Context:

https://manifund.org/causes/manifold-community?tab=about

My plan is to submit a mechanism to prioritize feature requests and incentivize people adding those features by using bounties created by a bot. Please feel free to give any criticism or suggestions in the comments.

This system will hopefully solve two problems:

• Right now, there are tons of new feature requests on the Manifold discord, which make it very hard for developers to properly prioritize them and implement the most important of those features. While I believe that Manifold users pitching in on what features would help is valuable, right now it's hard to estimate how much Manifold users would care about a certain feature existing, as the Discord upvote system is not exactly designed for that. Allowing people to vote with their mana will create a system that takes into account the strength of preferences of different people.

• Manifold is open-source, but I don't think this open-sourcing has done a lot to benefit them so far. There should be opportunities and incentives for people to create their own pull requests.

Implementation (MVP)

I will be creating a bot that creates a bounty for every feature request. The bounty will be awarded to whomever successfully merges a pull request that implements the feature. When someone posts a request on Discord, the bot will copy the text into a bounty and link on Discord. The bot will add a small amount to the bounty, and the rest will be provided by users who are interested in seeing the feature happen. To claim the bounty, the feature creator would need to make a comment with a link to their pull request. I will occasionally review these award requests and grant them. Potentially this can be handed off in the future.

Potential Additions:

• Message the bot to have it create a bounty for your request. The bot will also post to Discord on your behalf. Useful if you don't use Discord.

• Incentivize people for bountying feature requests that get implemented, to encourage more useful suggestions, by rewarding them with mana. Potential sources of mana to give are: contributions to features that don't get implemented, a cut of the total bounty, or mana provided by Manifold.

• Some ways to disincentivize controversial features, or allow "downvoting" with mana.

Open questions:

• How much funding do I ask for?

• What kind of collaboration with the dev team will this project require?

About Myself:

I'm a recent grad working as a data scientist. Before uni I worked in DevOps for several years. I haven't worked with the discord or Manifold APIs before but I'm sure I can get it to work.

If I decide not to go ahead and submit, this resolves N/A.