Stellar Community Fund

Round 1 Details and Submission Guidelines

Before we begin, I’d like to thank everyone who has participated in the Stellar Build Challenge over the past few years. It was an exciting way for developers to flex their creative muscles and introduce new applications and use cases to the Stellar ecosystem. As you know, we’re retiring the Stellar Build Challenge, but we appreciate all the enthusiasm towards the program and the hard work put into it by developers all over the world.

Builders, fear not! The Stellar Community Fund (SCF) has arrived! As we said in its original announcement, one of the major requests we’ve heard has been a method for the community to participate in guiding lumen distribution. We also wanted to make it possible for more than just developers to participate in growing the ecosystem. In this post, I’ll outline the details surrounding the first upcoming Stellar Community Fund round.

Stellar Community Fund Guidelines

Timeline:

The Stellar Community Fund will be held quarterly throughout the year.

The first SCF round will begin today and end on June 30. Final voting will begin on June 23 and run 1 week. We expect this program will evolve significantly after the first round. In the spirit of the space, the first round will be a “beta test”. Participant feedback is welcome and will help shape future SCF rounds.

Proposals and Proposal Guidelines:

If you’ve participated in SBC, this section will be familiar!

All proposals should be submitted as a new thread to GalacticTalk.org under the SCF category. Proposals can be for applications, tools, content (such as tutorials, books, and videos), or events. Do not submit strictly proof-of-concept proposals. Submissions must have a live element and be available somewhere that people can use/review them.

Proposals should contain:

Project title: The name of your project. Please adhere to the Stellar brand policy.

Summary: A simple sentence summary of your project.

Goals: What your project plans to accomplish broken down by objectives.

Description: The description should answer questions like “what does your project enable users to do,” “why is your project valuable for Stellar,” and “how does your project utilize Stellar.” It should also cover what platforms the project supports (ex; Windows, Chrome, etc.) and relevant documentation. This section should be very detailed.

Link: Links to your application, code repository, supporting materials, and/or home site. If you are submitting a proposal for content pieces (like walkthroughs), please provide links to the content pieces.

Anything else: Any additional information you think the community should know about your project!

After submitting a proposal, it’s important to stay active and answer any questions the community may have about your project.

Voting

Voting will take place in two rounds. A nomination round and award round.

Nominations will be ongoing throughout the proposal submission window. For this beta round, nominations will be based on the most liked proposals on GalacticTalk (discounting likes/nominations from accounts made after March ‘19). Though this will lock out new community members from participating in the nomination process, we still highly encourage new users to sign up and participate in proposal discussion so they can participate in nominations next round. This account lock-out will not affect who can submit a proposal. The top 7 most-liked proposals will move on to the final voting round.

Final voting will be held on /r/Stellar. After nominations close, we will open a poll thread with the names, descriptions, and links of the nominee proposals. Users will vote by selecting one of the seven options in the poll and by also leaving a comment ONLY confirming the name of the project they are voting for. Votes from duplicate accounts and voting manipulation will be discarded. Please only comment the name of the proposal you are voting for in the voting thread. Any other comments will be removed. There will be a second thread for proposal discussion linked.

Voting will last 7 days. For this round we will not be using photon weighted polls. Votes will be counted based on poll results, subtracting any votes that do not also leave a comment confirmation.

Awards:

The Stellar Community Fund is being allotted 12,000,000 lumens for the year. Each round will award 3,000,000 lumens. Winners will be awarded proportionally out of this pool based on final vote percentages.

Eligibility and Legal

Please only submit one proposal per person/organization per round. Winning entries will not be eligible for future rounds. All proposals must have some proof-of-use of the Stellar protocol or the benefit to the Stellar ecosystem. Please no ICO’s. We recommend all proposals be completed in English. Proposals must have a functional element (no purely conceptual proposals) and be accessible in the United States.

Unfortunately, if you’re a national or resident of Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Syria, Sudan, or Crimea, regulations prevent us from sending you any lumens. Additionally, we cannot send lumens to residents of the US states of Alabama, New York, Georgia, Connecticut, New Mexico, Hawaii, Vermont, and Washington.

SDF intends to comply with all applicable laws and regulations. In accordance to US law, all winners will be required to submit KYC documentation and fill out the relevant tax form. Failure to do so will result in your rewards being forfeit. These tax forms will be used for accounting and reporting purposes so please be aware of your countries applicable laws regarding tax-filing. Lumens will be reported at closing price on the day they are sent to you.

If you intend to utilize the Stellar logo in your project, it must follow the brand policy. Lack of adherence to these standards may result in disqualification. Use of the words “official” in regards to or ambiguity of connection with the Stellar Development Foundation may result in disqualification. Avoid using Stellar in your project name since it could be confusing for the community.

Engaging in vote manipulation will cause your proposal to be disqualified. This includes botspam, fake/sock puppet accounts, and brigading.

All participants will retain the intellectual property associated with their submission.

PS: Feel free to join the Stellar Community Fund keybase team.

GalacticTalk mirror: https://galactictalk.org/d/1903-stellar-community-fund-guidelines