I think the issues with the proposal system are aspects of the governance issues we also see in other aspects of the chain. The concentration of stake into the hands of a few amplifies the problems of stake-weighted voting. And practically I don't see how the community could select a board of directors any more effectively than we can select witnesses.
Well, we already have a defacto board of directors -- it's the ten or twenty account holders that can block a proposal or push it through. By my reckoning, Steemit has about 25% of staked SP, so they are dominant, but they don't have complete control.
TBH, I think the bigger challenge is the apparent disinterest in the blockchain's health from the other large stakeholders. Still, I agree that this is all sort of "pie in the sky" unless the large account holders are willing to make it work.
One problem is the lack of granularity on the voting system. Since the big votes have to vote on something to keep bad proposals out there ends up being no point in anyone else having an opinion.
I think the original vision for the blockchain was that there would be people who would opine on technical questions like who makes a good witness (or what proposals are good) and people would make their judgements based on commentary from people they trust rather than evaluating technical stuff themselves (just like we can pay attention to political news rather than read the text of bills). But we're in a receding-tide-swamps-all-boats kind of situation, there's just not enough going on for those analyst style roles to be a viable niche.
This is a big part of why I raised this topic.
First, I don't think that vision ever worked very well, and second, we need a new vision that fits the current platform. Meanwhile, the software libraries for open source development are slowly decaying while this fund sits there, untapped.
Steemit's curation efforts are fantastic, but for their own reasons they have decided not to prioritize the development landscape.
So, to me, the question is whether we - as a community - can find a way to modernize that doesn't require Steemit to sit in the first chair? Certainly, we can't accomplish much without having them in a supporting role, but that doesn't mean they need to drive the effort.
A lot of updating and building can get done with $3 to $9 million, but it needs to be done strategically. Thus, I am imagining a managing director for the SPS who sets a strategic direction based on conversations with the large stakeholders (our defacto board), and then recommends for or against proposals, depending on how they fit the strategy.
I agree the old model was questionable, but an atmosphere of growth and excitement tends to mask those sort of flaws, so they're more apparent now.
Are they decaying? Or just not being actively developed? Personally I suspect that the exchanges are not super keen on supporting Steem hard forks so any development would probably have to deliver some good benefits.
Maybe the problem would be easier to consider from the other direction. Maybe instead of trying to figure out a workaround to the "who decides?" question, if we had some solid ideas for what development was actually needed (eg what new features, etc.) and got community buyin on what should be implemented then maybe it would be easier to get consensus on who to fund to implement them.
I'm not worried as much about the blockchain itself (at least until there's a security exploit), but rather the supporting software that developers need like the cli wallet, steem-python, steemdb.io, steem-js. etc...
I guess one could argue that it's not decaying, but just not being maintained, but I see it as a form of decay when the underlying Open Source libraries are falling out of support, and the tools can't be operated on the latest operating system versions.
Agreed, but I'm not even thinking about new features at this point. First we need to manage the basic "blocking and tackling". I think that just getting software libraries up to date would make the platform more attractive to developers. I could be wrong, but I think there would be fairly broad consensus that these things are needed. After that, we can start thinking more about new features.
Here's an idea that potentially looks more decentralized: a person with a good reputation in the community can create a proposal that's something like "I want to offer a dev bounty for [insert needed dev support here]". The proposal gets funded, they accumulate the funds in their wallet, and they just hold it there until they're ready to pay out the bounty. An aspiring dev (if they exist) then doesn't have to face the nebulous "how do we convince people to pay us for this?" question, they have the face the potentially more tractable "what do I need to do to satisfy X's bounty?" question.
This might give the unilateral decision-making clarity of a CEO, but it doesn't have to look like the CEO of the whole blockchain, it's just one person among many running their own DAO-funded project.
Yeah, I've thought about that as a possibility, too. It's definitely a reasonable idea. Along the same lines, another possibility I have considered would be for an influential stakeholder to publish a "Request for Proposal" (RFP) in order to attract someone who could fulfill a need to submit their own proposal.
The drawback to the bounty is that you have to trust someone to hold the funds (unless it's mixed with some sort of escrow/multisig arrangement). The drawback to the RFP is that the person publishing the RFP may not be able to guarantee that any proposal would be approved.