Establishing a marketing fund for Peercoin - voting for Fund Keepers

General
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After many debates and discussions and calls to improve the marketing, we are very excited to present you this proposal to improve the marketing of Peercoin. Hope you like it.

After some consideration and consulting trusted members in the community River333 and I would like to share a proposal to establish a Marketing Fund. We think we have with Peercoin one of the most secure and proven networks for crypto currencies. With SunnyKing’s recent statements in the interviews this can only get better. Peercoin will have a bright future! But we need to work on it. Jean-Luc Picard said: It is possible to commit no mistakes and still lose. Let’s make sure that doesn’t happen to Peercoin.

The biggest risk we are currently facing is not being visible and recognisable as such by both future users, investors or developers or being swamped in the marketing talk or continuous FUD from other coins.
We are also very aware that this community is proud to not have the burden and overheads of committees, fund owners and foundations. So anything proposed should be lean and mean, but still fit to purpose. Here comes Peer4commit.com in to it’s place. Peer4commit.com is working for a number of developments such as peer4commit itself and Peerunity. We will soon see already announced improvements which make it easier to manage non-development and therefore marketing related projects. So that will fit nicely with this fund. Initially we might have to run without the multi-sig feature mentioned in the proposal and just have a shared account which has access to the funds.

So what we are proposing is to establish just a Marketing Fund. Not that we will start doing the marketing for Peercoin ourselves. We want to challenge the community to raise proposals to promote Peercoin. Good proposals promoting Peercoin will qualify for a donation from the fund. Proposals will be voted for and the submitter is tasked with the execution of the proposal. Everyone can raise a proposal but they will need to find someone willing to go with it. The approach for submissions for the fund can be found in detail at the bottom of this post.

With that we are looking for feedback on many aspects of this proposal such as:

  1. Do you agree to have a marketing fund? Is the timing right? (see poll)
  2. The way the fund is set up and maintained
  3. The voting process
  4. The submission process
  5. Anything else you think can be improved related to this proposal.

Looking forward to your feedback and comments.

Regards,

River333 & Cybnate

[i]BTW We have copied bits of this charter from the NXT forums to save some time and we thought it was a good example to start with. We did some refinements and enhancements though. Better well copied and improved than poorly invented ourselves we reckoned.

BTW2 The banner is just a quick mock-up for the proposal. We should develop a better one when this fund goes live.[/i]

— DRAFT PROPOSAL FOR ESTABLISHING A MARKETING FUND —

[size=14pt]Introducing the Peercoin marketing fund[/size]

The Peercoin marketing fund is now open to receiving your donations and plans for Marketing proposals. The fund is meant for projects promoting Peercoin. The fund itself will only be accessible by 3 trusted community members by means of consensus. These members will ensure to provide the opportunity to the community to discuss proposals in a designated thread.

Everyone can propose plans to the community, but the plans need to meet certain criteria to be considered. Key factors in getting your proposal accepted is by making it clear, organised and accountable. This means you know what you are going to do, how you are going to do it, and that it must be possible to check what your results are.

After submitting your plan, the community will consider it by the parameters posted below and discuss it for at most one fortnight, in which time we can ask you to clarify points that are not clear or would need changing. Then the community will vote**. If your submission is accepted arrangements will be made on payment if that is not part of your proposal.

To apply for funds, please make a separate topic on a Board/Thread (to be assigned). Start the topic name with [MF] for Marketing fund so we will recognise it as such. Then use the format below to outline the project. Feel free to add necessary documents or pictures by the use of links. The idea is to make it very easy to get an overview of your project.

[size=12pt]FORMAT FOR PROPOSALS:[/size]
Proposals need the following details. We will not accept proposals without these:
[b]

  1. Peercointalk or Github account and email/contact info for submitter[/b]

2. Submission date

3. A short description of the project with your goals very clearly specified(three sentences max.)
Make an outline so it’s easy to see what your basic plan is
3b. Long description as needed
You can of course describe your plan in full, link to other information etc.

4. Specify the target audience
Which group are you aiming your project at? Please keep in mind that “everyone” is NOT a valid group to be aiming at.

