CCS Coordinator (3 months)

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I commented on Reddit here.

Basically, I think having something to care about all matters CCS would be very positive. I just doubt a bit the hours per week needed over the long run and asked: Why not cut the effort per week in half and double the duration of the CCS?

I have adjusted the terms in an attempt to address your concerns (i understand that your thumbs up is approval of a 'need' for this role, rather than the terms of the proposal, let me know if this has changed)

I'm taking all viewpoints very seriously, you deserve a more well thought out answer than this but if i can just quickly share my thoughts. In my reply on Reddit i did quote my time doing the role as where i got 3~ hours a day from. But i see that it is possible, that there is a point where everything in this list is ok / nobody is making proposals / and i know whats going on and who is doing what . If this happens, i will not be twiddling my thumbs as the CCS portion is not the only aspect here.

To assure you that this does not happen - i can remove the 3 month constraint (as this was an estimate anyway) and then we are left with me contributing to the ecosystem to fill in the gaps / me waiting for things to do for Core (and these would be judged by the community / in plain view , my reputation is worth more than some quick Moneroj).

Perhaps some suggestions to fill in any possible gaps? Contributing in my spare time keeps me sane, i'm always seeking work - be it on monero-site , or testing monero-gui PR's (i am not a core developer as we all know, but i have skills to contribute in other areas)

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changed title from plowsof - Community Relations / CCS Coordinator (3 months) to plowsof - Community Relations / CCS Coordinator

Community community community

This person so far has only showed me true Monero and community spirit.

You can feel when someone is doing something because he likes it and truly believes in the Monero as coin.

For that reason it's really important to attract non-biased and objective developers around the Monero. (Blockstream2)

His tech and coding skills seems solid to me and feels like there is open position for coordinator of all these community happenings.

Interesting thing that you can create is Monero meeting calendar with twitter/telegram/email notification bot, because its' very easy to miss a meeting or at least html table with preview would help a lot.

I expect that you take a lot more responsibilities after(if) this proposal get funded.

Will donate

Thank you for the kind words @MajesticBank, the calendar is a great suggestion. We had an old one at https://www.monerooutreach.org/monero-calendar/ but it seems to be offline. And i like twitter/telegram bot idea, i could modify my spam script to include telegram channel(s) too.

Also I'll create a CCS bot for twitter (just like my general fund one) it will tweet "+?.?xmr to (ccs title) " and link people to the funding page, seems like a fun idea. Notification when things are 100% funded too, which is a bit tricky, alot of proposals are never truly 100% funded because the front end rounds the values up: (we've been under funding our devs by at least 1~cent for years! )

Sarang: research funding for 2020 Q3 underfunded by 0.003552452154 xmr

From what I gather, plowsof has spoken with luigi about this CCS coordinator role and he is in favor of it. If luigi needs the help, that is reason enough to move this forward.

I have doubts however about the "Community Relations" part of this proposal. I echo rbrunner's comment about the number of hours required relating to the CCS. Plowsof shouldn't be looking for things to do to "fill the gap" of extra hours he is billing for. A better solution would be to just bill for the hours worked relating to the CCS.

In summary, I support focusing on the CCS Coordinator duties and scrapping the "Community Relations" part, as it is too amorphous.

Thank you for the wise words @geonic1, (one of the very first sponsors of my work in fact). I have adjusted the terms of the proposal, i hope you are satisfied, let me know if your thoughts have changed. For reference, the monero moon newsletter takes 10 hours / week to produce

Thanks, it seems more clear now. By the way, I don't think your volunteer work on monero-site and monero-gui should be part of this proposal, as it is unrelated to the CCS.

The Monero Moon CCS proposal has been sitting in limbo for the last few months, so I don't know if that's a good point of reference. But, for example, ErCiccione's work on monero-site has been billed at 30 eur/hr. I consider that work more complicated and requiring deeper expertise, so would be hesitant to fund coordinator work on the CCS at a higher rate.

