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 software other than these forums to allow developers to collaborate and deal with bugs. Git might work but you need a development mailing list as well at least.
There has been and will be cooperation. Why do we need to pay individuals salaries and hope they "cooperate" as if they weren't already? If there's already the incentive to work together, distribute strengths as necessary, and efficiently organize roles in order to solve the problem at hand and secure the prize? The detriment of the salary is that when you have an official salaried "development team," it presents the idea that we already have the developers we need and we just need to wait and let them do work now that they are paid a salary. This is not conducive towards attracting new and possibly better talent!
additional thoughts:
quote from board emails:
Do you think that is fair? If you were a hopeful contestant and wanted to dedicate your skills towards a decentralized project?
Now, weigh that with its effectiveness. I think coalitions are great if the best developers we had right now got to call the shots on development, along with the freedom to not worry about their other financial obligations as much. Is there a way to encourage self-organizing coalitions so that we may still upkeep our promise of decentralization?
I assume guys like Tachikoma will naturally end up leading such endeavours anyways. It just may be better to keep up with decentralization and perhaps this subtle difference in mechanism could mean a lot down the road, motivation and incentive-wise and all that.
quotes from earlier:
Why can't we do it in the same spirit as the first contest? Objectives laid out, prize is there, and developers are allowed to form coalitions as they liked. I like to think that coin distribution within the one partnership that the contest had (I forgot who) worked out fairly, as well as to the full body of the contestants
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.
Yes, cryptocurrency has convicted me strongly of competition. Competition creates some crazy crazy innovations and brings the best people together. Already confirmed rewards (salaries) kind of go against that. Did the DARPA Grand Challenge reward anyone before the contest? Once the contestants have proven themselves, they receive the bounty which enables them to spend more TIME on such projects. The best and fairest way to encourage further dev is by providing further incentive for development of objectives with very clear criteria, ie bounties.