I’m glad we’ve been having the DHF discussion lately. Here’s my two cents—something I’ve been voicing at all the online and offline meetups I’ve attended lately.

First and foremost, I believe we should approach any funded project as a business project, with the best practices of project management: SMART goals, clearly defined scope, roles, responsibilities, checkpoints, identified bottlenecks... Just all the stuff we have been ignoring so far. A proposal will then span tens of pages, some might argue. Yes, but it is necessary in my opinion. Then we as a community should not approach these proposals based on sympathies and emotions, but with a business mindset. As investors, not friends.

On the other hand, we should tolerate failure. Even the best ideas and projects may fail terribly, often due to bad luck or externalities the responsible people could not influence. And that's okay. Let’s not blame each other for past failures, not even for future ones; let’s learn our lessons instead.

I personally believe Value Plan has a priceless database of past projects, as we’ve already spent about $4 million, if I am not mistaken. How about starting with scrutinizing these projects publicly and analyzing their impact? A deep and honest analysis, though. Just off the top of my head:

• The number of real onboarded users and their retention rate + the cost per user.
• Onboarded projects/dapps/developers.
• Quantification of the publicity gained.
• Tracking the spent funds, as I honestly doubt every cent was spent as claimed.

Based on the data, we can focus on what has shown some success, and perhaps brainstorm how to improve it, or scale it up in different regions, etc.