I think 10 hrs/week at 30 eur/hr represents a good value for the community.

In acting as a liaison to core - there will be times where effort will be required on -site / -gui. and i have proven my level of usefulness there over the past 5+ months, which i will continue doing during the course of this CCS.

The monero moon is the perfect baseline. It has been funded several times at a rate of ~35 eur / hour - 10 hours per issue: see https://ccs.getmonero.org/proposals/john-foss-the-monero-moon.html The community have no issues with that. If you want to know why the latest one is sitting in limbo you can check out the comments there.

Thank you for mentioning the getmonero CCS - another great baseline, along with the translation coordinator CCS. How are they going at the moment? was 30 euros an hour enough to keep the proposers contributing ( don't mistake me for saying money is the only reason those are in my OTHER / soon to be purgatory list but clearly the hourly rate was not enough to overcome external factors, no hate toward those 2 as they are valuable members in this community, still. ). And now, it is almost 2023 , there is a labour shortage and (so im told) the cost of living has increased slightly so those are my rates 40 euros per hour.

If someone wants to take on this role for 30 euros / hour 10 hours a week and they are more valuable for the community than i am, then of course they can have this position. We get a smooth running CCS (for cheaper) and i can contribute in other areas, a win win.

The community are getting a great deal here. It seems my efforts of selling myself have not been adequate here (at least for you personally)

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changed title from plowsof - Community Relations / CCS Coordinator to plowsof - CCS Coordinator (6 months)

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changed title from plowsof - CCS Coordinator (6 months) to CCS Coordinator (6 months)

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An average Domino's employee hourly pay ranges from approx. €10.41/hr for Pizza Cook to €13.27/hr for Delivery Driver, while Starbucks hourly pay ranges from €6.75/hr to €12.09. An average janitor salary is approximately 15€ and an assitant hourly pay is €12.07, in Europe.

My purpose of telling this to you, is to show that the basic hourly pay is less than 20€ everywhere. Can you breakdown how did you calculate the 40€/hr as the value for your work ? or is this arbitary ?

Additionally, I don't think the core needs a liaison, or there should be a liaison to the core. Anyways I support this CCS, if you are willing to bring down your hourly rate near 20€/hr.

Edit: some of the points on your proposal reflects you want to act on behalf of the community. No one wants someone else to be their representative or descision-maker. Let it keep as is, If something isn't broken, don't try to fix it.

Thank you for the comment, an entry level developer role in Europe will earn between 3-6k euros/month, my contributions have proven my skill set in this area (which i will use for the consultancy part of this role and also for being a general 'fixer' where applicable). If i should take on a full time role in that position i will not have time to contribute anymore.

With the labour shortage (real world and in Monero) / increased cost of living, as a community, we need to compete with the real world and invest in our contributors. We've tried 30/euros an hour, it doesn't work, and we're happy paying 35 euros/hour for a weekly news letter.

I'm not going to engage in any mental gymnastics of stating "22.3 eur/hour + 0.XX and carry the 1" Moneroj to avoid triggering anyone. 40 euros an hour are my rates. If you can find someone to do this role for €20/hr or even 30€/hr let them make a competing CCS and the community can vote who is better suited to this role / will benefit the ecosystem as a whole the most. I have proven my capability and had the OK from a member of Core.

Edit* Nothing will change with decision making, my vote will have the same influence as others, i will not be making decisions on behalf of anyone, if i must clarify this in the proposal i can (i wasn't aware that it comes off like that so i apologise for giving you that impression)

Couple task suggestions that I think would be very valuable for someone with your technical and communication skills to take on:

Contacting auditors/3rd party specialists to coordinate on efforts towards:
- composing multisig security proofs
- reviewing and prototyping bp++
- reviewing Seraphis/Jamtis
- researching trustless zk-SNARKs
- etc.
Quality assurance testing all new features and bug fixes each release cycle in the GUI, CLI, and RPC wallets. I can attest to your abilities on this front; it would be nice to have dedicated testers with a strong understanding of Monero. @selsta is probably the most consistent Monero "tester" these days and I think it would be nice to have more testing firepower since selsta's plate is fairly full as it is.

