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Announcing the Project Management and Delivery Excellence Initiative

Wow... a lot of new ideas - good.
Regarding Skype - please propose any different tool, if you don't like Skype. Just remember - it has to be easy to use for everyone.
Zoom, is easy to use, free and more secure because it is encrypted (i think), unlike skype which is not.
 
I propose we use an internet archive non-profit to improve transparency, able to be seen from Google with free long-term hosting for texts and downloads.
 
Yeah see you and I completely disagree on this one. I think this project has grown up well beyond the scope of using free services. So far this week I've heard that slack doesn't work well cause we are on the "free" account. Now I'm hearing that we can't afford to properly sign our software because it costs money. It what world do we exists as a potential business where we don't have access to a few thousand dollars in resources to make ourselves look professional. No offense but going and getting the cheapest, easiest solution to a problem is a very similar path that has lead us to being where we are.

Software projects with a 23 million dollar market cap shouldn't be squirming over a very basic set of functionality. Heck we haven't even gotten into buying and flying proper ssl certificates across all our products. Setting these things up with "free services" and without proper network budgets to me is a MASSIVE I said again MASSIVE swing and a miss. We are sitting here blowing our horns over decentralized governance and wanting to higher blockchain contractors yet at the current time we don't even have funds to finish a proper re-branding rollout. Foundation all still fly old domains, offical block explorer's old domains, dnseed infrastructure old domain's. Shouldn't the block chain be more worried about fixing and finishing off the things it requires to be fully healthy.

I really see this no different then vetting the financials of any project. Before we go spending any more moving forward shouldn't we first be taking the time to do a full audit and align the audit with a new vision and mission statement. It seems like now that we have those statements the direction going forward is quite clear. We now have two proof of concept services for our second tier network building any more services is probably a project for next year while we spend the current year finalizing the migration of all of our assets and getting some stability behind our servers and infrastructure.

The amount that this project rely's on the community at this point is amazing. You go to the dashpay site and it's never more prominent. I'd say almost 50% of the links on our core site are simply redirects to other sites offering services for us. We don't have enough resources to fly our own full set of infrastructure. Does it seem weird to anyone else that 60-70% of all the tools we have for looking into the block chain and monitoring votes have been built by someone completely removed from the dev team? We have no way of keeping those assets online if said current curator disappears. Those are scary things for investor's to know and realize. Suddenly are very shiny armor starts looking tarnished as people look around. Even teh fact that I'm able to have this discussion on this forum. To my knowledge all those fees are being covered again by an individual community member. Ironically enough it's a lot of these community members that host and supply systems for DASH but are then left out of the discussions. See how it all circles around.

Mmmmm need more 0xc0ff33

Let's agree to disagree then :) We are creating open-source software, and this enables us to use commercial, otherwise expensive services for free. It doesn't mean that these services are free because of their low quality. On the contrary, many of these services are top-notch, used by lots of commercial firms. GitHub, Atlassian, and many other companies provide great tools for free, and we'd be silly to pay for an alternative unless that's way better.
The fact that we are able to cover such costs does not mean that we should, especially if there's a free option available of similar quality. Irrational spending of money raised with the decentralized governance (even if it's only perceived by many to be irrational) will backfire in no time.

Regarding relying too much on tools made by the community: chaeplin's was the very first site providing masternode information. He disappeared from one day to another. The result is that new people came up with new tools.
On one hand I agree with you that we should prevent such a scenario from happening again - there are short-term plans to mitigate this issue partly.
On the other hand, even if we lose a tool maintained by the community member, another will be born from its ashes.
 
Nice discussion guys. Please keep posting your ideas and issues and also propose the creative solutions to identified problems. We really appreciate them all (issue reports, improvements ideas and solutions).
 
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Let's agree to disagree then :) We are creating open-source software, and this enables us to use commercial, otherwise expensive services for free. It doesn't mean that these services are free because of their low quality. On the contrary, many of these services are top-notch, used by lots of commercial firms. GitHub, Atlassian, and many other companies provide great tools for free, and we'd be silly to pay for an alternative unless that's way better.
The fact that we are able to cover such costs does not mean that we should, especially if there's a free option available of similar quality. Irrational spending of money raised with the decentralized governance (even if it's only perceived by many to be irrational) will backfire in no time.

