Hello and welcome to the second Hive Community poll where we ask the Community should we keep funding or wind down certain projects. I want to gauge the sentiment in the Community over various projects that Valueplan fund. Now post is not criticism of Valueplan in itself or anybody involved but it would be nice to be able to see who is for or against certain projects. You may agree with some sections of Valueplan but disagree with some of the projects funded so this poll should gauge the over all sentiment of the top funded projects. the new @hiveforum announced that they are planning for changes in the Valueplan structure which is most welcome and I am sure they will do a good job but this poll is more about the project than having a moan at the system itself.
We had the outcome of the rally car poll last week. Even though we only received 41 votes , 39 voted to wind down the funding for the car with 2 voting to keep funding. The vote was small but maybe an indication of the overall sentiment of the Community. Hopefully this upcoming poll will receive more votes.
The second most funded account on Valueplan is @mcsamm who is the co-founder of the Community Wells project. Cheers to me aul flower @themarkymark for the great website.
Source
Now point to note that the $215,397.55 is not all for the boreholes. @mcsamm has attended some conferences promoting the Community Wells initiative and this is included in this total but the majority of it is the borehole drilling.Just filter his name in the valueplan wallet and it will bring you up the memo for each funding round.
I published a post about the boreholes and their cost per borehole a couple of months ago which you can see the cost of each borehole here. Now this is for a good cause so one has to be a little but more lenient on this type of charitable project. And let's get this straight. It is a charitable project. I don't see these villagers know what a laptop is. Nevermind blockchain technology. Sure, they have no water in the village. They hardly have fibre broadband!! So the best we can hope for is a newspaper article that will onboard users or the fact that Hive is giving to charity will come across well at crypto conferences and encourage sign ups this way.
Borehole number 1 was built in April 2022 to a total cost of 3639.50 HBD. Fast forward to 2025 and the last borehole cost 9,181 HBD to launch. So we are in a different stratosphere of funding compared to to that of 2022. In fairness personally I would have been happy with the 3,639.50HBD for the first borehole. Seems about right when I look at the cost of hiring a drilling machine in etc. Fair enough. But then when the funding gets to 9k we are talking some serious funding here per borehole so if it was me I would be asking for a materials and cost of labour break down so I could audit this. Not because I think anyone is pulling the wool over our eyes but to make sure that Hive is getting the best value for their money and I am sure that the Community Wells people would agree. I work in a job where my current role is to get price quotes for certain things. I work for owners of huge property portfolio. One of the first things these multi millionaires did was knock the fucking idiot out of me and made me get the breakdown. So many contractors which I trusted for years refused to give me the material + labour breakdown and they will screw you if you can be screwed. One contractor gave me a breakdown
Breakdown
the cost to do the job €5,425
the cost to not do the job €0
Bastard. It was the last time I ever got a quote off that guy.
If there are any tilers on Hive. They will buy 4 bags of grout for a job and only use 2. They will then charge their next customer for 4 bags of grout and only use 2 and all these little extras add up.
If we also use the same contractor for the same jobs we employ the sausage per day rule. Would you rather a sausage a day or a steak once a month which means we will keep giving you jobs if the price is a bit lower. The bad times are down the tracks and a contractor will be delighted of a sausage a day in a recession.
So you wonder why I am the way I am and get a heart attack when I see these volumes of funding.
Now the idea is good and lovely and charitable but there are serious things to think about with boreholes. Are the 20 boreholes still going strong? Does the Hive Community maintain them? I don't know the answer myself. Do we pay the cost of maintenance? Surely we don't build a borehole, have a party and move on? Do we? I don't know these answers. The borehole guys never got back to me on the many occasions when I tagged them which I found strange. But looking at some NGO reports , these boreholes need quarterly checks and have to be well maintained to stay functioning.
One of the fundamental charters for human rights for any country is access to a water supply so it should be a government initiative that performs this role and not an NGO? Is there grants available? Not sure. There have been studies done about the ineffectiveness of borehole funding by foreign NGO'S in Africa similar to our own. One such study you can find here
Now this poll will be an interesting one because the Community Wells is one of those projects that makes Hive look great and make ourselves feel better about ourselves and on a number of occasions I have been told I was going to hell for even mentioning that this charity is costing too much. But seeing that Hive is now floating around the 14 cent mark, charity begins at home. These boreholes are fundamentally good and they promote Hive in a great light. I am sure the two guys are decent people as well because many have said so after attending Hivefest .
