BECO is pleased to announce we've contracted with Cristopher Sanborn for a voting-ticket “proposal bot”. This will be useful for staking your BTS so you can start collecting Manna. Here's what he proposed:
I’ve had this idea for a while now for a voting-ticket “proposal bot” to help people set up their voting tickets. My worry, (although actually it would be a good thing) was that the Reference UI would get the voting feature before I could write my proposal bot. But so far, as of yet, I see no indication of the Ref UI getting this feature in a timely manner. Of course there are the command-line tools, (uptick and cli_wallet), and I believe also the “android app” supports it at least partially, but these remain obscure for many users. This means a great many users currently have NO WAY to easily or intuitively set up their voting tickets without, at minimum, finding a suitable android device and importing their keys into a new wallet they may be unfamiliar with. (For me, that’s a no-go — I’m very proprietary with my keys for my main value-holding accounts.)
Thus it looks to me like there is definite VALUE for a convenient “proposer” bot that can help users set up their voting ticket, and propose it to their accounts so they can confirm it without having to do “something funny” with their keys. The utility of this bot should last AT LEAST until feature integration into the UI wallet, which at present appears to be far off.
I would like to develop this bot. But mainly I would like to be FUNDED to develop this bot. (I WILL develop it eventually… but unless funded I’m not going to be able to bump it far enough up my priority list to actually get to it in a reasonable timeframe.)
So my proposal is this: Let’s make this a BEOS branded effort!
The bot infrastructure itself will be a bit of python code that listens for incoming transactions in which a user sends a few BTS to the bot — enough to cover the fee for the proposal op — along with a memo describing the desired voting tickets. The bot responds with the requested proposal ops to the initiating account. Simple and effective! (Although not yet intuitive — the user has to know how to correctly format this memo, and which account to send it to, etc.)
So to make it FRIENDLY I want to design a simple web panel that can be inserted into the BEOS.world web space, so that users can interact with the bot by navigating to the BEOS website. The panel would guide them on selecting voting amounts and lock-up times, and compute for them exactly what memo needs to be included in the TX, and instruct them on how to send it, (and possibly even send it on their behalf if we want to make it that much easier).
If funded, BEOS would be granted exclusive license to deploy this panel for a period of two months following launch. Thereafter, the exclusive license could be extended, or it could go non-exclusive and be opened up to others. Similarly, the back-end bot will remain closed-source for the same first two months, but thereafter I will reserve the right to open-source it (or not) at my discretion.
I see this as an opportunity for BEOS to be seen as a leader in reestablishing community participation in BitShares governance within the BitShares community.
Cristopher is now contracted to begin work developing:
— Better-ballot-bot: A BitShares network “bot” that proposes voting_ticket_create operations upon request to users of the BitShares network.
— A BEOS-branded web panel, which can be hosted on and linked from BEOS.world, providing a simplified user interface (UI) to the bot.