I don't care about the cost of the services. I care about the experience of the end user. At the current moment we are shipping a piece of software that People and Businesses will use as digital money for everyday financial transactions. To this extent we owe it to the end user to take all precautions by using the most secure and industry recognized security best practices. Why we would want to choose a free cert that barely covers half the platforms out there rather then getting a single cert that can sign our applications across all platforms in a single go? We can continue that discussion later but right now we are providing a piece of financial software that when opened on all major operating systems displays an error about being "malicious" and that one should proceed with extreme caution. Not the best first experience. I'd rather our application open with 5 big phat gold stars on every operating system we build for and support. This is what would give me warn fuzzies, rather then having to by pass gatekeeper on osx to start the application.

Regarding relying too much on tools made by the community: chaeplin's was the very first site providing masternode information. He disappeared from one day to another. The result is that new people came up with new tools. On one hand I agree with you that we should prevent such a scenario from happening again - there are short-term plans to mitigate this issue partly. On the other hand, even if we lose a tool maintained by the community member, another will be born from its ashes.

I'm advocating for the basic services that we rely on to provide safe and reliable financial solutions to consumers and merchants be curated and documented, reproducible in the event of a disaster, and able to be as self sustaining just like the blockchain. Blockchains are hard to understand if you can't parse them with explorer's. Wallet's don't work well if there are no dnsseeds. Masternode voting is hard to count if not displayed on something like dashninja. Perhaps some of these very core functions need to be discussed and extended into the base protocol. Just like to see the discussion regarding these pieces continued. Maybe all i'm saying is dashninja becomes a residual project sponsored by the community. Maybe it's the ability for the blockchain to not just higher contractors but also services. I could imagine a spot where we carved off enough reserves for these basic services we need to be covered as well. Our code signing certificates, domains, ssl certificates, spork control utilities, reference node controls, and all the things I'm missing are just as important as our blockchain contractors. The blockchain also can't function without basic services to support it. Food for thought we aren't talking about crazy amounts of money here. Few hundred for vps', few hundred for cert's, few hundred for hookers and bl....errr beer's and pizza.
 
Found this old post that is worth adding here for reference I believe it stemed from that one day back in the day where enforcement got stuck on after a spork and nobody could get a hold of evan to disable it and we didn't have a block accepted for like 5 hours or something...?

https://dashtalk.org/threads/todays-issues-and-future-handling-of-crises.893/#post-5472

I agree that we need better communication for the future.

I couldn't get a complete hold of what was happening yesterday because I was travelling when the price alarms started buzzing on my phone. I'm quite calmed and just waited to get some info, but for some people it must have been tough... You can't imagine how frustrating is being a train with a bad connection and 30 pages of bitcointalk to read :)

Some thoughts:

-I'm also ok with giving all my data to the group for this kind of days.

-A map of the team's time zones and languages would be nice to have.

-We need an internal channel. A dedicated IRC channel is ok, but I think I would prefer something with more prevalent notifications. There are many apps we can use that can be installed on phones without the need to disclose the number to the others if someone prefers to keep it private.

-We should distribute responsibilities over the different communication channels. It is impossible to be at the same time on bitcointalk, darkcointalk, twitter, irc... We need to think on some way to identify us as sources of reliable semiofficial information.

-A support ticker system would be nice, but we need to be sure that we can handle it. The workload can be quite high. Maybe in a first phase something only open to those running darkcoin services (Evan has a mailing list, we could get to them easily).

-For planned events like this hard fork we need to plan ahead and reach out proactively. We can make a list on Asana and coordinate there easily draging items from one group to another and assigning them to team members(I've made an example project there for this).
wow...these are some great ideas!
 
Yeah see you and I completely disagree on this one. I think this project has grown up well beyond the scope of using free services. So far this week I've heard that slack doesn't work well cause we are on the "free" account. Now I'm hearing that we can't afford to properly sign our software because it costs money. It what world do we exists as a potential business where we don't have access to a few thousand dollars in resources to make ourselves look professional. No offense but going and getting the cheapest, easiest solution to a problem is a very similar path that has lead us to being where we are.

