The NCPA (Nano Community Project Award) is a collaboration between the Nano Foundation and The Nano Center to help support the continued development of community-based services. Each month, the Nano Center will award $1000 worth of Nano from a Community Development Fund to both recognize and support important community-based services, and support future development with new projects looking to add utility to the Nano ecosystem.

A core philosophy of the NCPA is that it is not only awarded to the community, but it is also chosen by the community, embracing Nano’s true spirit of decentralisation!

Outlined below, is the Nano Center’s proposed process for choosing the NCPA award recipient each month. It is something we have considered in detail to balance a smooth efficient process with the desire to incorporate as much community input as possible, creating a process which the Nano community can see is fair and transparent.

Stage 1

The first stage of choosing the NCPA recipient is an open discussion between Nano Center members. In January, TNC launched its membership system, which remains open for all community members to join. Members have access to an NCPA channel to propose and discuss community projects they feel deserve the rewards. At this stage everything is on the table; recognising existing projects, exploring new ideas or building future improvements.

Stage 2

Alongside this stage the Nano Center ambassadors will select a voting jury panel for the month. The panel, of 8, will consist of at least one ambassador, TNC mods, and the remainder will be members who are active and known in the community. The goal is to rotate the panel every month to allow different community views and perspectives to be heard. It was a clear aim from the start that the award was not chosen by a panel of TNC ambassadors and NF core members.

Stage 3

The jury panel will then consider the discussion from the members channel, and choose that month’s recipient of the NCPA. The panel will have the option to give the full award to one project, or (in specific situations) split it to support two or more smaller projects. They will do this collaboratively and finalise their decision with a panel vote.

Stage 4

The panel’s decision is presented back to the Nano Center to be awarded. There are some criteria at this point that need to be checked against to ensure the project qualifies, these will be found in a pinned Discord message. Once cleared we will announce the award winner for the month on The Nano Center Medium blog.

We will, of course, review this process as we go and take feedback on how it is working, but for now we are very excited to get the NCPA underway and look forward to some great community discussion. You can contribute to this process by requesting (free) membership on the TNC discord channel which will give you access to the members discussion channel, and developers are welcome to put their projects forward for review.

We are, at the Nano Center, very excited to be custodians of the community fund but we will need the help and contributions of the wider community to ensure that Nano sets the highest standards of transparent community decentralisation and fairness.