Thank you for taking the time to comment and provide some great suggestions J-Berman!

Let me just state the obvious to any outsiders - I am not a researcher and do not have the skills to create a well defined / in-scope audit of making a cup of coffee (this requires gathering the people who know how to and letting them hash it out). A good reference for me to learn from would be Seths contributions in Exploring zk-SNARKS - which inadvertently caused quite a fallout on social media as people misconstrued his efforts into suggesting rct's are a failure etc so it's one thing i would be hyper-conscious of when approaching tasks like this. Under the umbrella of CCS coordinator I would be asking myself 'why aren't we raising funds for hard problems e.g. reviewing/prototyping bp++ / Seraphis'? There is indeed a lot of coordination effort involved here, which i would need to take care of as part of this role.
yes, yes and yes - I've noticed how selsta is here/there/everywhere , saving him 30~60mins every other month with the GUI packager and reviewing PR's (where i am capable) / testing new features has kept me busy/sane for the last several months.

@plowsof has already taken on both of the above suggested tasks and performed well.

On 1: plowsof made contact with multiple auditors to move forward with vetting bulletproofs++ to see if they should be implemented in Monero. Those conversations are moving forwards thanks to plowsof's efforts.

On 2: plowsof's strong QA testing has already identified a couple interesting bugs in a couple of my PR's that may not have been caught before production (1: bug in the scan_tx feature, 2: bug in background sync in the GUI). Additionally plowsof's domain knowledge from giving support to users in the past helped me come up with a good solution to a not-so-easy problem in my scan_tx PR here. plowsof continuing in this capacity for each release cycle for all contributors' PR's will prove very valuable I think.

plowsof is already excelling. I support.

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changed title from CCS Coordinator (6 months) to CCS Coordinator (3 months)

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As per feedback during the community meeting i have reduced the time frame to 3 months and increased the hours to fully contribute to QA testing (GUI/CLI) / helping selsta / and also @ getmonero.org , as always: hours worked are hours paid - Milestones are not unlocked with solely CCS coordination work - they must be combined with hours worked on these other tasks so the community is getting the most out of me.

mentioned in commit d01ef759

merged

mentioned in merge request !299 (merged)

Work started during the funding stage however this update will cover what has happened since being fully funded. n1oc announced it on the 14th of November (and also provides us with an RSS feed too, how kind.) Most importantly, I would like to now say thank you to all of you who donated to my proposal, sent messages of support and helped share it.

Summary

After 3 community meetings:

17th December / 3rd December / 19th November

We have seen these proposals go to funding after feedback/consensus was reached: (funded swiftly too! amazing)

GUPAX : after an earlier idea of theirs was rejected, needing only a slight nudge / words of encouragement - they were able to come back and prove their work ethic / talents by completing this as promised in 1 month: v1.0 is now released
selsta : Long time / valued contributor, no work required here, i just had to read 'merge', and watch the support roll in.
Jberman : See above.
MoneroKon 2023 : We're in safe hands. The events team respond to suggestions quickly and thanks to community feedback, we're getting high -quality audio/video live streams have been secured (yes, they're hiring professionals). Funded in record time.

Now onto everyone's favourite word: SoloptXMR. Together with luigi, after reviewing the project in a vacuum (the CCS does not care what you like to spread on your toast each morning) we have moved forward with the requested changes. This is where i set aside my personal opinions based on things outside the CCS (and also those of a large proportion of the community) and accept (if any) damages to my own reputation. If you can't look at me the same again, i understand (me neither)!

I want to do more regarding the work in progress list - starting with the low-hanging fruit e.g. xmrsale which has been abandoned now for many months, with the project falling behind its fork satsale by many commits. The remaining funds should be returned to the general fund (or something else that we decide on). We can't have people treating the CCS like a piggy bank to hold our Moneroj for 'eternity'.