Software projects with a 23 million dollar market cap shouldn't be squirming over a very basic set of functionality. Heck we haven't even gotten into buying and flying proper ssl certificates across all our products. Setting these things up with "free services" and without proper network budgets to me is a MASSIVE I said again MASSIVE swing and a miss. We are sitting here blowing our horns over decentralized governance and wanting to higher blockchain contractors yet at the current time we don't even have funds to finish a proper re-branding rollout. Foundation all still fly old domains, offical block explorer's old domains, dnseed infrastructure old domain's. Shouldn't the block chain be more worried about fixing and finishing off the things it requires to be fully healthy.

I really see this no different then vetting the financials of any project. Before we go spending any more moving forward shouldn't we first be taking the time to do a full audit and align the audit with a new vision and mission statement. It seems like now that we have those statements the direction going forward is quite clear. We now have two proof of concept services for our second tier network building any more services is probably a project for next year while we spend the current year finalizing the migration of all of our assets and getting some stability behind our servers and infrastructure.

The amount that this project rely's on the community at this point is amazing. You go to the dashpay site and it's never more prominent. I'd say almost 50% of the links on our core site are simply redirects to other sites offering services for us. We don't have enough resources to fly our own full set of infrastructure. Does it seem weird to anyone else that 60-70% of all the tools we have for looking into the block chain and monitoring votes have been built by someone completely removed from the dev team? We have no way of keeping those assets online if said current curator disappears. Those are scary things for investor's to know and realize. Suddenly are very shiny armor starts looking tarnished as people look around. Even teh fact that I'm able to have this discussion on this forum. To my knowledge all those fees are being covered again by an individual community member. Ironically enough it's a lot of these community members that host and supply systems for DASH but are then left out of the discussions. See how it all circles around.

Mmmmm need more 0xc0ff33
again wow....I get fired up when I see this kind of dialoque. I'm going through this with my own company. Before adding more products...fill out and mature your foundation infrastructure. Well said coingun!
 
again wow....I get fired up when I see this kind of dialoque. I'm going through this with my own company. Before adding more products...fill out and mature your foundation infrastructure. Well said coingun!
Can you get a website already so I can order some wine with Dash!

Thanks bigrcanada. It one one of the biggest lesson's my first VC taught me. Your balance sheet isn't a proper balance sheet if it doesn't contain all the actual costs to run your business. You don't make a bunch of money if you aren't properly accounting for all your expenses!
 
Can you get a website already so I can order some wine with Dash!

Thanks bigrcanada. It one one of the biggest lesson's my first VC taught me. Your balance sheet isn't a proper balance sheet if it doesn't contain all the actual costs to run your business. You don't make a bunch of money if you aren't properly accounting for all your expenses!
Man...your telling me. I got schooled this year on that. Hands on business owners like me live to much in our fish bowl...sort of like the community members here on here. The fact that in several years I've not managed to get a website up, which I've sent $40K+ and have had to throw them all out speaks volumes of my lack of working and funding the basics. I'm super embarrassed that I don't have that site up. Damn...now you got me fired up to deal with this pronto! ;)
 
I have just catched up with this thread, sorry for being away from the discussion.

Foundation

The foundation website has not been updated yet because we are still in the process of changing the legal name (Harold filled a motion with the State, but it takes a lot of time). Once the legal name is changed we'll update the website to the new domain. Being a legal entity has the problem that you need to do things according to other people's rules :(

Alert system

crowning, thanks for mentioning me so I could get notified, it is difficult to keep up with all discussions :) I'm ashamed to admit that there is no advancement in the alert system. I gave it some thought back then, but it fell to the back of my mind. The only real improvement is that now some of us have exchanged phone numbers, but that is definitely not enough. I would differentiate two parts in this alert system:

1. Raising the alert. As coingun has said can use many apps for this that don't require to give phone number. My suggestion would be to create a Telegram group. It works great in phone and computer, it is free, open source and has customizable notifications. I would include in the group at least 20 active members of the community. If anyone sees something weird, he writes to the group. It would only be for this kind of events.

