NEM Foundation - Funding Proposal 2019

[NEMSecretariatOffice]

Dear community,

An opportunity is presented to hear your voice through a proof of importance (POI) vote in support towards a funding request for NEM Foundation. We have completely rebuilt the Foundation’s operating structure and mission. We are hitting refresh and starting from scratch. This means a renewed focus under this new leadership and a NEM Foundation that truly exists to serve and support its powerful community.

Before any vote is cast, we highly encourage the community to review the resources we have prepared to help you in making an educated and calculated decision:

1. Proposal deck – here
2. FAQ here – here
3. Video message – here

Please also see:

• Response to questions from Core Devs here

• Catapult Mobile Wallet Walkthrough here

Update:

Spanish translation

1. Proposal - here
2. Proposal deck - here
3. FAQ - here
4. Video - here

Ukrainian translation

1. Proposal - here
2. FAQ - here

Japanese translation

1. Proposal - here
2. FAQ - here

Requirements:

1. Minimum of 3% POI voting (includes 3% of TOTAL POI votes - both ‘YES’ or ‘NO’ votes included).
2. 65% majority of ‘YES’ votes out of total vote count.

Both requirements have to be met in order for the funding proposal request to be successful

Changes as of 10 February 2019:

1. Minimum of 3% POI voting (includes 3% of TOTAL of YES POI votes only)

Terms:

1. The process of discussion (no voting allowed) will go on for 10-days from 5 February 6:00PM Central Standard Time (CST) to 15 February 2019 6:00PM CST.

• During the first 5 days of discussion, the NEM Foundation would like to be able to make changes after hearing feedback from the community.
• For the second 5 days of discussion, there will be no more changes made to the proposal but the discussion can continue on.

2. The POI vote will begin for 5 days starting on 15 February 6:00PM CST and end on 20 February 2019 6:00PM CST, all community members are encouraged to vote. No more changes shall be made in order to give the community a firm proposal to vote.

3. Funds will most likely be taken from either the Marketing, Unconventional Marketing, Operations 1 or Operations 2 Funds. This will be finalized and proposed 5 days before the POI vote on 15 February 6:00PM CST

4. All community members can vote via the NEM Nano Wallet. A voting guide can be found here.

Summary:

If the funding request is approved, NEM Foundation will restructure to have newly created product-focused teams. The heads of these teams are the Chief Technology Officer, Chief of Product Management, Chief Financial Officer, Chief Business Development Officer, Chief Operations Officer, Chief Marketing Officer, and Chief Revenue Officer.

Each of these team’s leads will be responsible for reporting metrics and delivering a Return of Investment (ROI) directly to the community and council to maintain transparency and accountability. All funds spent will flow through the Chief Financial Officer and adhere to consistent accounting standards.

NEM Foundation should continue to exist as product-focused, revenue-driven and community-oriented organization because:

1. NEM Foundation has had a strong focus on marketing and business development which will be a key need to the launch and commercialization of Catapult - there are plans to promote Catapult through a comprehensive digital marketing strategy and following up on key strategic relationships which have been established.

2. The new leadership team has been only one month old and is committed to working with transparency and accountability. Alex Tinsman, the elected President had the highest votes for both POI and registered members votes.

3. We are adding an aggressive set of goals for tech product features, developer tools, and programmers that will help make the NEM platform the best in the industry. We are also adding plans to be sustainable by being revenue-driven through the appointment of a Chief Revenue Officer.

4. We are proposing a budget with a burn rate reduced by about 60% from its previous level. This will allow the Foundation to deliver ambitious results with responsible use of reserves. This budget is not yet confirmed, and there are more steps ahead before we have the funding needed for these plans.

5. A lot of thought and reflection was put forth reviewing the 2018 Foundation’s failures and successes as well as understanding the general landscape of how other similar successful organizations are structured - having this funding request approved would mean that we can utilize the learning from the failures and successes to ensure we allocate resources appropriately moving forward.

We want to be clear that the NEM Foundation operates as a separate entity and is one of many ecosystem contributors to the NEM open-source project. Therefore the NEM Foundation is not NEM. The NEM open source project remains strong and thriving.

