When does "presumably under development" get changed to "likely bounty squatting" ?
Once the GUI is easy for everyone to use, do you folks think a prediction market might be a better model for these bounties? That would eliminate squatting, and also give participants a good projection for completion dates.
In my experience it is hard to find highly skilled developers who have some spare time. (For Bitcoin projects... My theory is that everybody is hiring so this completely depleted the pool of available devs.)
Usually developers want a concrete payout model like "do this, get 10 BTC", as it matches per-hour wage they are used to. I.e. they know what a hour of their time is worth, they estimate how long it takes to complete a task, and can thus know whether it is a good deal or not.
If you introduce a risk of non-payment (e.g. if two devs work do same job only one gets paid), you need to compensate for it by higher payoff.
Also you need to take into account developer psychology. It is a very complex topic, but the general idea is that developers are more likely to take small tasks which they are prepared for.
Also they care about awesomeness, good cause, prestige etc.
Say, if something takes 1 hour of time and involves only tech I know, I will take risk, and even accept discounted payment if it is cool and everything.
So I think prediction market might work if you break whole thing into small tasks.
But this is very problematic:
- very few developers know all required tech, and preparation takes a lot of time
- designing the solution takes time
- it is very hard to break the whole thing into smaller pieces, basically to do this you need to design the architecture in all details
- when people care only about completion of a certain task they are more likely to commit bad code, or do not take into account the big picture
We've been trying to develop colored coins using bounty model for 6 months or so, and it wasn't effective. I'm now using a different approach for BitContracts.org: we have a team, of sorts. While individual team members get bounties, the difference is that they work continuously on many tasks, so preparation is less of an issue (you prepare only once), they are interested in long-term success and so on.
I haven't tried it, but what might work is hackathon-style events. It is easier for a programmer psychologically: if it is possible to find, say, 24h to work on this project, programmer can just commit to work on it, and have no worries about distractions and such.
Also hackathon might be perceived as a fun time, risk is bounded, so programmers will be more likely to do this.
Also it would help a lot if people who have more experience or have better vision will be available through the event to give advice. It happens very often that programmer is stuck on what appears to be trivial, and availability of an expert can drastically speed up the development and reduce complexity.