2. Acting on the alert. This part is more difficult because the reality is that only a very reduced group of people can solve network problems and maybe some of them are not comfortable giving their phone numbers to such a big group. If they don't see the Telegram alert they should get a call. Maybe we could list those members of the group who can solve problems (if that is possible, problems are not predictable, so knowing who can solve them is not that easy!) and who has their phone numbers. This way, if the doers don't see the alert message, one of those with their phone number can call them if they see it themselves...

Anyway, ideas are welcomed, I'll start a different thread so we can work on it.

Support ticket system

It can be a lot of work, but I agree it is worth the effort. User fible1 approached Evan about this offering himself to answer the tickets. I'm working with him to define what we should do. Atm, I'm answering all contact requests from the website. The volume is quite inconsistent, some days I answer five emails and others nobody writes. In any case, it is not a huge volume yet, but I guess that creating a support portal could increase that. I was thinking about using Jira Service Desk because we already use Jira and Confluence and our open source license covers it, but I need to check with flare. I was waiting to find him online to chat, but I guess that mention will do the trick :)

Free software

I agree with coingun that we can't limit ourselves to free tools. In some cases it is fine because it is free only because we are an open source project (that's the case with the Atlassian license, usually their software is quite expensive), but a budget for tools should be one of the first proposals we put to a vote.
 
I have just catched up with this thread, sorry for being away from the discussion.

Foundation

The foundation website has not been updated yet because we are still in the process of changing the legal name (Harold filled a motion with the State, but it takes a lot of time). Once the legal name is changed we'll update the website to the new domain. Being a legal entity has the problem that you need to do things according to other people's rules :(
Even more reason that we don't bury our darkcoin roots and maintain a backwards and forwards path as to where we have come and where we are going. You go to our github and can't find any left from of our old project name yet the one legal entity we control is still flying the wrong banner. This is partly what's leading to all the confusion. So IMO this whole transition has been a massive boat for confusion. All good though we learn as we go I get that.

Alert system

crowning, thanks for mentioning me so I could get notified, it is difficult to keep up with all discussions :) I'm ashamed to admit that there is no advancement in the alert system. I gave it some thought back then, but it fell to the back of my mind. The only real improvement is that now some of us have exchanged phone numbers, but that is definitely not enough. I would differentiate two parts in this alert system:

1. Raising the alert. As coingun has said can use many apps for this that don't require to give phone number. My suggestion would be to create a Telegram group. It works great in phone and computer, it is free, open source and has customizable notifications. I would include in the group at least 20 active members of the community. If anyone sees something weird, he writes to the group. It would only be for this kind of events.

2. Acting on the alert. This part is more difficult because the reality is that only a very reduced group of people can solve network problems and maybe some of them are not comfortable giving their phone numbers to such a big group. If they don't see the Telegram alert they should get a call. Maybe we could list those members of the group who can solve problems (if that is possible, problems are not predictable, so knowing who can solve them is not that easy!) and who has their phone numbers. This way, if the doers don't see the alert message, one of those with their phone number can call them if they see it themselves...

Anyway, ideas are welcomed, I'll start a different thread so we can work on it.
There is also lots of pragmatic way's to solve this issue. We could have an asterisk server setup to do the paging and contain all the numbers. It could start calling the group of people one by one in order of precedent until someone was reached. Some of the other issue could be solved by flying and maintaining our own assets. This is sort of what I was getting at about relying too much on the community tools. Sometimes with community tools there is doubt as to whether they are right or wrong due to the distance of removal from the actual core group to the member handling said service. If the network deployed and supported enough hardware it would be trivial to automate a lot of the monitoring/paging requirements for getting in touch with the group.

I just also want to clarify cause it seems like my concern about using "Free Certificates" has gotten mis-quoted to being I hate free software. That was never my comment. My comment was there is certain pieces of software that a business should build into their balance sheet. If they are required the software or platform to do business and function, then it should be reliable and scaleable. There are very few fully free offerings that scale properly for a business open source or not. I am no trying to break the bank or balance sheet I'm trying to make sure that as a group we are planning beyond our immediate needs today and what is in scope in view to move towards. Nothing worse then growing a business just to realized some very core architectural pieces that you didn't even realize you needed were missing or worse yet you get up to pitch that first VC and are blank when he asks his first question.

