Milestone Reporting, A Mechanism for Built-in Accountability
A new feature has been added to the Giveth DApp (currently in closed alpha).
It may sound bureaucratic, but Milestone Reporting is a crucial step in our quest to make accountable philanthropy a reality.
Publishing the Proof
Let’s start with a quick refresher on what Milestones are.
Essentially, they’re a tool within the DApp that helps nonprofits and other service-oriented organizations map out plans of action and publicly commit to abide by them. The main reason that Milestones are so important is that they are the only avenue through which groups can spend the funds that they raise on our platform. Milestones can make up a very small piece of an organization’s overall mission or cover a substantial portion of its mandate.
Each one lays out a task or set of tasks that the group wants to see performed. Once the work is done, the Milestone is marked as “complete.” At that point, a Reviewer has to either approve it so that money is transmitted to a recipient or reject it so that no money is paid out.
Milestone Reporting is a term that we use to describe the following process: 1) A Milestone Manager declares a Milestone complete and has to prove that all its requirements were satisfied. The evidence that they offer is published for all to see. 2) A Reviewer can then publicly describe the rationale behind their decision as they accept or reject the Milestone.
By revealing this information, Milestone Reports shine a bright light on the ways that organizations spend their money and make a new level of public transparency possible. If a Milestone’s evidence is not satisfactory but the Reviewer accepts it anyway, their name will be forever associated with that decision. We see this as a possible deterrent against wasteful spending.
One of the primary benefits of the Milestone system, we hope, will be that it commits organizations to spend Givers’ money in ways that align with the groups’ stated goals. Milestone Reporting adds an extra dose of accountability to this disbursement process by making it more transparent.
Examples
Obviously, this description is quite abstract. To think about how Milestone Reporting might look in practice, let’s consider a couple of examples.
First, picture an organization that uses our DApp to fund beach cleanup exercises. If the organization sets a Milestone for every quarter acre of beach it intends to clear, it would only take a handful of before-and-after photos, or perhaps video footage from a body cam, to prove that a given Milestone was completed.
The Reviewer would be responsible for examining the images to verify that they show the correct site in its entirety and that no trash is visible. To prove that they were captured on a certain day, the people taking them might incorporate some kind of digital equivalent to “today’s paper.” Incidentally, the Giveth Social Coding Circle is currently developing Snap Proof, a smartphone app that would do just that.
The beach example is relatively simple. For a more complex (and slightly more futuristic) case, let’s imagine a nonprofit whose goal is to build p2p energy grids that rely on a blockchain network. The group installs solar panels, home meters, and other electrical infrastructure in the houses of people who can’t afford the hardware themselves.
That organization could use data from certain smart contracts in the blockchain network to prove that a customer was set up with a piece of gear, and could even build a separate smart contract to act as the Reviewer.
Milestone Reporting and the Giveth Philosophy
The DApp pushes the social impact and not-for-profit projects that use it to report their spending to Givers, whereas most traditional nonprofits only share this information internally or with larger donors. We will require the organizations using our platform to expose their inner workings to the light of day, because when philanthropic projects open up, there are fewer opportunities to dress up failing strategies as successes.
Milestones also empower people to achieve results by assuring them that funds will be released when work is done. Organizations should have no problem getting qualified people to work on their projects when they can show that money is waiting to be disbursed and that the Milestone Reporting process is a fair one.
The goal of the Giveth DApp is to increase organizations’ efficacy, transparency and accountability through decentralization. By pairing decentralized fundraising (which can be rather lucrative) with strict transparency rules on any and all expenditures, our DApp discourages misspending, allowing for a degree of trust that hasn’t been possible until now. It will also help organizations stay more focused and impactful by making it harder to misuse funds.
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The Giveth DApp is currently in closed alpha. If you’d like to help us build it, please check out our github & roadmap, then join us in our DApp Development room on Riot. If you want to start a Giveth-based community of your own (after we’re live, of course) you can sign up here and join the Communities room on Riot.
You can donate to reward and incentivize the devs that are making the Giveth platform a reality.
In the meantime, we will keep on building the platform and will share more details about its different components in the coming weeks and months. Stay tuned!
Warm regards,
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