We would like the community to use this forum post to engage in discussion and the council is fully committed to taking in feedback for the new structure. The voting period will begin from the 15 February 6:00PM CST to 20 February 2019 6:00PM CST.

Three things we expect to see in 2019 if funding is approved:

1.) Expect to see more enterprise adoption utilizing Catapult with a revenue-driven culture.

2.) Expect to see more public and private chain transactions when Catapult launches.

3.) Expect to see stronger leadership, solid governance and more service to the community, partners and the world as we hope for a brighter future.

Reference on past announcements from NEM Foundation:

1. https://forum.nem.io/t/nem-foundation-message-to-the-community/
2. https://forum.nem.io/t/nem-foundation-update-a-response-to-questions-and-anticipated-questions/

Update

A joint statement has been developed by NEM Foundation and NEM Labs

Joint Statement by NEM Foundation and NEM Labs

Update

Voting is live. Please vote.

[eddy]

Please put the Spanish subtitles option on videos. Thank you . Great job. I hope translate all documents tomorrow for comunity Latam

[gentlemand]

This raises a ton of points of course, but for starters - We will take care to avoid hurting the XEM price through rapid selling.

Will OTC options be explored? Binance have just opened this up. I presume the foundation must have had occasional enquiries from larger buyers, though obviously they’re few and far between at present.

[Pontifier]

This whole thing makes me exceedingly angry. How many XEM were wasted last year? How many stakeholders could have been paid? This funding should not go through unless cheated stakeholders get their coins first!

Edit: This issue won’t go away by hiding it.

[jabo38]

I want to mention something to the community. This is the new foundation’s proposal and as you go through it and watch as Alex guides you through the things that are being said, you will see A LOT went into this.

The foundation has been pretty silent but that was because we wanted to be very transparent, but also accurate. During the last month, Alex had to figure out first how much money we have, how much money people were spending (actually this was a lot harder to come by than you would think), figure out all the employees and their roles. Then we had the evaluate the situation and decided that it definitely wasn’t good.

Next Alex had to think about different models and chose one. Then she had to prepare all the plans and numbers which took more time. The new council was meeting twice a week to discuss these issues and support her, and I’ve been quite impressed. Please take the time to go through it all, and we have more information on the way too. It took a lot of time to prepare, but a lot of thought has been put into this.

So, I would like to say that the foundation has been pretty silent over the last month, but it is was because Alex was leading a team that was working very hard. In the future, we hope to be more communicative.

[Pedro_Gutierrez]

Working On it, and video with subtitles

[jabo38]

Will OTC options be explored? Binance have just opened this up.

Yes, OTC options are being explored, and I have personally had a long call with Binance. There is no plan to sell XEM on the open market.

[Yhon_Restrepo]

xem was not wasted last year, it is understood that the structure of the foundation was always towards and directly on the marketing and adoption of NEM in the world, the thing that up to now the success, what we are doing at this moment is to become sustainable to obtain a stronger impulse in the foundation beyond marketing, the parties seek, seek, understand, write a project, like NEM, in the world you have to develop slow and safe, the issue is about the price and the speculation of the asset the situation is general the market, this news is totally positive discarding the fud that is behind it.

[jazzthatway]

Congratulations to the new EXCO and council for the quick turnaround and hard work in putting up this proposal. It is a good proposal for the future and it is something that we can all strive for. With the community interest at the centre of what we do, the trajectory for this is going to be manifold positive. Thank you Alex and team!

[Pedro_Gutierrez]

Congratulations to the new EXCO and council for the quick turnaround and hard work in putting up this proposal. It is a good proposal for the future and it is something that we can all strive for. With the community interest at the centre of what we do, the trajectory for this is going to be manifold positive. Thank you Alex and team!

For us it is a great challenge, to be able to demonstrate to the whole community that the new Foundation 2.0, will have fantastic achievements. Our team works aligned and always in favor of empowering the ecosystem and the community.

[n3lz0n]

Please kindly read the proposal, any questions let us know by posting here or in telegram. thanks!

[gentlemand]

There are a lot of positions to fill. Have potential candidates been identified for all of these roles?

I seem to remember quite a few mentions of struggles with recruitment. There’s the possibility of losing a great deal of time locating people.

