I'd like to address a few things here because I think it'd be good for a little bit of time to reset. I've spoken to many of you but I think it will be good to aggregate a bit of those conversations in one place.

  1. This is the first of 3 rounds of SCF that will happen this year. There will be 2 more. This is not the one and only round of SCF. They are ongoing. The next one will begin after this one.

"The Stellar Community Fund will be held quarterly throughout the year.
The first SCF round will begin today and end on June 30. Final voting will begin on June 23 and run 1 week. We expect this program will evolve significantly after the first round. In the spirit of the space, the first round will be a “beta test”. Participant feedback is welcome and will help shape future SCF rounds."

We know that the current setup isn't perfect and as we mentioned in the introduction, the program will continue to evolve and improve based on community feedback.

In case you missed it: "We’ve started work on a separate web app featuring weighted votes based on a handful of signal items. We’ll still encourage discussion on GalacticTalk because I think it's important - but the voting/project-sorting will not be on GT or Reddit. It will be a site specifically designed for the SCF, iterating on what we’ve learned from this round and what we’ll learn in future rounds."

The web app will likely not be ready until round 3, so the current system will need to continue with some tweaks until then. However, we will definitely be utilizing the community fund channel discussion to figure out how to best weigh signals.

But, the next round will start right at the heels of this one. Since individual projects can only win once - the intent was that this will help foster some innovation and provide feedback to projects that are working hard! The intent wasn't to stoke the flames of war. I feel like the spirit of the SCF should be collaborative and not combative. My hope is future refinements will help ease some of the tension - but there's also got to be some consideration of how we treat each other during this process. Constructive criticism is always welcome but it has to be done with some level of respect.

I've also said this isn't the replacement to SBC. This is an ongoing experiment for community distribution. I would really like to see it continue on.

As outlined in the original post. "one of the major requests we’ve heard has been a method for the community to participate in guiding lumen distribution. We also wanted to make it possible for more than just developers to participate in growing the ecosystem." There are all kinds of people participating in the Stellar ecosystem. Some of them aren't developers and haven't had an opportunity to present their ideas. I am eager to see what kind of projects come from both developers and community members with other backgrounds.

  1. The rules

Going off of the above, since winners can't resubmit the same project - we have not limited participation to a certain threshold. Anyone can participate. While it is currently up to the GT community to nominate - in the future it should be open to everyone during nomination round. This will open the pool of voters from the onset. The ICO rule was placed not because of a "funding limitation requirement" but to protect the community from potential token scams. Having a token is not grounds for disqualification - we just don't want to push the overall community to having to buy into a token sale in order to see how a project functions.

We have been recording all of the feedback we've seen and the rules will be expanded to clarify some of this in the next round.

  1. Disqualification and Brigading

If you've followed what I've said before - there's a heavy emphasis on the spirit of things. The last thing we think is productive is disqualifying anyone. Disqualification really should only be on the grounds of blatant manipulation (buying votes) and abuse (overtly being hostile). If someone is breaking the Stellar Code of Conduct (https://www.stellar.org/community-guidelines/) - this is something we are very serious about.

However, we did outline that vote manipulation is against the rules. "Engaging in vote manipulation will cause your proposal to be disqualified. This includes botspam, fake/sock puppet accounts, and brigading."

Since this wasn't deeply defined, we aren't going to kick anyone out who has used dummy accounts to vote - but the GT team did add additional constraints to remove extraneous accounts from this round. However, please try to avoid self-nominations. We'll be expanding the definitions for this next round to clarify what EXACTLY constitutes vote manipulation versus clever promotion.

  1. Everything else

SCF exists inside of its own program. That being said, it won't be the last new program from SDF. We are recording feedback. Moving forward I'd like to keep the conversation in the SCF channels focused on SCF - ways to improve it moving forward and especially on project feedback and discussion. I'd also like to see less instigating and gatekeeping. I believe everyone should have a voice and have the ability to have their project seen. Please refrain from attacking each other. Kolten and I are always happy to talk about the community fund and are eager to hear your perspectives. We greatly appreciate the feedback and suggestions we've heard so far. We'd love to hear any additional criteria that the community thinks should be included for proposals as well.

Just remember, this is the first of many rounds and eventually it should run smoothly, on-rails without the friction of this "beta" round. I have seen a lot of interesting and unique proposals and I'm eager to see how these projects grow over time with participants sharing in the spirit of community collaboration.

Great update. Enjoyed watching things progress over the course of this first round. Best of luck to everyone that advances to the final round. While my project did not make the final round, I will definitely be entering the next one with a new approach 😁

One last update:

We will be using project summaries (as well as linking to the full proposal) on the Reddit voting thread. Please update your summaries by the 22nd - if you would like changes to be reflected in the final vote process. Please keep summaries between 100 - 700 characters. We will cull them down if they are longer. If you already have a long summary or a short one - that's fine. You can point us at a handcrafted summary that fits in that character range. Just shoot me a message.

I'll be reaching out to people on the 22nd to make sure the summary says what is intended.

Thanks!

