Process rate of change

Making suggestions towards what rates of change could apply to each of the funding operating processes

Understanding how fast different factors can change which impact the funding process will help with thinking about how any adopted systems and processes can be made to be sufficiently flexible and capable of handling any fast changing information or environments.

The most prominent step in the funding process that influences all other areas is the knowledge that an ecosystem is applying to generate and select its priorities, ideas and contributors for execution. The information made available to an ecosystem for making decisions will change on a daily basis. Some of this information can then influence changes to the priorities, ideas and contributors being selected to execute the most promising ideas.

Ideas are likely the next major area in the funding process that could see frequent changes due to the range of ways that a solution can be defined to solve a certain priority. A wide range of information from internal and external sources could influence how ideas are updated and introduced over time to better address the current priorities. Execution could also likely see a slow to moderate rate of change when any of the contributors involved in the execution of ideas changes or how they operate and collaborate together. Finally an ecosystem's high level priorities would be another step in the funding process that would gradually change over time as the ecosystem starts to achieve its existing priorities or when existing priorities become less important than other ones.

Applying some approximate suggestions to think about these rates of change helps to highlight how important it is to consider how any treasury funding process is able to handle environments that have fast changing amounts of knowledge available. Any ecosystem will want to consider and respond to this knowledge when making funding decisions. If ideas are likely to change fairly frequently then the question to ask is how will the adopted systems and processes for funding cater for those changes? Can those changes to ideas be performed easily and effortlessly by the contributors responsible so they are better aligned with addressing ecosystem priorities?

What changes and how often?

Knowledge about an ecosystem can include information such as any on-chain and usage data from any network, performance and measured impact data, preference and sentiment data, available tools, libraries and SDKs, market data, industry technical advancement research, reports and insights and any other relevant data for Web3 ecosystems. Any of this data could change on a daily basis due to the breadth of information being covered. Much of this data would change automatically as it is recorded on the networks themselves daily, other areas such as the software libraries and networks being deployed would still change regularly and could be verified through public code commits. All of this aggregated information represents knowledge that any ecosystem can use to improve what they are prioritising, what ideas will be the most effective to execute and can also help with providing a better understanding of how to approach effectively executing those ideas.

What implications does this have on the process?

The implications of knowledge on the selecting priorities, ideas and contributors is profound. The knowledge applied by an ecosystem is what gives its members an understanding of what’s working and isn’t working, what problems exist and what new areas and opportunities have the most promising potential outcomes based on historical data and case studies. This and many other areas of information that impact the available knowledge help with making more well informed decisions. The members of an ecosystem who have the most accurate and up to date information will be able to more effectively be well informed when picking impactful priorities, ideas and contributors for execution. Due to this the implications of a fast changing amount of knowledge is that the priorities, ideas and contributor selection process will need to be flexible enough to handle a fast changing environment of information made available. The ecosystem will want to be able to respond to new information. The better an ecosystem can do this the more they will be able to align themselves with more impactful priorities, better ideas and improved approaches to execute them.

What changes and how often?

Setting high level priorities within an ecosystem can help to identify the biggest problems and opportunities that exist at a given moment in time. An ecosystem will benefit from coming to some form of consensus on the general preference and direction the community wants to take. Some example high level priorities could be to make it more effortless to build in the ecosystem, to have a range of secure and scalable DeFi applications or to adopt and integrate more self sovereign identity solutions across the ecosystem. Setting high level priorities such as these examples will help a community communicate its current preferences. Priorities that have a larger scope and that are more generally applicable across most of an ecosystem would more often than not take a longer time to achieve than smaller more targeted priorities. For higher level priorities it would be difficult for an ecosystem to achieve these priorities if they were constantly changing day to day or week to week. New knowledge could be an influencing reason that these priorities change over time however for the most part this is unlikely to happen on a daily or weekly basis. Changing priorities is to be expected as bigger problems and opportunities present themselves to the wider ecosystem.

What implications does this have on the process?

If priorities had a fast rate of change in an ecosystem then it would be paramount that a funding process is able to respond to those changes and start redirecting funding to initiatives that are addressing these new priorities. The idea and contributor selection process would need to be sufficiently flexible to handle these changes as these priorities change. One implication of changing priorities could be that certain teams of contributors may need to migrate to a completely new area of focus to continue working on areas that better address current priorities. For other ecosystems where the rate of change is more gradually paced then a slower and more gradual change in allocation of treasury assets to different initiatives over time could be expected. Due to the longer amount of time needed to achieve any high level priorities we could expect the slower rate of change being more likely and preferable if possible.

What changes and how often?

There are many different parts and elements that make up a complete idea which is trying to address ecosystem priorities. At a high level the idea could be to create a lending and borrowing protocol to address a need for more DeFi applications in the ecosystem. However within that idea are many other elements including the tech stack, mathematical formulas or algorithms, user experience and interface design, application features being provided, security practices and audit processes amongst many other aspects. All of these are important parts of the overall solution idea that can all be updated and changed over time as new information or resources become available. Factors that could influence the need for ideas to be updated over time could include new software libraries and packages, new adoption or usage data from similar applications, changes in security best practices or approaches and many other forms of relevant information.

What implications does this have on the process?

If some part of an overall idea needs to be changed or improved to respond to new information or learnings from the execution of that idea a redirection of execution effort may be needed towards other ideas or focus areas to better address existing priorities. In some of these cases this may mean that contributors need to learn new skills or that different contributors are needed with different skill sets. Sometimes these changes could also mean introducing a change in how the team operates when executing an idea. One example of this could be a new security tool is identified as something worth integrating into the solution being developed meaning the group of contributors will update how they are securing the software they are deploying.

What changes and how often?

Execution focuses on which contributors are being selected to execute the most promising ideas. How they operate as a team and execute an idea is also part of the execution process. The contributors who are involved in the execution of an idea could change moderately often as existing contributors move to other areas of work and new contributors join over time. The ecosystem may also decide to select different contributors for certain areas of work based on their historical performance or when different skill sets are required. How contributors collaborate together to execute ideas could also change over time as new best practices emerge around software development, security audits, collaboration, organisation, community building and any other relevant area that influences how a group of contributors operate together.

What implications does this have on the process?

Changing the contributors involved in the execution of ideas doesn’t mean that any of the knowledge, priorities or ideas would need to change. In some cases a change of contributors could result in those contributors influencing new ideas and priorities through their own suggestions or they might help with identifying new and useful information to consider. Changing how contributors operate and collaborate together would also not necessarily mean any changes are required for the knowledge, priorities or ideas parts of the funding process. As contributors learn about how to improve their own processes and operations this can lead to new knowledge which could then influence future priorities, ideas and execution.