5. Budget
Be as specific as possible. Try to use accepted costs as CPM/CPC and CPA. (Cost per mille (views/impressions), Cost per Click, Cost Per Acquisition).
Sloppy budgets will not be accepted for a vote.

6. Specify deadlines
No project can be without a specific time limit. We need to know when you plan to either implement it, or when a project is supposed to go live.

7. Metrics need to be specified
How are you going to check how many people you reached? This is needed to be able to see how successful you are in your aims.

8. Turnaround times
Requests will be turned around in 7-10 days for smaller requests. Larger ones (e.g. 250 PPC+) may take up to 14-17 days to allow community to discuss and the voting process to happen. Extensions of discussion time can be allowed at discretion of fund keepers on request of community or submitter(s). Reasonable requests will be granted automatically.

9. Payments
Payments will be in PPC and to an address mentioned in the proposal. Proof of ownership of that address may be required.

If you have any questions, please ask them in this thread, so we can answer them in public.

** Voting
We need to work up a voting process. Currently I’m thinking of enabling volunpeers which are active for more than 3 months and have karma >=5 to vote. We would need to have at least 5 qualified members voting in a relative short timeframe (<=3 days?). When there is equality of votes after the deadline one of the three fund keepers will provide the deciding vote. When there are not enough votes (<5) within the deadline the project is rejected. Projects can only be submitted once in the same form.
We might consider one-time fund requests for micropayments <10 PPC / 6 months to go without a vote at discretion of project maintainers. They still can be discussed though, it is just reducing the burden of having to vote too often.

At this stage for the voting process I suggest we would just use votes in a thread. Just a post in a designated thread with project name and a yes or no and encouraging a voluntary explanation of the vote so future submitters can improve their proposals and assess their chances on success.
I’m happy to use anonymous voting as soon as someone can prove a voting process were voters are unique (preventing people from voting twice) and can prove they are part of this community (preventing competition from manipulating voting process).

— END OF PROPOSAL FOR MARKETING FUND —

BTW Don’t forget to vote in the poll

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Thanks Cybnate, I hope we can get lots of feedback on this.

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finally :smiley:

4

Hallelujah!

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This sounds like a really, really great initiative. One thing that I like about peer4commit, is that it can’t “turn into a foundation”. Is it possible to earmark funds or perhaps have some kind of donation stream or something? Me personally I would rather send a little coins now and then, instead of everything at the start. Hmm, I’ve got to think things through a little bit here what my preferences are, but whatever they are I’m of course supporting this thing.

Also, I think we really, really need some talking heads willing to represent their own view and idea of Peercoin. It doesn’t even have to reflect the “community”, but at least be a person that like Peercoin and can talk about stuff in podcasts etc.

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Ok, thanks for the positive support, but I’m a bit surprised about the relatively low number of responses. Is the proposal too complex maybe? Or are we hoping for something else better?

I think it can play a useful role with smaller requests to have someone maintaining a website with useful information. Having said that when properly funded larger project will certainly be assessed and voted for.

@pillow, yes we can earmark donations in the fund, but you might be better of to create a project on peer4commit.com yourself when you have very specific objectives. Donate to it and see if someone likes to go with it.

I think the power of the fund is that we can respond faster to requests or opportunities without having to raise money first. Makes us more agile. It also hopefully challenges the community as they know the money is there, they just need to come up with a good proposal and the votes to get it.

Maybe I can give a few examples of projects which might be useful and could be funded:

  • Marketing portal with all peercoin services and goodies nicely presented (website can link to it or it can just be a page on website)
  • Making a template for a press release
  • Providing quality articles for newsletter or website
  • Creating video snippets, 10-20 seconds of video promoting aspects of Peercoin for Youtube channel
  • Create banners, pictures etc. we can use for Peercoin advertising
  • Presenting Peercoin on conference
  • Most viewed Peercoin promoting post on Bitcointalk contest
  • Hire talking head liking Peercoin (as pillow already suggested)
  • Support hosting of interesting projects improving use of Peercoins
  • Small seed or support to start Peercoin promoting business selling Peercoin related products
  • Best Peercoin in the news, -photo, -article, -on the radio or even -on tv!