So what is it Hive? Keep funding the boreholes or wind down the funding and be happy with the 20 something boreholes that Hive as a Community built for us.
Please comment and let us know the reason for your vote.
The big problem for me about the boreholes is that there doesn't seem to be a plan to demonstrate to the world how they bring value to Hive. I think this is a great example of how blockchains can do something that governments won't or can't and of self-governance. However, we're not seeing that reflected in how the project is reported or promoted.
I'd welcome a breakdown of the budget and actual spend. The first boreholes may have been easy wins, the later ones may have had more complex challenges. Globally, we've seen an increase in the cost of materials. You have a valid point about maintenance: what is the plan and what does it cost?
In terms of people joining Hive: I wouldn't worry about that too much if there was a plan to promote the boreholes more generally: a kind of "look what it is possible to do, think how we could build new economies" approach, and there was a costed plan in place for, say, five years, together with an exit plan.
I actually think we should stop griping about this project and look at how it would need to be to add value to Hive, which, for me, is mainly about having some focused audience-building activity running alongside it.
This is pretty much the problem of most of the things that are funded. Sure in the past they seemed like good demonstrations of what the chain could do, but years later all we're doing is charity work at the expense of the chain itself.
At this point we should be cutting all the failing projects that aren't actually seeing any results for Hive and completely change the way we pursue advertising ourselves to the world.
Like you mentioned: an exit plan. There wasn't one. The starting plan was the foundations of it: do something charitable > get picked up in the media (hopefully) > ???
Same thing as that fucking rally car. Now we're just funding someone's little rally career with no real plan. Again, the plan being to just have hopefully been picked up in the media at the very start. This isn't marketing, this is foolishness.
What proposals do you have?
A few years ago I probably would've put in the effort to answer something like this, but there's not really much point as it would just be a waste of my time, and yours to read it. Nothing would change or improve.
But I will say that having exit strategies on these things would make things better. An actual goal. Something to achieve where once that mark is hit, we aren't just sitting around throwing funds at something that genuinely offers nothing to the chain almost a decade later.
For example the rally thing would've made sense for a season. A quick test to see if it did pick up media attention and then dropping it once things fade off into irrelevancy. Diversified efforts into brief marketing attempts are better than longer ones in things people pay zero interest to.
I understand. I'm reluctant to throw the baby out with the bathwater, though. If the community would like better planning, reporting and marketing plan, then let's ask for that.
I can't help but feel that people have been asking forever. I've seen countless requests for cuts, changes, or even just simple reporting on the funds being used. Some of these ideas were fine at the start, but yeah, where's the end? Why are we still funding such things when it goes nowhere? Unless certain groups funding certain groups is the play here and they're getting cozy from it.
Valid points @shanibeer . Thanks for giving your opinion.
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What have those holes given back to hive or to us? I know this sounds so selfish but the money comes from us, so we need to know what for. Do we build those holes to promote hive? If yes then what we have got back in return? Users? Engagement in mainstream media about a blockchain that support people? If there isn't any, then it is not for promotion and only stupid idiotic people who insist in believing it is promotional activities.
I don't mind if there boreholes is for our form of social contribution, helping others. And I will support those kind of projects. However social contribution or fulfilling our social responsibility has different portion of spending.
I can't see 200k usd as part of social contribution whilst seeing people here are complaining they do not earn enough , and some start crusades because they don't think certain people deserve earning their hive... We are fighting each other here for a piece of shares and others outside our ecosystem getting a lot more than most of us here without giving back to us in any form of value.
105 active members in the Ghanaian community which is presume would be first base for anyone who signs up to Hive. I’d say it’s tough to measure the results at conferences but it gives off a good image at these events which cannot be a bad thing .
Not a bad comparison with the leofinance community:
Cost per subscriber - hiveghana $118; leofinance $125.
Cost per retained user: hiveghana $1,741; leofinance $2,500.
% retained: hiveghana 6%; leofinance 5%.
they are on the same league I guess
This is going to be a complicated response.
Water is essential for life, but this does not mean people have a right to demand others provide water. It means anyone preventing you from accessing water with your own resources is violating your rights. This is an essential distinction for any discussion of rights anywhere.
Governments produce nothing, and cannot give out what they have not first taken from someone else. It is impossible to operate a moral and just organization built on a foundation of theft and fraud. Governments use the monopolization of services like water, education, and the military to justify their abusive nature to a gullible public, but none of these services require a central state.
