[Grant proposal] Eco Community Consensus Bot

Summary

The proposal for a grant of 235895 $ECO ($4850, rate $0.02056 14 March 2023) to fund the development of Eco Community Consensus bot. The production version of the bot (referred as V1+ in the roadmap) is available to use on Eco Discord by Layer 3 and Eco team.

As the bot is currently undergoing adoption in Layer 3, the allocation amount has been reduced. The plan is for the bot to become the primary way for managing Layer 3 point distributions in the next season, at which point a full funding will be requested. More details in "Funds Breakdown" section below.

Project URL: https://github.com/nisnevich/eco-discord-lazy-consensus-bot

Mission

Layer 3 is a decentralized group of trusted members within Eco Discord, which is currently aimed to support cultural development of the Eco community. The main challenge of the Layer 3 group is finding consensus in group decision making. 59 people have a lot of different opinions, how to find agreement and distribute funds from the pool?

The mission of the Consensus bot is to facilitate the proposal and approval process for grants and changes within Layer 3. The first version of the bot operates using a “lazy consensus” mechanism, where proposals are automatically approved after a set period of time unless enough members of the community vote to cancel them. This allows for efficient decentralized decision-making, and helps to cut down on the amount of unnecessary discussions and arguing.

Details

The main goal of the Consensus bot is to bring a simpler and more transparent decision making, which means - to maximize the creative process within Layer 3, and to minimize the organizational efforts needed to make things happen (to get approval of the community and the required funding).

With two years of existence, the Eco Community has demonstrated its ability to support various types of activities and challenges in parallel, and the Consensus Bot is designed to foster this ability, enhancing independence of the creators and ensuring adherence to the community’s values.

The Consensus Bot leverages the concept of lazy consensus to streamline decision-making in a decentralized community. The lazy consensus approach operates on the principle that it’s easier for individuals to agree by default rather than actively objecting and proposing alternative solutions.

Lazy consensus integrates do-ocracy and a consensus process. Do-ocracy is a methodology by which those who take initiative to do work in a group are empowered to make decisions about what they do. It tends to appear most often in informal organizations characterized by high levels of mutual trust and a dependence on contributions by highly motivated volunteers, which is basically how Eco Community always used to operate.

In addition to lazy consensus, the bot includes a "!tips" feature for automated accounting of "personal" points distributions. With this feature, the bot distributes points directly without requiring transfer to the Layer 3 member, thus enabling control of the remainders. As per the current Layer 3 agreement, the feature limits the amount of distributions to 3000 per season. The bot also includes an export feature, which allows for quick exportation of all analytical data related to balances and transactions.

Roadmap

Below is the roadmap with the delivery timelines (subject to change based on the feature development of Layer 3):

Package - Stage - Timeline MVP - Beta - 30 Jan V1 - Release - 20 Feb V1+ - Release (current stage) - Feb-March V2 - Beta - Late March V2 - Release - Early April

MVP features:

• Lazy consensus with voting.
• Automatic grants and basic validation.
• Zero-downtime runtime restarts.
• V1 features included MVP plus:

Lazy consensus with grantless proposals (to approve specific actions that don’t require a grant).

• Advanced validation (wider coverage of cases, NLP, bug fixes).
• Analytics (new “!export” command).
• Multiple tech improvements (e.g. automated DB backups, recovery and versioning).

V1+ features: hot fixes and improvements based on the feedback received in production. The improvements are being added continuously so there’s no fixed date on the timeline.

• !tips - automated accounting of “personal” points.
• Various usability and tech improvements.

V2 features: a version to be used in season 2, new mechanisms and/or improvements based on the ongoing Layer 3 development and the backlog.

Stages:

• Beta: available in Eco Community Tools Beta Test Server (ask for invite).
• Release: available in Eco Community Discord.

The roadmap will continue based on the development of Layer 3 (see “Further Development”). The project is open source under the MIT license.

Team

Arseniy Nisnevich (yulston#0081) - Developer, PM

Individual contributors:

• Valeriy Shevchuk (facts parade#4191) - User Guide and User Flow Descriptions (Figma)
• Francis James Tolentino - Pull request: https://github.com/nisnevich/eco-discord-lazy-consensus-bot/pull/3

A round of applause is in order for everyone who took part in the beta testing on the Eco Community Tools Beta Test Server. As part of the “Funds Usage” section, a proposal is being made to offer a reward to all beta testers who have made significant contributions and had a positive impact on the project.

Funds Breakdown

Detailed breakdown of the project development up to the current stage of the project (V1+): https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/u/1/d/1z9bsQh12nt0BZefmZDYXfs0H6i7kTKC_m8eEAG4b-po/edit?usp=sharing

As mentioned in the summary, the allocation amount has been reduced to 4850$ due to the undergoing adoption of the bot in Layer 3. The plan is for the bot to become the primary way for managing point distributions in the next season, at which point a full funding will be requested.

A reward of 100$ is requested for open-source contributor Francis James Tolentino who has made a pull request. I contacted Francis and he agreed to receive a token of appreciation.

The combined allocation amount is $4850:

Contributor(s) - Amount, $ Development (Arseniy) - $4750 Open-source contributors (Francis) - $100 Total - $4850

Funds Destination

Send 235895 ECO tokens to this address: 0xEf3DA9c117Ad0C6C0ca36b3f71666fA0873d57D1