Just a braindump, and I’m sure some are better than others and I’m sure you can think of more and better ones.

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I confess I didn’t read the whole text as carefully as I should. I just really think we need to do marketing and trust that you guys are up for the task. I kind of trust you guys more then the text, so that’s why I didn’t read it as carefully as I guess I should have.

I did not think of this. Points well taken and I’m willing to change my mind a bit here. I will be donating some coins and then when I see them being in a way I like, I’ll simply donate more. But as you wrote, there is an opportunity cost tied to not having the money at hand when needed.

I just want to clarify that I don’t want to donate coins to a person who’s getting paid to do this job. If someone started a podcast, or perhaps contacted already existing podcasts and did things like that, I would for sure donate coins to help cover the cost, some expenses and what not. But I feel this person have to have a stake in Peercoin and have a motivation that’s outside the pay/donation. I’m thinking here that this person could become like almost a spokesperson and for sure the “face of the community” so I think its really important that this person is not doing it only for the money. I’m not willing to donate money to a person, who builds up a network and reputation and then simply goes on to the next coin and well… I guess you get the picture. But help cover expenses, etc. yes for sure I can do that. But this spokesperson have to “be someone from the community” that kind of really just want to do it. :-*

Am I off base? (maybe off-topic ;))

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Cybnate, I owe you and River333 a response to this post. I’ve been a little pre-occupied lately, so time has been short, but this is important enough that I want to make sure I give you good feedback on it. Thanks for pulling this together.

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Cybnate and River, sorry for taking so long to respond to this. Like Ben, I’ve been extremely busy. This proposal is brilliant and I wholeheartedly agree with your quote above. If something pops up that needs money, such as the $500 press release cost in ppcman’s thread, we won’t have to get depressed anymore because we’d have to raise the funds first to even consider it. :stuck_out_tongue:

I actually hear that NXT does this. They provide funding for good ideas and that’s exactly what has spurred their huge growth over the last couple months. With everyone knowing the money is already there, people will be more willing to take the time to propose something. There won’t be that hesitation any longer because they’d know they won’t have to figure out how to raise the money by themselves anymore, rather it would be available to them as long as they can prove they have the competency to pull it off and people support their initiative by voting for it. I put my stamp of approval on this! :slight_smile:

Question, you have this banner on the forum thread. Am I correct in understanding people can just scan it to donate to the fund? Where else would this banner be located? We’d definitely need to make a better looking version of it, but you already mentioned that.

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In which forum would I create a proposal ?
Thanks

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[quote=“silverstacker, post:10, topic:2522”]In which forum would I create a proposal ?
Thanks[/quote]

We haven’t designated a place to post proposals as of yet. We will allow a bit more time for feedback before opening up the fund for donations and proposals. When that happens I will let you know.

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Don’t get discouraged as I think there is a lull in almost all cryptos at this time because the prices have been mostly going down for the last six months or so. No matter that the prices skyrocketed in the six months prior to that :smiley: It’s kind of like: what have you done for me lately? So, few people are very excited right now, but starting the seed of marketing might be a very good thing to do at this time.

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I don’t know if I buy that, because NXT seems like they’re not having any problems. They’re always pushing something out. They just got GoCoin before us, even though GoCoin said they were looking into adding us the previous month. They’re doing something right. I’m thinking it must be the emphasis they put on marketing, which draws new blood into their community to help out. We don’t have that yet, but with this marketing fund we might be starting on that path.

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Sorry Cybnate and River333 with so many things going on I have just read this thread. It’s a great initiative. The timing is not perfect. I think PPC network is still weak and an explosion of visibility and (probable) increase of coin value could attract attackers. Then again, there is always a down side of everything so, start it right away please. Start small, find out the best approach along the way.

That said, several things from risk averse side to think about. Some questions don’t have to have a clear anwser now especially if the proposer is well known.

One is accountability and auditing. Whoever wants to get the fund should at least answer such question: how do you prove your expenses are legit – e.g. receipt of purchase or service, other acceptable and convincing evidence such as an id/namelist of giveaway etc. If details cannot be given (e.g. name list of a giveaway to strangers at a county fair) then it should be told in the proposal for evaluation. Then there should be ways to audit based on evidences. I think providing proof of a dedicated fund-receiving Peercoin address is a must.

