Stellar Community Seed Fund №1 Wrap Up

We learn a lot during every round of community funding, and this first Seed Fund was no exception. We got a ton of great feedback, and we'd like to thank you all for your input. It's crucial. After reflecting on what everyone had to say, here's what we're planning for the remainder of 2021:

1. We are committed to giving out the remaining 7M XLM allocated for the community fund this year, and, in case this isn't obvious, in continuing SCF rounds for years to come. We plan to run two more SCF rounds in 2021, each of which will award 3.5M XLM. The first will run from July through September; the second from October through December.

2. To improve the process, encourage discussion, and support both smaller Lab-Fund- and larger Seed-Fun-sized projects, we are planning to incorporate the following suggestions:

• Move the discussion to Discord
• Switch to a budget-request system
• Limit voting to qualified community members
  

Community funding is a difficult thing to get right — there's no existing playbook for a fair process that supports worthwhile projects and engages the community — and there's still a fair amount of collective thinking we need to do to figure out how to execute the suggestions above. In order to ensure the SCF is responsive to your needs, we'd like to take an agile approach from now on, and so we plan to gather feedback, try things out, see what happens, iterate, and improve, and we rely on your continued participation as we do.

Below, you will find more detailed explanations of the proposed changes for the rest of 2021, but the most important thing you can do is join the discussion on Discord to help shape the future of the SCF.

Move the discussion to Discord

Discord has an intuitive interface and a robust roles system that allows for the promotion of moderators and panelists. We've seen how well it works for both Stellar Quest and the community-run Stellar Global, and we think it's the right platform to encourage conversation and participation.

Our immediate goal is to get everyone interested in SCF to join the SCF Discord server so that we can work together to figure out how to execute budget requests, panel qualification, and voting. We will likely start channels devoted to key topics, and encourage you all to weigh in as we hammer out the details. Ideally, we will arrive at consensus over the next few weeks.

We're going to try to grow that server into the place to discuss, discover and participate in all things SCF, so please join the Discord and let your voice be heard!

Switch to a budget-request system

Many of you suggested incorporating budget requests into SCF, and we think it's time to give it a try. Budget requests allow entrants to indicate their desired level of funding, and voters can factor them into their decisions to better evaluate projects of different shapes and sizes. By incorporating budget requests, we can also streamline things a bit because a single SCF round can support both Lab Fund and Seed Fund submissions. Hence our plan to run 2 more rounds this year.

It's not going to be easy to incorporate budget requests, and there are a lot of logistical questions left to answer, but over the coming weeks, we hope we can work together on Discord to arrive at the right implementation. At the moment, we are picturing having projects denominate their requests in USD so it's easier to match them to real-world expenses, and we are considering offering a menu of tiers to choose from so that voting is not overly complicated, but we are open to your ideas, and committed to making sure we end up with a solution that is fair and flexible enough to meet the needs of a diverse slate of projects.

Limit voting to qualified community members

Based on a ton of incoming feedback this Seed Fund round, we ended up implementing qualified community voting to improve the evaluation process and prevent contestants from attempting to game the system. We kind of did it on the fly, which we admit wasn't ideal, but the results proved positive: the 8 finalists are the exact kinds of projects the Seed Fund was designed to support.

In general, panelists and contestants were supportive of the change, and we'd like to maintain qualified voting going forward. Again, there are still a number of open questions — Who qualifies? How do we ensure voters conduct thorough and fair evaluations? How do we tally the votes? — and our goal is to try to work through those over the coming weeks on the SCF Discord. So, a parting plea, which should be familiar at this point: join the Discord!

Once again, congratulations to this round's winners! It's an exciting time to be a part of the Stellar community, and we look forward to seeing what you all come up with next. Onwards and upwards!