Subscription-based Funding

Applying project-based funding to such services creates huge administrative tasks, personal overload and economic insecurity.

Success is that the community can get the required professional (and continuous) services in high quality without 'burning people'.

For the community it should be quite easy to vote on and select really value-adding services. This challenge setting can be measured by the following metrics (examples):

• Number of trusted repetitive services (funding based on 'Statement of Work' and agile subscription)
• Frequency of use of such services
• Quarterly NPS (Net Promoter Score) as rating for such services
• Number of experts working in such service organisations
• Diversity and inclusiveness of service providers
• Level of external outreach (reaching business, governments, NGOs etc)
• Cross-chain and interoperability outreach of such service
• etc.

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Why do we need this complementary way of funding ?

Our rapidly growing community needs stable services (moderators of institutionalised work-streams and workshops, initiatives, tool-makers and tool-maintainers, Risk & Opportunity Management, etc. etc.). These services require excellent expert-teams, who need to work under sufficiently stable conditions for not being personally exploited (otherwise it is easy to run into burnout situations). Most of these services do NOT have project-character, they require trust, relationship and continuity.

Dedicate ONE CHALLENGE SETTING to an alternative and modern subscription model

We can learn from industry and apply an agile, quarterly-rolling subscription model. This would give the community sufficient leverage that service providers don’t get 'lazy' and really deliver the promised value AND would give the service providers the required stable environment in order to be able to establish performing teams and organisations. Such a modern subscription funding can e.g. constructed as following:

• Getting Votes in Quarter n: 100% bindingly subscription as per Statement of Work in Quarter n+1
• Quarter n+2 = If not selected again, falling back to 75% of the subscription
• Quarter n+3 = If not selected again, falling back to 25% of the subscription
• Quarter n+4 = If not selected again, falling back to 0

This way, the community does not need to enter into any static 'annual subscriptions' and the service providers must proof their value quarter by quarter - but will not fall from 100% to 0 over night

Possible proposers

• Every service provider that is not an individual (where 'employment' could be better)
• Every service provider with strong value to the Cardano Community, but also with a strong value to the 'outside world' (reaching business, governments, NGOs, and/or acting cross-chain etc).