How are you going to track every project when there are, say, 50, each in different approval, paying, auditing stage? By hand with a google doc spreadsheet? Using peer4commit but substituting links of github commit to links of grant threads on peercointalk (don’t know if it is possible)? I would like to see something lean and mean and transparent.

Now that you have public fund on your hand, how do you prevent getting sued by the government of where you are or where the Fund is legally registered? Does the Fund need to be registered?

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I don’t know if I buy that, because NXT seems like they’re not having any problems. They’re always pushing something out. They just got GoCoin before us, even though GoCoin said they were looking into adding us the previous month. They’re doing something right. I’m thinking it must be the emphasis they put on marketing, which draws new blood into their community to help out. We don’t have that yet, but with this marketing fund we might be starting on that path.[/quote]

Well Nxt is only just over six months old and no doubt they have marketed better than Peercoin from the get go. But, I think Peercoin is far and away the better engineered / designed crypto. Given the choice in a revolutionary new mission-critical environment between a well engineered product and a well marketed product I will choose the well engineered hands down every time. That is not to say marketing doesn’t matter. It does. That’s why this thread is important.

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Great to have a few more responses, expressions of support, questions and feedback. That gives us some confidence going forward as we are all exploring how best to run this.

Transparency
@mhps Will have to start small as in simple projects. I think we do need to go through a bit of a learning curve on what works and what not. As you said we need to find the right levels of transparency for each project. Some will need more than others and it also depends on the trust level of the submitter.
That is where the discussion and voting on a proposal becomes important. When a proposal is not adequately transparent in the proposed execution we will give submitters hints to improve that or refer to other projects where this has been successfully applied. If they still continue into the voting round people can still down vote it if they don’t meet the proposed level of transparency, are not trusted or there is no good value of the proposal. The onus for a good proposal is on the submitter, but community either need to challenge them before voting occurs.

Role of peer4commit.com
@mhps good questions (@river333 feel free to chime in here), I think we might just request to have every project passing the voting process with a positive outcome, to have the submitter create a peer4commit.com project. I think that would be good practise. Peer4commit.com does have some basic auditing built-in so donations and expenses on the project are tracked. The submitter should still communicate on how those expenses relate to the project.

Another option potentially attractive for new submitters with potentially low trust levels is that once a project is approved, River333 or I (or any other trusted community member) sets up a peer4commit.com project together with submitter. Once multisig is in place this would prevent rogue submitters running away with the assigned funds, as they would require the signature from the second trusted person. The challenge with this model is that it is more work for River333 and I. The alternative is drip-feeding the required funds into the peer4commit projects created by submitters which also needs some administration and oversight. Anyway we will probably start with a Google spreadsheet and by the time we have 50 concurrent marketing projects going as @mhps suggested, I’m sure we have a level of funding we could pay someone to do some of the administration.

Please let us know what you think. River333 and I are open to further suggestions to improve this process. The more we can improve transparency and reduce admin overheads the better.

The fund itself
@sentinelrv, the idea is that people can indeed scan the QR code in the banner of the fund. The current banner is just a quick mock-up. The fund itself will reside on peer4commit.com.
@mhps So I think from a legal perspective no one really owns it, it is a community fund for and accessible by the community. River333 and I will only be tasked to release the funds according to the agreed protocol with the community. We are just volunteering to do so for the community, but we don’t own the fund. It is like a bookkeeper only paying by the owner approved invoices.

Voting process
Personally I’m a bit worried about the potential low levels of interest to actually vote. It is in the interest of the community that everyone votes. But the tragedy of the commons says that everyone will think that someone else cares and will vote for them. This will especially be the case with lower profile projects or project asking for e.g. small hosting donations. So I’m looking for ideas to incentivise voting without perverse outcomes. In other words the incentive shouldn’t affect objective voting. And can we trust the submitter with organising voters? Is the proposed vetting of voters by having community members active for more than 3 months with =>5 karma appropriate? Or should we have more detailed rules related to size of project and trust levels of submitter?

