Hey Nikita, I agree that the governance support is a scope creep beyond what is described in this RFP but I do want to note that the funding requested by their team is only for what is outlined in the RFP - to provide a governance client and a developer toolkit that would allow anyone else to create a governance UI.
In terms of why @mintcloud and I believe that looking for long term incentive alignment is important in this is because we think that that is the way to a reliable governance client - given that this client will be the primary way that the community will interact with governance, there should not be any worries of it falling out of maintenance. As described in the RFP, the intent is for a team to take ownership over the design, build, and maintenance of the client; design and builds are often one-time tasks but maintaining its uptime and dependencies is an on-going cost that a team would take on. If there are no feasible long term incentives, we worry that a team could design and build a client but fail to perform the maintenance piece at which point the community will need to restart this process again.
Beyond just uptime, @mintcloud and I felt that long term incentive alignment would bring a nice to have continual improvement of the governance portal. Boardroom is a team that is solely focused on governance and as such, they will likely continue to improve their product which 0x Protocol’s governance will inherit those improvements from.
To your earlier stated concerns about locking into a solution provider with ongoing maintenance/sustainment/hosting costs, Boardroom’s proposal is that they will continue to maintain and host the governance client at no additional costs in the future (I’ll let @kevinknielsen clarify here as he sees fit) so from that perspective, I don’t believe that a successful proposal for Boardoom to build a governance portal necessarily locks the community into a ongoing cost.
To your point about the proposal also containing additional coordinating functions, activities, and reports, I agree that that is scope creep. It was not listed as a must have/nice to have/should have and to that end, I would say that the additional services do not fall under those categories still. That being said, I don’t see the Boardroom team wanting to become more involved in 0x Protocol’s governance a negative - I’d almost expect some level of that (perhaps not to the extent that is proposed) if they are to provide a governance client that suits the needs of the community.