or a EU user? All of this needs to be weighed. Oh its not nice boiling down people to numbers and attributes? Well that's tough but it needs doing.
Is the potential monetary value for Hive of a user earning 100k USD per year in US, that is searching for investment opportunity in trad markets the same as the value of someone with a 300 USD monthly salary. This has nothing to do with their value as a person but we cannot be in a business of measuring niceness and the contents of peoples hearts.
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How big of an obstacle is our onboarding UX? How can we force dapps to fix it? Marketing doesnt exist in a vacuum, its subject to many other factors on Hive for it to succeed.
Whats the maximum potential return for each proposal funding and how does the proposal maker intend to achieve that. Theres been 1 proposal i rejected that was done in Poland which got funded in the end that i rejected, not on the basis of it not being a cool idea, but on the basis of me not being shown actionable steps on how they intend to achieve their goals, or even what the goals are. What numbers they intended to reach and what the expected return on investment would be. There was no established goal beyond wishful thinking or just marketing talk.
The proactive approach:
We need to break down everything by numbers going forward and tell the community:
"ok, this is what VP will fund and this is whats expected from you, we will give you pointers but we want visible results that translate into value for Hive."
I know no one is being paid and no one had really much accountability for voluntary work so far. @clayboyn on Splinterlands cant act like this with Splinterlands or he loses his job. Theres a visible and serious consequence for him.
With Hive its been people putting in time and effort for no pay so how do you even hold them accountable? Are you going to hold accountable the people asking to spend their time for free to try and onboard a few people to Hive? There are no consequences. You stop funding their project? So what. The next non paid person for another project still wont be subject to any consequences as there is no personal loss for them. Oh youre punishing me by not allowing me to spend more of my time and effort for free to try and help. Oh how terrible! So thats the pickle and it goes up all the way to the top..
Maybe it changes, probably not, Im almost certain it wont, so id say what Im trying to propose here doesnt really solve all inherent problems with our voluntary system, but it might solve some. Maybe thats enough, maybe its not.
So yeah. So practically speaking I want to make a list on what I think we need, via an established strategy and present it via @valueplan to the community to see if there will be proposals being made that will attempt to deliver the goals we want to achieve.