Zealy 2025 Program Q3

Current discussion for this proposal can be found here

Introduction

The program targeting marketing and education is back, for real this time! A new program lead, and a lot from the last discussion which never hit the chain.

Details from the first proposal

Details from the second proposal

Details from the third proposal

High-level updates:

WG-zealy calls will no longer be happening.

The community manager and technical administrator roles proposed in discussion 822 are merged into a single program lead role.

The program will volunteer reviewing and mission-creating resources to the community contribution program whenever applicable. link to discord convo

The program will run with no downtime assuming that future proposals pass reliably. If this discussion does not pass by the start of Q3, any changed proposal will still only ask for the monthly request.

Starting the program and scaling it is planned over a long period of time, ideally bringing this program to more platforms. This will not happen with this proposal but will be drafted for the Q4 proposal.

To fight abuse, paid missions may be more limited in the duration of the missions and the number of winners per mission.

The funding request structure is going back to what was proposed in discussion 633 requesting for 4 months at once, requesting new funds on that fourth month, to keep operations running non-stop.

More people are going to be involved in the administrative part of the program with a focus on delegating work to make the program more sustainable for when people need to take time off and scalable for later on. 3 people have shown interest in contributing to the administrative part of this program, excluding the program lead. One person may have multiple roles in this program.

Roles

• Multiple roles for each task
  • Defined tasks
    • Mission review:
      • Missions should be reviewed within two weeks, with an internal goal of one week or less.
    • Mission create:
      • A minimum of one technical, one social, and one design-related mission should be created monthly. Many of the missions will be created to try to directly benefit the community structure by tracking and funneling users to different community programs and e.g. helping test different features or developing useful applications. Some missions might be exclusive to sub-sections of the community, such as the Akash Insiders.
    • Payroll & payments:
      • Responsible for paying payroll, rewards, and miscellaneous payments on time.
      • Documents all miscellaneous payments in a spreadsheet, grouping together payments such as monthly reward payments that are documented elsewhere (e.g. when a rewards list is published showing where all payments go).
      • Responds to queries related to users having entered the wrong address.
    • Program lead:
      • Handles community funds without owning the funds or owing taxes. This is only to be used on proposal deposits, TX fees, and to be sent to "payroll & payments"-person. In case of 3 months of inactivity, 3 failed proposals, or in the case of the program being canceled, community funds will be returned leaving the wallet with less than 1 AKT.
      • Drafts, presents, and publishes discussions and proposals to SIGs & the Steering Committee.
      • Handles administrative work keeping operations running smoothly which includes creating and running different helper scripts and fighting abuse.
      • Manages and reviews role applications.
      • Complements all other roles if necessary.
• Ability to delegate work to program lead or to person with the same role to take time off.

Monthly request & total budget

• Monthly request: $9,500 USD + fees
  • Roles: $4,000 USD
    • Program lead (piberdev): $1,000 USD
    • Payroll & payments (rodri): $500 USD
    • Mission review: $1,250 USD (divided by 2 or 3 if needed)
    • Mission create: $1,250 USD (divided by 2 or 3 if needed)
  • Miscellaneous payments: $500 USD (e.g. platform subscriptions, bonus rewards, spontaneous small contests, and ad-hoc bounties.)
  • Mission rewards: $5,000 USD (note that this can be lowered again to $3,000 USD/month if the total budget is deemed to be too high)

If USDC and AKT can be requested through the same proposal, a 5% conversion fee will be added to payroll and other payments where funds must be converted to fiat. Otherwise, a 10% buffer will be added to the entire proposal, and this conversion fee will be added at the time of withdrawing funds or sending out payroll.

The total budget consists of the Q3 Budget @ $28,500 USD plus a request of the buffer month to make sure that operations run smoothly at a total sum of $38,000. This figure does not include the fees mentioned above as we are not sure if it's possible to create such a proposal or if we are going to have to request everything in AKT or USDC - we are not going to submit multiple funding proposals at once.

Total request: $38,000 USD + fees

Timeline and credibility

Piberdev who is taking the full lead on the program this time around has been a community member for 4 years and a Vanguard for 3 years. This program has been running mostly successfully for over a year with changes each time around. This proposal has been reviewed by some Akash Insiders with no changes suggested and was discussed in the SIG-community call on the 10th of June where some questions were asked and some feedback was given. The feedback should be fully implemented in this revised document. If no major changes are requested, it will be presented in the next Steering Committee call on the 26th of June as well. If this goes well, the proposal will go on chain ASAP and the program will start again by the middle of July. Role payments will be paid in full the first month as the first half of the month will be used to prepare the first sprint.