[unknown] In the correspondence above, we opened the most exciting question and this topic has ceased to be relevant, of course, if our detailed answer is not enough for you, you can tell us about it.

If there are still questions on our Scopuly project, the answers to which would like to receive, please do this in the Scopuly project branch so as not to mix personal with general. Let's keep order.

Thank you for understanding.

I also want to clarify the recent account suspensions. Two kinds of accounts were suspended:

  1. Accounts with an invalid email address.
    Having a reachable email address is a requirement for having a GalacticTalk account. If your email bounces with a "this email account doesn't exist" message it will be suspended. If you regain access to your email address you can message support@galactictalk.org from it and I will reactivate the account.

  2. Sockpuppet accounts
    If a group of accounts has <same_name>@<different_email_service> emails, posts from the same IP addresses, always in the same topics, the whole group was suspended. Also if you created a post with one account, then delete it and reposted the same content with another account using the same IP address, one account was suspended. I took extra care to double check every suspension.

    @StellarZac

    We’ve started work on a separate web app featuring weighted votes based on a handful of signal items. We’ll still encourage discussion on GalacticTalk because I think it's important - but the voting/project-sorting will not be on GT or Reddit. It will be a site specifically designed for the SCF, iterating on what we’ve learned from this round and what we’ll learn in future rounds."
    The web app will likely not be ready until round 3, so the current system will need to continue with some tweaks until then. However, we will definitely be utilizing the community fund channel discussion to figure out how to best weigh signals.

    It seems to me that such voting website looks like a good idea for the next round of SCF itself. SDF has so many important things to do right now. Just prepare a short description, and I'm pretty sure that someone from the community will be eager to implement and maintain the open-source voting website for the future SCF rounds. You can host it on your own infrastructure to eliminate possible manipulations from the project developers.

    It's kind of cool if SCF competition participants could build the voting platform for the upcoming rounds. As C# core platform developers said once, "every mature programming language should have a compiler written in this language".

    Using the example of one project from the top 7, we will analyze an example, and let this example serve as the end of injustice, since it already becomes like a circus, which is extremely unacceptable for such a project.

    The Timed Transactions API project (nothing personal, you are cool guys, you have nothing to do with it) now has 19 votes, only 29 votes, but about 10 accounts from April and later means 19 valid, and from these 19, 7 photos of their profile , where there is no activity at all, or several messages in one topic. It follows that 12 valid votes may be offset. If you showed such a courtesy to all, this message would not have followed.

    If you have already begun to do the cleaning, let's do it totally, so that in no case no one can refute your decision, thereby putting into question the fairness and decency of voting, and this is a direct way to destruction.

    We want only one thing, so that all of us, the developers, will be calm and confident that if the Stellar team makes a decision, then it is flawless and it bears the same value for everyone, and not for individual individuals.

    Please do not respond to my message, but just once again carefully double-check all voices, and restore full confidence, which we really lack.

    Respectfully, Alex

    (Scopuly Team)

      AlexGrotesk You bring forth a very valid point in that sock puppet accounts can be less obvious than the credentials the recent account purge was based on.

      For example, we can analyze the votes for Scopuly. Of the 24 votes, there are a handful of similarly named accounts where there is no activity at all, or several messages in one topic. The following two accounts were created closely together last year and show post history only within Scopuly topics:

      https://galactictalk.org/u/JackLadowsky
      https://galactictalk.org/u/desert021

      In addition, several new accounts with the FirstnameLastname convention were created closely together after the SCF phase begun. They have no post history and are inactive since giving a like to the Scopuly entry.

      Of course this could all be a very odd coincidence 😅

        We draw your attention to the fact that you did not take into account the fact that we do not insist on the return of votes, on the contrary, we insist and urge you to pay attention to the facts we have cited, which should be absolutely relevant to all participants. About our votes that are not counted - we do not claim this.

        Yes, and also, it is not necessary to enter into protection when the message was addressed to a completely different client. After all, citing such tough arguments, I am sure it will not be difficult to answer, but I did not insist, but on the contrary did not call for an answer, so let's finally close the topic with voting and achieve justice for all participants.

        Of course, it’s best to respond to what you want, and not to what really requires an answer. I understand that the question is not entirely satisfactory, but what to do, we did not think about everything.

        Let's not breed a circus, already done enough =)

        Good luck to everyone in the final! We are watching the scene =)

        Thank!

        bkolobara Yes, we had several accounts from the past .. You did everything clearly and correctly. We must inform that we apologize to all participants of this SCF.
        In fact, when all these things and the conflict between the participants of the competition pop up - we all, I noticed, get even closer together, because we all have different projects and we all do one big thing - raise Stellar so that he would lift us all.

        Therefore, we wish everyone good luck, patience, inexhaustible inspiration and growth of projects!

        • Jem likes this.
          4 days later

          Hi, I'm trying to post a new topic about our project into Stellar Community Fund but it says that I do not have permission. What should I do?

            citystates thank you very much for your guidance. I did read SCF guidelines previously. Couldn't find anything on permissions though. Please advise.

                16 days later

                If you didn't see it yet, the winners have been announced:

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