Three months later, and we have learned a lot regarding what the community thinks we should be working on for development in 2018. These polls and all the conversations that have taken place regarding the technology behind possible implementations are the result of the amazing work of the Gridcoin Research 4.0 team and everyone who has helped since then. The following analysis is my own.

Now, let's see how things turned out.

Polls

Poll Result # of Total Voters Voting Share Details (Best viewed on Gridcoinstats.eu) Securing Super Blocks, perhaps with Dynamic Witness Participation Yes 77 (64.04%) 89 107,913,342 (22.99%) No 0 (0%)

Need More Information 11 (35.49%)

Abstain 4 (0.47%) Reward Payment Method Yes, Focus On Manual Reward Claims 55 (55.45%) 142 109,121,269 (23.25%) Yes, But I Do Not Like Either Of These Options 18 (39.12%)

Need More Information 10 (1.77%)

Yes, Focus On Superblock Payout 18 (1.36%)

Yes, I Support Both Options 37 (1.26%)

No 9 (1.01%)

Abstain 1 (0.02%) Proof of Research blockchain Yes 102 (90.08%) 132 75,067,588 (16%) No 18 (6.97%)

Need More Information 13 (2.86%)

Abstain 3 (0.09%) Determining Magnitude Yes 97 (94.83%) 118 70 281 020 (14.98%) Need More Information 15 (3.86%)

No 6 (0.96%)

No, But We Should Not Use Rac Either 2 (0.23%)

Abstain 2 (0.12%) Solving the Stake Weight Problem Yes, CBR with continued exploration 102 (90.76) 124 75 048 621 (15.99%) Yes, Masternodes 9 (5.25%)

Yes, Not CBR Or Masternodes 7 (3.68%)

Abstain 4 0.16%)

No 5 (0.15%)

Need More Information 3 (0.01%)

Analysis

Four out of five of these polls received over 70,000 vote-weight shares (about 15%) AND 100 votes. This is rare in the lore of Gridcoin polls. To me, this says that these are developments that caught the eye of high and low weight participants alike. That, and the community is growing and become more active!

The one poll that did not receive more than 100 votes is the superblock poll. This, to me, means that it was not easily understood or approachable by the general community when compared to the other polls -- and understandably so. The high need more information result comes from a few high weight participants who seem to support the idea of reworking superblocks, but also do not feel comfortable supporting an improvement that is not clearly designed and tested -- again, understandably so. To me, this is the weakest poll.

The strongest poll in my eyes is the vote on how to get a cruncher their Earned Research Rewards (ERR). The high participation means that more people found this poll approachable, and the problem it seeks to solve as relevant. This matches nicely with the results of the recent survey polls run by @tomasbrod. Additionally, this poll attracted the highest vote-weight, meaning that high weight participants also have an opinion on the subject. Because of the closeness of this poll along with the high participation in both number of participants and weight, I believe that the conversation around ERR is going to bare many fruits from many trees.

From a community perspective, the process around these polls was magnificent. There was about 2 months of pre-poll discussion that resulted in 6 week long polls that were completely different from those originally proposed. The final polls were formatted as a group and hosted by a composer of the original proposal which signaled a willingness to listen, discuss, and compromise by the original group. And the discussions around all of these subjects stayed on topic and focused on honest questions, education, and passionate but respectful debate. There was incredibly little posturing and ego involved.

Not only have we all learned new things, and not only does the development team now have a new resource to help inform their roadmap decisions, but I think we all had some fun in the process.

If you can think of some ways to build upon this process moving forward, please mention them in the comments below!

The Roadmap

These results will help inform the development team as they work to create a roadmap for the rest of 2018. There are, of course, other developments that must happen, so they were not polled. The developers who have spent much of their lives working with the code over the past year are the people who best know what needs to be done and in what order. I would hope to see a roadmap put together by the end of February.

While a roadmap will help provide confidence in Gridcoin development moving forward, it is important to keep in mind that it is still just a map. Sometimes off-roading is not only fun, but inevitable.

Personally, and based primarily on recent events coupled with the results of these polls, I'd expect CBR and TCD to be higher on the priorities along with some sort of codebase upgrade (part of the original proposal).

I am looking forward to the roadmap that comes out of all this hard work, and to the coming discussions and developments around the advancement of Gridcoin and our mission.

For Science!