Testing CLI/GUI

Unfortunately, no official release client to test until January~, however, I've still been busy and always on hand to test things:

After creating sanity check scripts for scan_tx in the CLI/GUI I've been using it as my daily driver (along with background-sync) and have not had any issues.
Promote scan_tx usage in the ecosystem with a redeem gift card proof of concept script which these projects/persons are taking up: xmr.gift/ofrnxmr/cakewallet/moneroATM/stackwallet.
Trivial but fun CI workflow script to confirm p2pool hashes, and my own PR to clear text fields (w0w) - I've got one in the works now that will let you open different wallet types from the browse filesystem method without seeing an error for this issue (please hold your applause).
Confirming/Reproducing GUI user bug reports by spinning up vm's to save selsta time / keeping an eye out for reports.
Where possible I test things and say i think its broken and you should set an error variable

Site

Plenty to do here, most of my time has been spent updating the wallet/daemon docs / guides - which are almost all merged and ready to be deployed. Ercicione has been reviewing the localisation PR's (I still have a lot to learn there) Ercicione has been of most help reviewing the localisation PR's where I lack experience.

Misc

I wish I could say the Bulletproofs++ review/audit is up for funding now, but we are waiting for the author to submit some updates. However, I did the legwork by communicating with auditors / core to save developers/researchers like koe / jberman time. Now, vtnerd is busy implementing the haskell proof of concept into C++ (thank you). I've kept certain members of core up to date with happenings in the community and annoy them when required.

In my spare time I have developed a very healthy addiction to Matrix/IRC - this has enabled me to battle the cold temperatures by keeping me as sedentary as possible, thus helping to increase my body fat reserves. I've also put up 2 community nodes (node.monerodevs.org and node2.monerodevs.org (ports 18089/28089/38089)) and watched as user Siren updated the front/back end of https://monerodevs.org/ (making my own contributions worthless). I've had to change my sleeping pattern on more than one occasion to catch someone who spams about the size of a ledger seed phrase. https://bounties.monero.social/ is fully functional thanks to Henry and Dan Miller and John_r365, I've stepped in to make sure payments are released when bounties are completed.

Any questions or 'you should focus on this' / 'do better' please let me know.

After 5 community meetings / season's greetings and a happy new years:

3rd Dec / 17th Dec / 7th Jan / 14th Jan / 28th Jan

These proposals have/will be funded by our community:

koes' Seraphis Library 2 Work
and shortly, selstas and Loveras.

Thank you to all those who have participated in the meetings / offered help/suggestions/criticisms / the CCS proposers who i have annoyed to provide updates. If you're reading this and you want me to mention that thing you helped me solve / or the idea you gave me, please reach out and i'll thank you personally here because theres alot of you out there (im barely literate so need all the input i can get)

Resolving CCS issues?
- to date i have resolved only 1 more than none issues. this is not acceptable. with the support of the community i will be working my way through resolving 5 of the most realistic ones listed here
- i have been proactive in keeping tabs on the wip list and chasing up updates for the community

CLI/GUI ~ Testing

#3936 through testing, was able to identify issues / create some test cases, which i later submitted fixes for (turning the review into a collaboration)
#4088 i solved an open issue!
#8697 through testing 3936 in windows - identified and fixed an issue with monerod service not starting on boot. reported another issue which was then solved by selsta here
#8698 after reviewing a trivial copyright update PR - i identified 20 missing files by creating my own script in bash. I then turned this into a continuous integration script for the monero repo so a pull request is made each year here
#8721 reviewing this seed node PR became tedious so ended up creating an automated checker which updates daily to save selsta time in the future check-seed-nodes (inspired after hinto forked one of my repos rendering it useless)
I am currently busy QA testing #8096 from jberman/rbrunner (stating this here as it won't contribute to the next period - and jberman has graciously spoonfed and explained all of the testing tools / tasks)
p2pool / release-v18.0 testing:
- take part in hardfork testing with 2 machines
- provide a stream of constant testnet transactions with an automated script
- introduce a high fee transaction randomly to verify that p2pool updates the blocktemplate immedietly when a high fee tx is detected, and is able to mine expanded blocks e.g. this one @ 580KB
- provide computing resources for Rucknium to aid research