Support ticket system

It can be a lot of work, but I agree it is worth the effort. User fible1 approached Evan about this offering himself to answer the tickets. I'm working with him to define what we should do. Atm, I'm answering all contact requests from the website. The volume is quite inconsistent, some days I answer five emails and others nobody writes. In any case, it is not a huge volume yet, but I guess that creating a support portal could increase that. I was thinking about using Jira Service Desk because we already use Jira and Confluence and our open source license covers it, but I need to check with flare. I was waiting to find him online to chat, but I guess that mention will do the trick :)
If only we had the ability for the blockchain to higher services _and_ contractors... hmm.

Then it could rent out VPS's and fly more services. I personally would probably suggest osticket.com they make a great free open source system you just need a vps to host it. I'm familiar with the setup and would be willing to bang this one out for the community if there was a spot to host it or I can add it to masternode.io

Free software

I agree with coingun that we can't limit ourselves to free tools. In some cases it is fine because it is free only because we are an open source project (that's the case with the Atlassian license, usually their software is quite expensive), but a budget for tools should be one of the first proposals we put to a vote.
My comment keeps getting taken a bit out of context but that is fine. I only choose to mention that we shouldn't be shying away from a solution simply cause it's not free. I do agree with Knot and Balu that many free services are quite great. I've also made a lot of money migrating scaled businesses from free platforms that no longer support their business load to proper ones that do. In almost all cases the customer responds darn I wish I had made this transition earlier. Just trying to save us some time learning it the hard way.

A lot of the mistakes in this project that have been made have simply been from people learning new things in new fields on the fly under real world stress.
 
I'm lurking here but can't just pass by this
Even more reason that we don't bury our darkcoin roots and maintain a backwards and forwards path as to where we have come and where we are going. You go to our github and can't find any left from of our old project name yet the one legal entity we control is still flying the wrong banner. This is partly what's leading to all the confusion. So IMO this whole transition has been a massive boat for confusion. All good though we learn as we go I get that.
That's not 100% true https://github.com/dashpay/dash/blob/master/doc/release-notes.md#older-releases :rolleyes:

Anyway, interesting questions raised here and interesting ideas of how to solve some of our issues. Will keep watching :smile:
 
I'm lurking here but can't just pass by this

That's not 100% true https://github.com/dashpay/dash/blob/master/doc/release-notes.md#older-releases :rolleyes:

Anyway, interesting questions raised here and interesting ideas of how to solve some of our issues. Will keep watching :smile:
Great that we have some reference I hadn't seen that yet.

The base point I was trying to make was that during most conversion's involving mature brands on the web there is usually some effort made to maintain old links that may be linked to from around the web. Lots of people talked about xcoin, darkcoin and those github projects and links are still out there and now dead. I have seen lots of people coming into IRC asking if we are still closed source because the documentation out in the wild referring to our source was all pointing at the darkcoin github which is sort of just a dead branch of an old tree now.

Lots of ways to address this could just be better documentation on the "master" wiki. Maybe just a commit back in the old repo's forwarding people on to the new repo's. The DASH seo is still filling up and it's really hard to find some of the old tools. Even your bootstrap file. You ever logged into a completely fresh machine with none of your dev stuff and tried to use only some shitty search engine to find your bootstrap file and the dash wallet? I spent 5 or 10 minutes digging around looking up where everyone's stuff moved to. If I'm spending 5 or 10 minutes think what others who's never heard of xcoin/darkcoin/dash. I'm proud of our roots. Heck a lot of the crazy solutions we've come up with are simply from great minds getting together and thinking about problems and discussing them.

Thanks for helping us engage.
 
Great that we have some reference I hadn't seen that yet.

