Proposal system | Project management | Forum

I am keen to get the proposal system for CLLARE up and running soon so that we can appeal to our very large number of new Reddit members for ideas.

How do people feel about the following:

For the proposal system in general (i.e. all projects), the basic system is this.  A Call For Proposals must specify:

• A precise statement of proposal requirements, i.e. all proposed systems must achieve X, Y, Z, using A, B, C, not using L, M, N.
• A precise statement of "bonus" requirements, i.e. things that proposals don't have to achieve, but which would be very nice.
• A template for proposal submissions, making it clear what information a proposal needs to include (this will obviously be very proejct specific)
• A list of criteria which proposals will (in principle), be judged on the basis on.
• A day on which proposals must be complete by, after which voting will happen.

What do people think of this system?

For CLLARE, with regard to the proposal submission template, there is a draft in the Wiki here.  What do people think of it?

brmj said:

This looks basically good, but the bonus requirements and the list of chriteria proposals will be judged on are a little redundent. the bonus requirements would necesarilly be some of the same things that would be deciding factors if all the esentials were met in multiple proposals.

I suppose these parts need some clarification.  What I had in mind wouldn't necessarily be redundant.

With CLLARE I was thinking along these sorts of lines:

• Requirements: 1) Be able to land one person on the moon and return them to Earth safely.  2)  Use a pre-existing (or likely to be finished soon) launch vehicle.
• Bonus Requirements: Be scalable down to lesser missions (circumlunar, earth orbtial, suborbital) in some meaningful sense (i.e. these sorts of missions should involve less hardware, a lower stack mass, etc).
• Judging criteria: Safety/redundancy (e.g. meaningful abort options at many points in the flight, in response to many potential failures), minimal dependence on the development of our own technology (e.g., on this particular metric ballutes are bad because we can't just buy one, the way we could probably buy a suitable parachute), etc.

Does this seem sensible?

I am talking about project level proposals.  E.g., for CLLARE, choosing between the plan with the conical CM and open LL, the plan with the spherical CM and any other proposals people come up with.  Proposals for individual pieces of hardware should be made through a much more lightweight system.

heawill said:

On the note of proposals, though, do we have a system for receiving proposals?  I mean, is there a proposal email or form or website?  Or am I putting the cart in front of the horse?

We haven't really spoken about that much yet, since I guess the focus has just been on figuring out what we need in a proposal.

I think it should be sufficient to implement this in the Wiki.  People can create a new page, use the CLLARE Proposal Template that is in the Wiki to initialise it, then fill out the details.  We can have a centralised list of proposals on the Wiki somewhere.  When people create a new proposal they can add it to the list.

We'll have to write up a brief set of instructions on this, e.g. a page naming scheme for proposals, how to use the template, etc., but it shouldn't be too hard.

I am keen to see this get done soon so we can start getting detailed investigation done on the proposals, especially now that we have another engineer in our ranks to help.   If people are in general agreement that the currently proposed system is looking at least good enough to test out, then I can make all the Wiki updates today sometime.  Once that's done we can make a blog post, link to it on Reddit, etc., and hopefully see if we can get some more ideas in addition to the current two we have worked out ourselves.