I don’t know how different the requirements are compared to what existing employees are up to.

[jason.lee]

There are a lot of positions to fill. Have potential candidates been identified for all of these roles?

Yes, we have identified a number of good candidates who had to be made redundant/laid off. If the proposal is approved, it will give us an opportunity to get them to work full-time for NEM Foundation before they look elsewhere. There is a big difference when we have talented people working full-time for NEM Foundation on top of being community members, we do not want to lose out a great deal of time locating people.

We have also have HR & legal support to roll out the new structure so that we can hit the ground running soonest possible.

We want to be respectful and transparent to the community, hence a 10-day discussion period followed by 5-days of voting.

[tongokongo]

Good luck!

[n3lz0n]

The team members that we let go, we still keep in touch with them. The new structure will have a lists of open positions for them to apply to…

[gentlemand]

Cool.

I’m sure more than a few folks are primarily focused on Public Catapult.

With this new set up what is required from the foundation to get it rolling?

Will the foundation be expected to employ more developers expressly for this? What do the core developers need from you to progress public Catapult and has everything needed been identified?

Obviously details may be hard to provide at present but an idea would be useful.

Previously the only solid fact I’ve seen about the old arrangement is that the foundation were expected to approve the public roadmap for release which obviously hasn’t happened.

What will be happening that wasn’t happening before?

[jason.lee]

With this new set up what is required from the foundation to get it rolling?

First we need the support from the community to vote on the proposal. That is the most important requirement.

Will the foundation be expected to employ more developers expressly for this? What do the core developers need from you to progress public Catapult and has everything needed been identified?

Second, yes, there will be developers either directly employed or contracted by the Foundation to get Catapult up and running. The important next step is the commercialization of Catapult - the Foundation aims to have top talent in busines development, revenue generation, product management, project managers to make sure that Catapult is not just a technology update - it is a practical use case, it is problem-solver to industry, it helps gamers pursue their passion in gaming utilising mosaics as a rewards token, aggregated transactions and more.

The Foundation essentially wants take this ‘product’ and put it in the hands of the world. We will need people who can wear suits to meet corporates and governments, people who can speak in major publications online and offline and people who can go down to the ground and develop viral engagements to use the NEM blockchain: Catapult-enabled.

Previously the only solid fact I’ve seen about the old arrangement is that the foundation were expected to approve the public roadmap for release which obviously hasn’t happened.

What will be happening that wasn’t happening before?

We will have a very strong focus to be revenue-driven. That means that there will be funds coming in to ensure that we are sustainable. Our engagements will have this question that needs to be asked, ‘what is the ROI or can we bring revenue to the Foundation?’ That would mean that we institute a revenue-driven culture

[gentlemand]

That answer’s still a teensy bit management speakish.

It may not be possible to answer fully at this moment in time. If that’s the case then let us know.

In terms of purely making public Catapult an operating reality, what will the foundation be providing that wasn’t provided before and how significant and vital will its contribution be compared to the core developers?

Is it impossible without extra developers? Are there issues waiting to be addressed that haven’t been worked on at all? If the funding fails where does that leave the whole thing?

I think the start of all the ructions in NEMland began when it was revealed that public Catapult’s launch was dependent on foundation input. I certainly wasn’t aware of it. Obviously I expected foundation input to be a major factor but not one of the deciding ones.

This is going to be the number one concern for most. At present, rightly or wrongly. some feel progress has been taken prisoner by the previous foundation set up rather than aided and woes regarding its internal operations aren’t high on the list of interests.

[corporal_clegg]

The salaries are quite substantial and I imagine it will difficult/impossible to find people worth the target salary who would be willing to work on a one year contract. It doesn’t seem like a reasonable target to be filling so many of such roles right off the bat. Perhaps some of the roles could be combined.

[Inside_NEM]

Salaries listed are subject to change as it depends on region and whether the role is paid in fiat or XEM. That being said, salary allocation won’t change. Also we called out in the presentation that not all positions will be immediately filled. We will ramp up accordingly. Salaries in 2019 are less than in 2018. In 2018, there were also bonuses that aren’t reflected in spreadsheet.