The base point I was trying to make was that during most conversion's involving mature brands on the web there is usually some effort made to maintain old links that may be linked to from around the web. Lots of people talked about xcoin, darkcoin and those github projects and links are still out there and now dead. I have seen lots of people coming into IRC asking if we are still closed source because the documentation out in the wild referring to our source was all pointing at the darkcoin github which is sort of just a dead branch of an old tree now.
Err... I agree on being proud of our roots part but again:
1) https://github.com/darkcoin/darkcoin redirects to https://github.com/dashpay/dash automatically, nothing is dead imo, I see no problem here

Lots of ways to address this could just be better documentation on the "master" wiki. Maybe just a commit back in the old repo's forwarding people on to the new repo's. The DASH seo is still filling up and it's really hard to find some of the old tools. Even your bootstrap file. You ever logged into a completely fresh machine with none of your dev stuff and tried to use only some shitty search engine to find your bootstrap file and the dash wallet? I spent 5 or 10 minutes digging around looking up where everyone's stuff moved to. If I'm spending 5 or 10 minutes think what others who's never heard of xcoin/darkcoin/dash. I'm proud of our roots. Heck a lot of the crazy solutions we've come up with are simply from great minds getting together and thinking about problems and discussing them.

Thanks for helping us engage.
2) Bootstrap: https://github.com/UdjinM6/dash-bootstrap
1. search "bootstrap" here on forum - tons of links to my repo and few to the thread itself https://dashtalk.org/threads/bootstrap-dat-to-help-new-clients-to-sync-faster.2908/
2. google "dash bootstrap" - link to the repo is on the first page for me

3) Wallet: dashpay.io -> Download
I don't think that it's really that bad to spend 10 minutes :tongue: but maybe we can improve this somehow... Any ideas?

4) What is "master" wiki? The one on forum forwarding you from top menu here ( http://en.wiki.dashninja.pl/wiki/FAQ ) or the one that is linked from dashpay.io ( http://wiki.dashpay.io/ ) ? The latter is supported by tungfa and it's up to date (and also mention XCoin and Darkcoin as a previously known names btw). The former is supported by elbereth and he said he will keep it running but have no time to update it often.
I guess we could make few small updates to make things a little bit more consistent however:
- make a simple "Note" about Dash on Elb's wiki and provide a link to http://wiki.dashpay.io/ - pinging elbereth
- change link on forum top to redirect to http://wiki.dashpay.io/ - pinging Propulsion
 
Gentlemen, great discussion!
Regarding tools - we are going to use Atlassian stack (professional and free for open-source projects) to maintain basic ITIL processes like Problem Management, Change Management, Release Management (I am thinking about Incident Management and Release Fulfillment as well). The work is in progress. We will share some updates soon.

I have a proposition - let's move the discussion about existing issues and improvement ideas to a separate thread. We would have one place to store them all. What do you think about this?
 
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4) What is "master" wiki? The one on forum forwarding you from top menu here ( http://en.wiki.dashninja.pl/wiki/FAQ ) or the one that is linked from dashpay.io ( http://wiki.dashpay.io/ ) ? The latter is supported by tungfa and it's up to date (and also mention XCoin and Darkcoin as a previously known names btw). The former is supported by elbereth and he said he will keep it running but have no time to update it often.
I guess we could make few small updates to make things a little bit more consistent however:
- make a simple "Note" about Dash on Elb's wiki and provide a link to http://wiki.dashpay.io/ - pinging elbereth
- change link on forum top to redirect to http://wiki.dashpay.io/ - pinging Propulsion

Still formulating responses for 1-3 but off the top I think you justified my point. Even we don't know which is the master :) I'm not trying to be overly critical perhaps all that is required is some clean-up. I'll get more into 1-3 when I have more time.
 
Err... I agree on being proud of our roots part but again:
1) https://github.com/darkcoin/darkcoin redirects to https://github.com/dashpay/dash automatically, nothing is dead imo, I see no problem here


2) Bootstrap: https://github.com/UdjinM6/dash-bootstrap
1. search "bootstrap" here on forum - tons of links to my repo and few to the thread itself https://dashtalk.org/threads/bootstrap-dat-to-help-new-clients-to-sync-faster.2908/
2. google "dash bootstrap" - link to the repo is on the first page for me

3) Wallet: dashpay.io -> Download
I don't think that it's really that bad to spend 10 minutes :tongue: but maybe we can improve this somehow... Any ideas?
I pretty much stand corrected. The last time I looked was a little while back and you guys have been busy cleaning up. Very nice job.

PS: amazing job on https://github.com/UdjinM6/insight-api-dash just finishing syncing that baby up!!! I'll post links once it is done.
 
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