I think we're getting some well considered sincere opinions on this issue, and that's very encouraging, thanks everyone!
I had a brain storm the other night that might give us a workable approach to resolve the situation. I've made my opinion known previously that my preference is to keep the remaining stakes in reserve for distribution later. The final number of stakeholders isn't known precisely, but we know it'll be ~1000 (maybe a bit under, maybe a bit over). That's enough to start building a community, so we *could* distribute ALL the left over stakes to the existing stake holders and do very well in the longer term. On the other hand, there are a lot of advantages to keeping at least some stakes in reserve for distribution later on.
What about this for a workable compromise, We distribute stakes to the ~1000 existing stakeholders based on the original calculation (i.e. 50% of total stakes to 3K stakeholders), and within the first week we use the NXT voting system to determine *exactly* what our community wants. In essence we resolve the matter using a democratic process based on one stake one vote. I really think this could be great test case for how we run (k)Ora in a decentralised fashion. Even the most cohesive communities will have issues that divide and cause deadlocks & gridlock with key decisions. We have a decentralised mechanism to deal with this, how fantastic!!
I know we already had a poll, but I don't feel that was truly representative. Only ~150 votes came in, and maybe some of those people weren't even stakeholders. I know I'm biased because the poll result was in favour of distributing left over stakes to the ~1K existing community, but this issue really is super critical, and using the NXT voting system we will know *exactly* what the WHOLE community feeling on this is once and for all. If we get the same result so be it, but one other problem with the forum poll was it didn't offer mixed combination option (e.g. 50% to existing stakeholders and 50% in reserve for future stakeholders OR 33% each for existing stakeholders, future stakeholders & bounties).
The NXT voting system can be 'per asset', so only Kora token holders would be eligible to vote, and I think having a voting system to help decide things is revolutionary for a leaderless decentralised starfish community like (k)Ora.
Later on we could attempt to design a set of rules to govern how our 'direct democracy' voting system would work long term, but for now we could experiment and use the left over stake issue to test the water a bit (and have some fun!).