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Decred Journal and Politeia Digest 2022 |
This proposal requests funding for the production of the Decred Journal and Politeia Digest for the remainder of 2022, with a maximum budget of $33,000.
Decred Journal (DJ) is a detailed monthly report of all notable project activity in key areas such as:
- Development - progress in ~18 code repositories simplified to less technical language
- People - new contributors, community's social media stats, unusual changes of activity
- Governance - Treasury in/outflows, recap of proposal activity
- Network - health indicators for mining, staking, nodes, research highlights
- Ecosystem - updates from existing and new services in the ecosystem
- Outreach efforts
- Events - summaries of attended and organized events
- Media - notable articles/videos/podcasts/translations
- Markets recap, including DCRDEX volume
- Relevant External - crypto news in areas relevant for Decred like decentralization, governance and funding, chain forks, DEX, privacy, etc, with a focus on events we can learn from
The primary goal is to deliver all notable project activity in one big monthly report, in order to help stakeholders track project progress and make better decisions. Secondary goals are to promote the project by exposing a solid amount of work each month and attract new contributors. For more on motivation and target audience please see our production guidelines.
Politeia Digest (PD) serves to keep voters updated on all notable Politeia activity. This includes summaries and highlights of proposals and their edits, comments, and related activity. It tracks Politeia in greater detail compared to Decred Journal, but is still short enough to catch up quickly. There is no fixed schedule, but releases are timed to drop when most useful, e.g. before voting is started for a batch of proposals.
Politeia Digest is included in this proposal because it has the same goals as DJ in one specific area (Politeia), and is done by same people with similar production process.
The level of detail of these two publications is most useful to sophisticated stakeholders and investors. For ~30 minutes a month one can stay on top of most things and follow the links to learn more about specific stories. But the general audience can still pick interesting parts and skip the rest. Also, DJ and PD can serve as a source of news for other formats of updates.
46 issues of Decred Journal have been released since April 2018 and 50 issues of Politeia Digest since October 2018. In 2021 they were funded by the Decred Journal 2021 proposal with approx. $28,400. In 2020 they were funded by 2020 Marketing proposal and have spent approx. $28,300. These figures do not include translations.
Over time the production was optimized as we got better at it and removed less valuable content.
To improve resilience and reach content is published on Medium, GitHub, Odysee and Block Commons. All sources are stored in Git repositories that anyone can clone to protect it from loss and censorship. As a bonus, it allows offline reading and easier translations. The production process is extensively documented to facilitate knowledge transfer to new maintainers if necessary.
Several data tracking projects were started while writing DJ: social media stats, events index, network stats, proposal docs and translations index.
- Published 12 issues of DJ and 10 issues of PD.
- Spent around $24,800, or 73% of the $39,000 proposal limit. It was paid in DCR at contractors' standard monthly average rates (varied between $54.25-$198.60 throughout 2021, average $131).
- Average monthly proposal spend was $2,370.
- Please see the final report for notable developments, challenges, and other details.
The work will be done by @bee, @richardred, @Exitus and @bochinchero, with occasional contributions from others.
The most notable change is @bee will be stepping down as Journal lead, but will still be providing critical review/oversight. @Exitus has kickstarted the re-production of the Journal and will be serving as the Journal lead going forward.
| Item | Count | Unit $ | Subtotal $ |
|---|---|---|---|
| Decred Journal | 9 | $3,000 | $27,000 |
| Politeia Digest | 9 | $550 | $4,950 |
| Compensation for Jan 2022 work | 1 | $1,000 | $1,000 |
| Total + $50 rounding | $33,000 |
We will set the maximum monthly spend limit to $3,000 for the Decred Journal and $550 for Politeia Digest. There will be 9 issues of DJ (including April) and ~9 issues of PD.
Extra $1,000 is included to compensate work done in January 2022 to complete the December 2021 issue. This work was not paid due to poor selection of billable period that ended in 2021, and the team deciding to not bill for it to respect the terms of the 2021 proposal.
This translates to a total $33,000 for the duration of this proposal as a hard limit. We expect actual billing amounts to be similar to prior years (~70% of the limit).
An average 2021 issue had ~5,000 words (~12 pages) and links to ~240 sources. To get a sense what it takes to produce you can check the latest April Issue. Basically it involves collecting and writing up a lot of mini stories. Perhaps the biggest part is harvesting ~18 code repositories for notable updates and translating that to less technical language (while still keeping some details since we also target developers).
This proposal does not include translations.
This proposal will fund the work done between January 1, 2022 and January 31, 2023. One extra month is added to complete the December 2022 issue.
All billing will be performed in Decred's Contractor Management System. Any unused funds will stay in the Treasury.
Any feedback to improve Decred Journal and Politeia Digest is greatly appreciated.