Hi @paulofonseca , thank you (and Andrei) for the detailed proposal. All three features are nice-to-have and would make the forum easier to navigate. Below are a few thoughts and questions from our side.
1 Voting-Power Tags
Several delegates have flagged a risk of bias here.
- @maxlomu has raised a very good point about filtering out noise, however we still believe that displaying raw voting weight could unintentionally cause smaller delegates to be ignored, even when they share valuable ideas.
- Rather than labeling voting power, we suggest using badges that reflect a person’s position or activity, such as “Active Delegate,” “DIP Participant,” or their formal DAO role (e.g., committee member or working group participant). This still provides readers with useful context and could reduce costs, as it eliminates the need for real-time voting power data.
2 Live-Vote Banner
We do think this is a nice-to-have feature, having real-time result within each thread. However, we have a few suggestions:
- Will the banner automatically update to show the final result once voting closes? Currently, if we were to do this, it would required the forum admin to manually tag proposals as “Passed” or “Failed” in Discourse. If we could automate this process, that would help improve each proposal’s forum status clarity.
We’d also like to better understand the core problem this feature aims to solve. Is it primarily meant as a reminder for voters? If so, what kind of impact does it have and is that impact worth the cost, especially considering we can just look directly from Tally and Snapshot?
Don’t get us wrong, this feature is definitely useful. We’re just trying to understand its value and potential trade-offs.
3 Proposal-Notification E-mails
We already find Discourse’s built-in email and digest system quite useful, so the $28.8K price tag feels high for what seems like an incremental benefit.
If many delegates continue relying on native Discourse notifications, would the DAO still be expected to pay the full amount? At this stage, it is difficult to justify the cost, especially since there is no clear evidence that these features will see widespread adoption among delegates. Much of this functionality already exists within Discourse, and Tally also provide notification feature as well.
That said, this solution does offer some advantages. Centralized notifications for Snapshot and Tally are helpful, and features like community call reminders could be useful. These improvements would enhance the user experience. However, at $28.8K, the cost still feels high compared to the value it creates, especially if usage remains low.
Budget & Team Size
Pricing has been a key concern raised by other delegates as well as ourselves. Given the proposed budget of $206K USD over two years, we have a few questions we’d like to better understand first:
We did some preliminary research on market rates, particularly for Web3 project managers and designers. While we fully recognize that rates can vary based on expertise and scope and that our data might not be perfectly accurate, we came across an average rate of approximately $63/hour for Web3 project managers, with a high end around $96/hour. In comparison, the proposed rate appears to be about 1.56x higher than the maximum we found.
We’d like to learn more about the reasoning behind these rate differences, whether it’s due to the specific expertise required, the scope of responsibilities, or other considerations that might not be immediately apparent.
The same question applies to the designer role as well. If you could share a bit more context, that would be very helpful for us to understand the full picture.