| version | url |
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v2-published |
--- COPY THE META BELOW TO PROPOSAL SUBMIT FORM ---
title: Decred Journal and Politeia Digest 2023
start_date: 2023-02-01
end_date: 2024-01-31
domain: Marketing
limit_usd: 40,000
--- COPY THE PROPOSAL BODY BELOW ---
This proposal requests funding for the production of the Decred Journal and Politeia Digest for 2023, with a maximum budget of $40,000.
Decred Journal (DJ) is a detailed monthly report of all notable project activities 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.
The Journal ultimately exhibits Decred's monthly evolution and development, providing excellent optics for new viewers keen on seeing the health of the project, and its track record of delivering.
We plan to tweet the most interesting elements of the Journal in order to reach an audience that prefers short-form content. Example.
Politeia Digest (PD) serves to update voters on all notable proposal activity at best time. This includes summaries and highlights of proposals and their revisions, comments, and related activity. It tracks Politeia in greater detail compared to Decred Journal, but is still short enough to catch up quickly. Unlike DJ there is no fixed schedule, instead issues are released 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 the 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. General audience can still pick interesting parts and skip the rest. Also, DJ and PD can source news to other formats such as Twitter, the News Update videos, or Decred Magazine stories.
Decred Journal released 55 detailed monthly digests since April 2018. Politeia Digest released 56 proposal batch updates since October 2018. Most of the work was funded by 4 approved proposals: 2019 Marketing, 2020 US Marketing, Decred Journal 2021 and most recently DJ and PD 2022.
To improve resilience and reach content is published on Decred Magazine, Medium, GitHub, and Block Commons. All sources are stored in Git repositories that anyone can clone to protect it from loss and censorship. Other benefits of Git include offline reading, detailed log of contributions, and easier translations. The production process is extensively documented to facilitate knowledge transfer to new maintainers if necessary.
A total of 126 DJ issue translations to 8 languages were made. PD received 10 translations to 2 languages. Translations were funded separately from the DJ/PD proposals.
A number of side projects were spawned while collecting data for DJ: reports on attended events, social media stats, network stats, supporting proposal docs and the log of translations.
- Published 9 issues of DJ and 6 issues of PD.
- Spent around $25,570, or 77% of the $33,000 proposal limit. It was paid in DCR at standard monthly average rates (varied between $19.79 and $62.63 per 1 DCR, average $30.52).
- Proposal's monthly average burn rate was $2,740.
- DJ spent ~$24,050 (94%) and PD spent ~$1,520 (6%).
- Releasing earlier has been a big challenge. We are looking how to fix this.
- New "byproduct" projects created in 2022 include: monthly updates to decred.org/news page, network data snapshots, reusable charts of network metrics, and more detailed updates about the ecosystem posted in the #ecosystem chat room.
- Read the full final proposal report on Politeia (backup copy here).
The work will be done by @bee, @richardred, @Exitus and @bochinchero, with occasional contributions from others.
The 2022 proposal had a maximum billable amount of $33,000 for 9 months. The actual billed amount was $25,570.
For 2023 the monthly targets will remain the same at $3,000 for Decred Journal and reduced $333 for Politeia Digest. This translates to a maximum billable amount of $40,000 for 12 months. Unlike 2022 we will remove "hard" monthly limits in case any subproject needs to stretch slightly, as long as everything fits the total hard limit for 12 months.
| Item | Count | Unit $ | Subtotal $ |
|---|---|---|---|
| Decred Journal | 12 | $3,000 | $36,000 |
| Politeia Digest | 12 | $333 | $4,000 |
| Proposal total | $40,000 |
An average 2022 issue had ~4,400 words (~11 pages) and ~220 links to sources. To get a sense of what it takes to produce you can check the latest December and January issues. 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 but they can be funded from Decred Content and Asset Translations 2023 proposal as needed.
This proposal will fund the work done between February 1, 2023 and January 31, 2024. All billing will be performed in Decred's Contractor Management System. Payments will be made in DCR at standard DCR/USD exchange rate assigned by the CMS for each month when the work was done.
Any unused funds will stay in the Treasury.
- v2: Improved text and links, clarified DJ vs PD expenses in 2022, clarified budget monthly target vs hard limit, added budget breakdown table, corrected word/page/link stats to use 2022 data.
We'd love to hear your feedback regarding the Journal and Politeia Digest. Is there a new section you'd like to see? Is the Development section too technical? Let us know.