We will be removeing this entry soon. While this program has been setup with all good intentions, we were never put in charge of the fund, never held the private keys to it, and never effected any of the postulated actions. As the 0L network restarted, the fund was no longer advertised as one that we'd manage on behalf of the 0L community. We were left in the dark as to why this decison was made and do not know exactly who made that decision; it wasn't a community decison or what they call social concensus.
The 0L FTEP aims to collect ongoing donations from validators, and redistribute those donations to engineers working full-time on the 0L platform.
Formally, this address is operated by the 0L Stewards. For administration and safety, transactions from this address will require multiple signatures from 0L Stewards and members of the full-time engineering group.
Based on social consensus among currently active 0L constituents, the inaugural stewardship is taken on by members of MSRG who pursue research on distributed systems such as distributed ledgers and blockchain technology.
There are two types of contributions needed for the success of open-source projects:
-
Isolated tasks which can be delivered independently without extensive coordination or holistic view of the platform. Those contributions are a good fit for bounties, and this is customary in open-source projects.
-
Another type of contribution requires intimate knowledge of a wide range of system components, and can only reasonably be achieved with a high commitment of hours over the long term. Bounties are generally not a good fit for these contributors since they do not provide continuity, sustainability and predictability.
#1 is a largely solved problem. For #2 above, there are perverse incentives in the early days of a network.
In the early days, a prospective engineering contributor has a choice between A) running a miner plus contributing engineering and B) running a miner and not contributing. At the early stages of a network "B" is the rational choice.
Incorporating a social consensus of donating to such a program, plus redistributing to engineering could make "A" the rational choice.
From the community perspective, funding ongoing contributions from bounties is expensive in early days. Bounties must compete with earnings from node operations (mining). As such, given that at the beginning of a network there is a combined need for an intense amount of work while the value of mining is high, any funds set aside for long term engineering efforts (e.g. over the course of a decade) could quickly become depleted.
All donations that come into FTEP during a given month, go out in the same month to full-time engineers who self-monitor the contributions.
You attend the full-time engineering meetings. Have high quality and high impact software, architecture, systems, project management, or research and development deliverables weekly. The time committed is a minimum of 30 hours per week. During bootstrapping of the program (until Sept 1st, 2021), the minimum is 20 hours per week.
TLDR; The engineering group decides.
Currently (April 2021):
The members of the group will vote to affirm if each individual's contributions were above the hourly threshold or constitute a milestone towards platform evolution and sustainability. Those whose contributions do not meet these criteria, will be gently and gracefully reminded of the objectives of the Program.
The group can decide on how to split. As of April 2021, the donations are split evenly among all members.
Voting mechanism, criteria and stewardship responsibilities will be revisited on a regular basis or when triggered by a quorum of 0L Stewards and FTEs in a past or current month.
An open dialogue among stewards, FTEs and contributors will settle the monthly consensus and constitute the vote; should that process get stuck, the group will vote anonymously (every participating steward and FTE carries one vote.)
There is no magic here.
This presumes there is strong social consensus that FETP is needed by the community, and the donors will self-police prisoner's dilemma scenarios. Donors will donate when they see value being produced by the group, and can stop when they don't, and advocate for more donations.
The full-time engineers are a small group, and we make the honesty assumptions.
The group's work is publicly visible on github, and reports could be made based on that activity. On the other hand, FTEs, maybe better than anyone else, understand the platform and can value contributions not measurable by volume of github activity.
Since the members of the fulltime group ultimately decide on the split, they have an incentive to enforce that their share of the donations does not get diluted.
Provisionally, the FTEP program is administered by the 0L Stewards, who oversee the use of the wallet for practical purposes. Futurely, a different entity may administer this program. The community will be notified in customary channels. The 0L Stewards reserve the right to discontinue operation of this program at any time.