Should we reconstitute the Steemit development incentive program as a permanent online steem hackathon?

Gall's Law: A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. The inverse proposition also appears to be true: A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be made to work. You have to start over, beginning with a working simple system.

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Introduction

Back in 2022, Steemit announced the Steemit Development Incentive Program ( DIP / #steemdipproposals ), which was intended to run for a year and then get renewed - if successful. It's not clear to me whether it was renewed or not, since the Steemit web site still has a link for Latest Updates from @dip.team, but the most recent update is 9 months old. For purposes of this post, however, it doesn't really matter. My suggestion is, this:

Let's consider reconstituting the DIP as a permanent online Steem hackathon

Background

In yesterday's post, I reflected on the idea of using Steem communities to accelerate Open Source development for the Steem blockchain. One of the suggestions was this:

Perpetual Steem hackathon: Community participants announce their goals for the next two weeks and post their progress, and gain support from investor-curators who are dedicated to supporting development. Efforts could be on any open source project that benefits the ecosystem: new or existing, coding, documentation, design, testing, etc...

I posted about some other possibilities, too, but my gut feeling is that this is the one that has the best odds at getting off the ground. So, let's consider,

How do we build it?

In today's post, I'm going to think more about what it might look like to get something like this started. We start with a simple system that we already know is working, namely this:

• A well-funded moderator sponsors a Steem community around a certain topic area and supports the community with upvotes for relevant contributions.

Then we evolve the system from there, using the community rules and moderation activity to relentlessly create something that becomes more complex and effective.

The topic area, of course, is for contributors to describe their activities in support of the Open Source Steem Ecosystem. At a high level, here are the steps that I imagine for taking us from here to there:

1. Lock up support from voter-investors
   • Dolphin and above stakeholders could be asked to commit some percentage (5%? 10%?) of their voting power to this community (when the content arrives to support it), either by delegation or by self-guided voting.
2. Identify moderators and curators
   • Steemit would do this, either by renewing the agreement with the @dip.team, by following the monthly application process that they use for the steemcuratorXX accounts, or by any other method.
   • Other community members could set up their own curation accounts and accept delegations in order to support the effort.
3. Lay out the rules/bylaws
   • Licensing considerations:
     • Which open source licenses would be eligible for support?
     • Is it possible and/or desirable to create an "OpenSteem" license where code is free and open for use on the Steem blockchain, but not eligible for use with derivative chains?
   • Community participants would be asked to post about activities in blocks of two weeks or less (again, start simple and build/evolve). Permitted posts would include:
     • Plans for upcoming activities
     • Progress reports
     • Descriptions of the completed deliverables
   • This work could be done in support of new or existing projects, and it could involve writing code; writing/updating documentation; design, testing, etc...
4. Rug-pull protection
   • Anyone who receives delegations for community moderation would be expected to offer some sort of plan to minimize the risk of misdirected curation rewards.
5. Building an army of Steem developers
   • We could also look at this community like the "farm team" for Steem developers. Developers who build a successful track record in the Perpetual Steem Hackathon would be more likely to be considered for SPS proposals. Further, we could develop "community standards" regarding eligibility for proposals of varying sizes based on a developer's delivery record in the community.
   • The community moderators/admins could maintain a "pinned post" with a registry of projects, descriptions, repo links, statuses, maintainers, and other supporters/participants.

Drawbacks and Challenges

Of course, there's a downside to anything. What would be the downside to creating an incubator like this? The main thing that I think of is that much of the voting power that goes to the Steem hackathon community would likely be withdrawn from elsewhere.

Further, there are two primary challenges that I see: First, it's not clear to me that we have enough developers (yet) to support an initiative like this, so bootstrapping is a major challenge. To mitigate this, I would suggest a multi-month PR campaign to popularize it before launching.

Secondly, any time there are delegations, there's a risk of unexpected exits or misuse of curation rewards by the delegatee, so (as mentioned above) investors would need to insist on protections from anyone who runs a curation account that accepts delegations.

Thoughts?

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Thank you for your time and attention.

As a general rule, I up-vote comments that demonstrate "proof of reading".

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Steve Palmer is an IT professional with three decades of professional experience in data communications and information systems. He holds a bachelor's degree in mathematics, a master's degree in computer science, and a master's degree in information systems and technology management. He has been awarded 3 US patents.

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