Voluntary organizations proving the government is unnecessary by providing services is absolutely a good thing. Using sound economic analysis to weigh costs and benefits is the proper role of all economic actors, and seeking price breakdowns is responsible stewardship. Government programs, in contrast, tend to just assume spending money is doing something, and seek to spend their annual budgets so they can ask for more next year.
Asking about maintenance costs is a valid question. Consider the famous Carnegie libraries. The buildings were funded by the tycoon, but operating costs were up to the communities. That should not be our model. I think we should plan for a maintenance fund to keep these going as a sustainable project.
TL;DR version: funding infrastructure projects responsibly and efficiently is no bad thing. Carry on!
👍
Good points @jacobtothe . I think it depends what part of the world you live in regarding the governments and how they provide water. We all know it falls from the sky but there is alot that goes into maintaining the reservoirs and treating the water before it comes to our taps. Where I come from it is up to the government to make sure our water supply is clean and drinkable and they do a good job most of the time.
Why is it up to the government? Because they usurped the service. And when it fails, its monopoly nature means most people have no real alternatives. That's a failure point, not a strength.
Who else will supply and maintain a public water supply for large population densities and not charge for the privilege? Unless you have a large scale private provider but even they would need government funding to maintain the system . It would be a disaster
Well, let's look at another utility often considered a "natural monopoly:" electricity. In my region, there are some areas served by a major corporation called Avista. There are also cooperatives serving other communities. Both models function. Some of the power comes from government nuclear and hydroelectric projects, which are consequences of prior policies but not essential government functions. People can also build their own wind and solar systems and back-feed their surplus into the public grid and get paid.
You ask how it would be funded, but that is the insidious nature of government monopolies. Water is not free. Instead of transparent pricing, you have opaque bureaucracy and taxation hiding costs and removing the market incentives for efficiency. Consumers have no choice but to pay what is demanded and accept what is offered.
I've met @mcsamm a few times and he has achieved something amazing here. This is life-changing for those people, but I am sure people want to know what it does for Hive. I was with him where someone else expected the costs to be much higher so he could be getting good value. I think some big guy on Youtube was doing something similar at much higher cost.
As for Hive benefits, I think they have signed up lots of users in Ghana and educated them on blockchain. Given how few active users we have this could make a difference. They are just unlikely to really influence the markets.
Then there is the documentary that ought to be seen by a lot more people. On Youtube it has less than 800 views.
I voted to continue, but we do need to publicise this better. It could stand as an example of blockchain doing good to counter all the negative publicity it gets. We do need updates on how the existing wells are doing too.
Thanks, @steevc. We have rolled out a plan to provide monthly updates from each of the 23 boreholes constructed. They will begin soon to share with all. I am always grateful for the support given to bring the project this far. Hive is powerful.
I'm sure you get some comments about the cost, but I hope it is not too stressful. Hive is small and people worry that we are not spending where we get benefit. Meanwhile there are rich people who could buy wells for every village, but don't. I think you are doing great work.
Great @steevc . Some good points for the "Keep funding" side there. As @shanibeer pointed out that the Ghana Community are just slightly behind Leo in active users.
Why the fuck are we drilling bore holes.
🤣
A hive wouldn’t be a hive if it didn’t have holes!
I'm not against this funding, but we sure need to see a true breakdown cost. And if it's charity, none should be profiting from this, which I think it's what actually happening...
Also if Hive falls, the bore holes fall with it. At this point is a matter of priority. Like asking to a homeless for money
Great Blanchy i think all project should have poll with the VP proposal and we at least get community feedback.
We should stop it or limit it to 1 a year , especially at those hive prices we can’t effort , we aren’t able to fund it - we have all tools to look out for funds, charities to join hive economy and use Hive blockchain to fund those boreholes - we have success story, this is the time to build user base in those areas so they can blog and perhaps build boreholes for themselves.
We did great with it and so far, we have documentary which i proudly filmed real success story and use case of Hive but we shouldn’t sponsor it anymore instead @mcsamm should attend to all charity, foundation, ngo events and look out for links that can fund it.
Interesting to hear from
Someone so close to the project .
I love the work @mcsamm is doing, I've seen it all and it's a great projects, it's great for Hive to show how we can solve the problems, how blockchain can help humanity, it's great for people that really need the water - as this is necessity, it shows how quick and efficient things can be done without 3rd party involvement - Hive is a tool to make things better but when we on the verge we should limit sponsoring it because soon with this pace and price drops we will lose the tool to do anything. So IMO at this moment we need to help ourselves and this should be our focus - I still support McSamm and his work!