Misc

i recently put up a bounty to help a talented dev/researcher complete an important task for the Seraphis project, its at 0.4XMR so far and those that have donated can say they helped get the RandomX mining algorithm merged fully into Seraphis, check it out: Blake2b dev challenge

After 3 community meetings:

11th Feb / 25th Feb / 11th March

We have seen these proposals go to funding (on behalf of the proposers, thank you to all who have/will donate!)

FeatherWallet / Independent Monero Film / Monero Observer / AcceptXMR

I am proud to say that AcceptXMR has been the first example of the community not only cancelling an open CCS (xmrSale - due to various reasons including abandonment), but also proposing an alternative project to take over the remaining funds to provide the "same, but better" product. Gauging community sentiment was mentioned / stressed as being important in meetings (because this would be setting a precedent after all) so requiring the proposal to raise funds (to allow people to vote with their wallets) was agreed upon. Using GUPAX's precedent for a ballpark maintenance figure of 20xmr/year - 14 xmr will be requested from the community, to total 20 once combined with the left over 6xmr from xmrSale. I commend BusyBoredom for listening to the wishes of the community, and wish them the best of luck with their proposal.

I have found that we have throughput for focussing on 3 'problem' ccs' at a time. Currently:

MollyIM / SoloptXMR / Animated Videos

MollyIM is not abandoned. the proposer has been working on their own custom Monero wallet sdk and (so i'm told) will be posting an update detailing their struggles shortly. The Animated videos proposal is an on-going issue (concerns have been raised / noted from the community), but they have at least attempted to 'make it right' by seeking feedback / creating video 1. Endor of SoloptXMR has been the only one of this group not to produce a comparable update during the same time frame :(

testing / misc.

I am always on the lookout for things to test / sanity check / save people time. Some things i would like to highlight:

https://github.com/monero-project/monero/pull/5370#issuecomment-1436154807 testing of a PR uncovered long wait time to generate addresses. moneromooo patched, my test completed in 9 minutes instead of 9 hours now, a 60x improvement courtesy of moneromooo.
https://github.com/plowsof/monero-gui-exe monero gui's windows installer creator now allows people to build as soon as gitian binaries are available. No runid inputs required (workflow and also dockerised shell script) selstas personal packager script was also updated, so some more time saved there.
https://github.com/monero-project/monero-gui/pull/4124 - i didnt 'double click' during testing and failed to miss something, so reverted a small feature in time for release.
https://github.com/plowsof/scrape_ccs_fr noticed that the ccs wallet is 242 xmr over funded

The over funding issue is something we need to work through together.

I hope the people who have supported me are satisfied with my performance. I am not perfect, and make mistakes - hopefully i have shown that i am able to change / move forward when this happens. 1 or 2 legal threats, but it seems like i've made it out onto the other side relatively unscathed knocks on hollow head Thank you for reading.

CCS Coordinator (3 months)

What?

Who?

Milestones

Funding

Merged by luigi1111 2 years ago (Oct 30, 2022 12:01am UTC) 2 years ago

Activity

Summary

Testing CLI/GUI

Site

Misc

CLI/GUI ~ Testing

Misc

testing / misc.

CCS Coordinator (3 months)

What?

Who?

Milestones

Funding

Merge request reports

Merged by luigi1111 2 years ago (Oct 30, 2022 12:01am UTC) 2 years ago

Activity

Summary

Testing CLI/GUI

Site

Misc

CLI/GUI ~ Testing

Misc

testing / misc.