Proposal: Monthly or quarterly contest to incentivize proposal ideas.
Details: On a predefined schedule, the CoE will initiate a contest round for idea submissions. At the end of each round, the CoE will pick the best idea(s) and pay a bounty. The author can choose to engage in the development, knowing it has a high chance of retroactive funding, or decline and the CoE can initiate an RFP.
Timeline: This could happen almost immediately.
Best-case outcome: CoE receives a large number of high-quality ideas, and their proposal pipeline grows significantly.
Worst-case outcome: Idea quality is low or too complex to implement or participation is too low, all of which impact bounty ROI.*
Funding: TBD in the included three-part poll
*I see a potential problem in the current setup. Most of us come from the data science or finance world. Very few of us are full-blown developers or engineers. As a result, the current community base may lack the skillset or creative thinking to build high-quality projects.
Additionally, as people receive project funding, they potentially drop out of the availability pool, as their efforts to finish and improve their projects take precedent.
It may make sense for the CoE to actively recruit through Twitter and Linked-in, a new group of community members, with those skillsets. That, of course, could be a different proposal.
In the polls that follow, you will vote on:
Should CoE fund an ongoing contest for proposal ideas?
Should the contest be monthly, quarterly or other?
How much should the bounty for a winning idea be?
The poll will close on September 15th, 2021 to allow everyone to vote and comment.
Should the CoE fund a proposal contest?
Yes
No
0voters
Should the contest be monthly, quarterly or other?
Monthly
Quarterly
Other
0voters
How much should the bounty for a winning idea be?
1 NMR
5 NMR
10 NMR
More than ten (please comment in the thread with amount and reason)
I propose to offer some bounty for high quality Data Scient forum posts as well!
At Kaggle I saw a great deal of discussions of data science topics on the forum. I believe that sharing generic ideas do help the community, without hurting someone’s MMC.
Offering bounty for the best or top 3 DS posts would encourage sharing.
Based on yesterday’s conversation in the CoE Rocket Chat, I think it’s best to close this poll and withdraw the idea.
If the group in its current state is unable to communicate the status of three open proposals and balks at the idea of regular communication going forward, then asking them to take on the management, review, and prize distribution of regular, more demanding processes, seems like a bad idea.
Based on early numbers it looks like this proposal would have community support. If the CoE is able to move past current internal issues, it may be worth revisiting. I think someone else should lead the charge though. Given my declining relationship with Arb, it’s best if I pull back from all things CoE, so I don’t add disruption where production is required.
@uuazed, @aventurine, @hb1 and @lackofintelligence have all added input into the tracking and communication of open projects. This proposal will reopen once we’ve finalized some of those thoughts and put some structure to it.
We have momentum on project management. It’s either going to happen through a facilitator, an existing CoE member or a volunteer. But it’s going to happen. So that we don’t lose momentum with the current production focus, I’m opening this back up. Keep voting. If all goes well we could loosely set the following milestones.
Proposal to the CoE by Sept15th
CoE vote by Sept. 30th
First Idea Competition launched Oct. 15th.
Results gathered and presented to the CoE Oct. 30th.
First prize awarded Nov 15th.
Idea proposal or RFP by Nov. 30th
The process will be reviewed and improved with input from both the CoE and community and the next comp schedule determined at a later date. At the process improves, frequency will increase to that agreed upon.
Again, this is all early stage stuff, any input will only make it better as we all push forward.