I was under the impression that we were the only group doing this sort of thing, but there are literally dozens of groups making holes like this in needy countries I think. That makes it a little less special and doesn't drive the users to the blockchain which I think was the original intent. While it may be a noble cause with some clear kickbacks happening, this isn't what we need right now. I think we need to grow first, then the charity stuff can happen.
Good point . I think the first cost to go during a period of austerity is charitable donations or contributions
I'm all for charity, but if you get more users you can compound the outcomes of it.
I would fund sfa!
A complete reset is required.
But I would take this over the rally car any day of the week.
As a PM of many years I find the lack of project controls abhorrent.
Thoughtless expenses. Charity? Better to support Hive authors from poor countries, who spend their time, energy, and inspiration on Hive year by year, who rely on Hive in the long term, better to support them by securing a higher price for $HIVE than aimlessly spend on these wells, especially when we, as a blockchain, need help ourselves.
What to do instead? Let's define
Yes I think the key here is retention and retention also has alot to do with the Hive price and when it goes down people just get browned off and quit the platform. When it is flying there are people onboarding. We need to check out on new modern platforms like Kaito and their yappers and target this market.
@blanchy
I really want to have you as a guest on Hive Thrive.
Come talk with us. It’s casual. 1 hour every Tuesday at 6utc
I can’t find you on discord so I got to harass you here 🤪
Guess I'm going day drinking some Tuesday at 2pm then!
Yes, drinks in the day, we will solve the world’s problems over shots!
18th and 25th November are both open… either date suits??
You on discord…. I’m Buttcoins over there too if you want to find me
I have nothing at all against charity, my issue is with lack of transparency and especially around effectiveness. I've got a bias that a donation to a proper outfit might be better than "let's dig some holes!!!11" from some crypto folks ...
At leat then we would get receipts ...
And then I think if we have a "charitable arm", how did this particular initiative get the big slice-o-pie?
As usual though there are one or two whales that can say 👍 or 👎 and it matters not what any of the rest of us think. Decentralisation weeeeeeeeeeee!
Such an initiative is good for Hive and our brains - re waht we marketing wise is the other topic - too many charity porjects out there and we have not the relevant visibility it seems even we talk, write and spread this since years - but in comparison to other funded stuff I would keep that one!
Thanks for your input @uwelang
(X) Meh,...
I agree with the materials breakdown, and personally I'd like to see more of the 'how it's done' in the posts.
Perhaps folks could learn to drill their own boreholes from the example.
Maybe a camera so we can watch the people, and a sprayer so we can pay hbd to spray them?
I mean the interaction profile of this project could be raised tremendously.
Wells can be driven with a sledgehammer.
I strongly agree with you that the level of interaction we are getting for $200k+ is low.
Thanks!
A HBD sprayer 🤣🤣🤣. I was gonna add an (x) meh vote for you @antisocialist 🤣🤣 but it would spoil the vote somewhat but I shall take note of your meh and add it to the results .
With all the great PR he's getting McSamm should be elected to public office any day now.
I clicked on the above round button to vote with the majority, but nothing happened.
Thanks!
Edit: The number incremented by 1, as it should. Just took a minute.
I finally found a flaw in you @valued-customer. 🤣🤣🤣Patience .
Oh, I have plenty of flaws. Lack of patience is one of them.
Do you work in procurement? If not, I think you would enjoy it! LOL
I think they need to double the funding of Boreholes!! Mr Beast is racing ahead of Hive, lots of work to do here!!!
I’m a property manager so yes procurement would be part of my job unfortunately 🤣🤣. As is Irish say . It’s a pain in the hole.
hahaha I thought so. I did a stint in procurement and it is seriously ball busting LOL
Just a short history.
mcsamm of the Borehole project started in Steemit (Steem). It constantly receives $70-200 worth of votes from steemcurator account. It is only then the curator account found discrepancies & corruption in the report/amount of $$$ he made than the borehole project. The curator account stopped supporting.
He jumped into Hive (using Valueplan). The rest is history..
Same with hive coffee shop. I won't be surprised if they drop hive logo and change it to BLURT or something else next.
I was torn between two responses — just as I would be in real life, standing before a beggar with sad eyes…
It’s a good cause, but you’re right. Right now, it’s more important to save the boat and ourselves first, so that we can keep helping later — once we’ve tightened our belts!
Your poll journey is complete! Let's unpack the outcome and hear from your voters.
The top-voted choice is Wind Down the Community Wells Project with 24 accounts voting for it.