Hope this trigger further discussion to improve the proposal and answers most if not all of the questions in this thread, please let River333 or me know if I missed something or didn’t pay appropriate attention to a concern or comment.

My apologies for another lengthy long post, but I think this is worth spending some time on to get it right from the start.

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@Cybnate or @river333:

Do you have any thoughts around the anticipated funding requirements, to get things started? I understand that it will be determined by the number of projects that are in progress, but I expect that we’d want to maintain a certain level of funding on a consistent basis, so that we’re able to respond to opportunities or threats as quickly as possible.

What level of community investment gets us to a comfortable starting point?

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[quote=“Ben, post:17, topic:2522”]@Cybnate or @river333:

Do you have any thoughts around the anticipated funding requirements, to get things started? I understand that it will be determined by the number of projects that are in progress, but I expect that we’d want to maintain a certain level of funding on a consistent basis, so that we’re able to respond to opportunities or threats as quickly as possible.

What level of community investment gets us to a comfortable starting point?[/quote]
Good question, Ben. We do have a certain anticipation but at the end of the day it is up to the donators to vote what they think is good share to spend on marketing. So we have to live within our means whatever that may be. We can’t commit or vote for projects if the funding is not available. To address that issue which might be a temporary one once good quality projects queue up, is to include some kind of priority setting into the voting process. It wlll require a bit of admin and setting clear expectations to submitters. A project requiring 1000 PPC will have to wait if there is only 500 PPC in the fund.

And then there is of course what River333 and I think would be an ideal level of funding. 500 PPC would be the minimum to make it workable in the form we propose, but scaling further down is possible when we just solely work with micropayments (<=10 PPC) for small marketing jobs or some hosting costs for valuable information. Anyway my ideal scenario would envisage to have some top-ups when we reach the 500 PPC level so there is always some flow of projects and clearly advertise that funds are available for good ideas.

On the other extreme, to do marketing at the level NXT is doing requires clearly multiple thousands of PPC and would likely require some scaling up. We think we need to find the balance what is useful, what is the uptake, quality of delivery and what donators think what the value of Peercoin marketing is. This might take a bit of time and tweaking along the way. And if it doesn’t work it’s worth considering a cut on development donations, similar as most charities do (ever heard a charity raising money for the marketing of their work? No, they just take it from your donations).

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Hi everyone,

I am Harvey, an active participant in the Peercoin Chinese Community.

It is definitely a good idea to put more efforts in the marketing. The peercoin community has done a lot of wonderful things but only few people recognize the intrinsic value. To attract more attention in the Chinese community, several key members in China are promoting the Peercoin in different ways, for instance:

  1. A forum in Chinese www.diandianbi.org
  2. Several weibo accounts (with thousands of followers) spreading the news about Peercoin/Peerunity/Peershares
  3. Small funding donated by our key members to support our events.
  4. Giveaway PPC to invite more users
  5. Translate the weekly updates of sunny king and post it around.
    …

Recently there are many discussions around Ghash.io and 51% attack in POW. I believe this offer a good opportunity for our marketing attempts. Actually, we are organizing a event to give prizes to people whose PPC client generates a POS block in the Chinese community. One of the main exchanges in China shows interests to join and support this events. We are talking about the details. I probably will submit a proposal and ask for further support once the Marketing Fund is ready.

I think there are many things we can do together in the future. For example, we can contact manufactory in China and get thousands of PPC T-shirt in cheap price. And use them as prize in the EAST and WEST community. Even the silver coin with PPC logo, actually it does not cost much if we can order hundreds of them. I think with these efforts we can attract more users and grow the Peercoin community. :slight_smile:

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[quote=“Harvey, post:19, topic:2522”]Hi everyone,
…[/quote]

This sounds crazy good. If I had any doubts previously, I will for sure donate money now because of this. It would be awesome if you could snap photos of people wearing the t-shirts and post it on reddit etc.

I strongly believe that peercoins is a “peoples currency” (since most people can afford to mint without joining a centralized pool), so I guess the restrictions in China and the people there make it a good fit.

I’m looking forward to hearing more about your progress!