The next 6 months are critical. I believe a project manager is needed, someone with technical knowledge and management skills, who can hire and motivate the right people. A lot is at stake and the existing resources should be deployed intelligently and narrowly (i.e., not to fund every idea, but to use the bulk on the fundamentals) to hire the very best people to lead this project. Success at an early stage will create valuable dev MSCs that can fund the project for years going forward. The board needs to take decisive action to get the right people working on this project full time.
For open-ended ongoing tasks like this, I believe what David proposed could be effective, to have x percentage of the new coins released in some length of time. To keep on receiving the flow of funds one must do a satisfactory enough job to the community to justify keeping someone on. Open communication in this case will be vital.Edit2: I have rethought my position. See my post in the poll, I do not believe this is a good way of evaluating worth of work without clear objectives, and even harder to evaluate the worth of x
PERCENTAGE of MSC in l time interval.
Edit: at the same time, do we need a project manager? I'd like to ask the current developers their thoughts. Do self-organizing teams need/benefit from a top-down type of manager to get clear-cut objectives completed? I like to think that we just need the element of competition for truly grand prizes to speed things up fastest. If a manager indeed would help development, I would imagine a good manager would offer up their talents to a dev talent pool and put together a team. Bounties split as they're earned and as the team likes.
Again, thoughts?
Competition isn't everything. At some point you need cooperation between developers and contests don't really help people to cooperate. What you need to do is pay development teams. Assign certain developers to a team and pay them all as they build something together.
So if a feature gets built by a team of 5 developers then team panther for instance should get paid as a group. Also you need to rely on collaborative software other than these forums to allow developers to collaborate and deal with bugs.
So my advice is to form development teams and give each team a code name. Give each team a particular area of focus and make each team select a team leader. So if one team is working on smart properties and another team is working on stocks and another the user currencies now you have three teams working on important features.
The team leaders from each team should be in communication with each other and should manage collaboration between the teams. The team leader should give a weekly report on the progress on the forum and give daily progress reports to the other teams via email. Use contests for purposes like smaller less critical features, experimental features, bug testing, or bug reporting.