Compensation Structure for DAO Contributors

Reimbursement and imbursement are listed as synonyms in the thesaurus, so I was driving towards some clarity in meaning, since you’re differentiating.

PNI’s proposal on its face strikes me as a reimbursement, but I could also see how it would be interpreted as a grant. What’s the specific difference you’re highlighting?

I think we could use Grants, but i like Imbursement as it works well with Reimbursement and is an allocation that has yet to be earned, whereas Reimbursement is for work already completed.

Trying to simplify the process here.

The work PNI did last year had already been compensated in tokens and in USD. I would definitely not see that as a reimbursement.

Got it. In my mind, that kind of structure would already be covered under bounties, or with RFPs in a bid system.

What benefit do you think an imbursement brings versus a bounty?

Bouties to me don’t feel like we value our builders enough. Imbursements feel like we are signing a player to a longer term contract. It’s a mutually beneficial longer term agreement.

See this thread here: https://twitter.com/Patticus/status/1621557633793523713?s=20&t=wbcQzy4kOYjDEU88LgK1wg

We just need to figure out who the players are. I’ve spoken to my team. Don, BigBoss, and Dire want to contribute long term to the success of Pocket Network.

The twitter thread you’re referencing is speaking about hiring a team of FTEs. That is not what the DAO is doing. Locking in long term compensation commitments from the DAO instead of putting specific tasks out for the community to contribute to creates a monopoly on participation, something we’re actively in the process of ending with PNI. I don’t see a benefit in expanding a system that so many, including yourself, have spoken against already.

It also potentially creates bottlenecks, in that if none of the teams in question have bandwidth to complete a task, and there isn’t room in the budget based on those commitments to bounty out a task, that leaves the DAO locked in place.

I agreed with many of the points @shane brought up in the other thread, and first and foremost among these is that our goal is in building MORE participants, not less. And with the ongoing reduction in total pokt minted, the DAO’s budget is only going to get tighter.

Given your very vocal desire to increase builder participation, I’d think you’d understand the risk making that a dominant structure creates.

1 Like

The DAO needs to hire full-time people. Specifically and possibly only engineers should be hired full-time.

I disagree with a lot of the way you think about bringing on and compensating talent. I’m sure I disagree with a lot of people on that. A lot of builders have already proven themselves. It’s a damn shame PoktBlade is not free range working and being paid a monthly stipend already. Same for Ramiro. I sure as hell don’t need to be overseeing the work they do. BigBoss is already working towards ledger integration. Who are we to tell him what to work on.

Who is putting putting out the tasks?

When LeanPOKT and Geo-Mesh were built do you think the team was thinking about tasks? No, the brightest minds saw a problem and got to work.

1 Like

In terms of protocol development, @Olshansky is. And he outlined in your other post about the need for structure on that. and @h5law has shown how effective that can be, turning in a number of bounties for reward. This is a very agile approach to development that works similarly to how dev orgs I’ve led in the past work.

Innovative solutions based on R&D work well with reimbursement. Specific tasks associated with moving the protocols forward work well with bounties (and any agile dev is familiar with kanban boards and the like, which our dework system mimics).

The DAO does not have the budget to assume the overhead of full time engineers, and I don’t see an effective way for them to be managed. The Foundation can have full time employees, but they have a specific mandate, and supervisors in the Directors. In a development organization, there are specific architects and leads who provide oversight for dev work, who are hired based on their expertise in that space. The Foundation Directors are not dev or devops or architects, so would be ineffective in managing that workflow.

Daniel has made clear that “too many cooks” in the path to v1 is a recipe for disaster. The biggest external contributor to v1 to date has had zero issues working with the bounty system. While it’s clear you disagree with my perspective, I have yet to understand the reasoning why, since we have the architect of the project saying it needs to be tightly managed on a task basis, and we have participants using that system effectively.

Many of us in this ecosystem (yourself included) have performed freelance work in the past; I’ve personally worked freelance on multimillion dollar projects that stretched out over the course of a year. The entire FOSS movement has shown that there’s no need for an FTE structure to accomplish major things (Linux is perhaps the single greatest example of that). And having managed devops orgs in the past, capacity planning and utilization is one of the greatest challenges with FTE engineers, given the cost to benefit ratios of one of the most expensive resource classes in the org.

I see that you disagree; I just don’t understand why. All of the available evidence points to the bounty approach being both well managed in the way that Daniel needs, and an easy route for new contributors to immediately begin participating, like Harry has.

1 Like

Love the concept. What does the DAO need done right now? Just like with any hiring position, there first has to be a job description, with milestones and accountability. I think listing the responsibilities and deliverables is the first step, instead of hiring first and then figuring out what they want to do later, or if what they are working on is valuable to the DAO.

When you break it down, you and @Jinx are actually talking about the same thing. Regardless of if it’s a full time hire, or a bounty, both require having a list of tasks that need to be performed. The method on how the payment works is where you differ, but having the deliverables and accountability is required regardless.

Would Poktblade walk away from his very successful hosting business to instead get his paycheck from the DAO? Is that something he wants? Or would Ramiro step away from POKTscan to only work for the DAO?

If they want to work full time for the DAO, then we would welcome a proposal that outlines what they will work on, what the milestones will be, and how there will be accountability. Hopefully PNF will help streamline all of this, but the first step is the dev needs to want to work for the DAO in a transparent manner.

I’m not following this concept if having the DAO give people stipends, without a roadmap and laying out what they are working on… when they already have businesses in POKT’s competitive ecosystem.

Exactly! That is a great example of a dev who sees something that needs attention, and the DAO can reimburse when it’s successful, or PNF can help ensure progress is being made if it’s an imbursement with milestones. Perfect example how any dev, including all the devs you frequently mention, can do work in the DAO and get paid for their contributions.

Many devs projects have been funded WHEN they submit a proposal the DAO can get behind… so there hasn’t been any hiccup with that system thus far. It worked out quite well actually, though there are barriers to entry that PNF is committing to address. I don’t however understand the concept of this system of just paying folks, because they are a dev in the ecosystem, and trust that those funds will go towards benefiting the ecosystem, when they already work for companies competing in the POKT ecosystem. Some have mentioned concerns with PNI and conflicts of interest in the past, yet this new method of paying devs as free-range, without specific tasks, would make ignoring obvious conflicts the default stance of the DAO. I can’t reconcile how that scales.

Do you know of a DAO that has a successful program of funding developers in this manner?

3 Likes

The DAO absolutely has funds to hire sign on engineers. You were just willing to quickly accept a 33% looting of the DAO treasury to PNI but now you all of a sudden want oversight of the rest of the community.

We need to drop the hire thing in crypto. No one gets hired in crypto. You get signed!

Please don’t lecture me on your past wins. You and your team have developed nothing of value for Pocket Network. Sure you’ve onboarded thousands of users, but a spreadsheet and 6 months to get a landing page up is not my idea of moving fast and breaking things.

In the past 24 months Ritesh and I have done over 8 rebrands and pushed out projects like Copper, mistX, SendNodes and SendWallet. SendWallet is the best staking for retail in the network and its not even close.

Of all people, you are the last one who should be advising on compensation structures for the best engineers our community has to offer. As you’ve shown in the past and continue to show, you are way too biased.

I don’t worry about V1 development, we’re way passed that.

As @shane already mentioned, this was a one off true up, and not a model for the future. I certainly don’t consider it “looting the treasury”, either. And I spoke of dev management, not “oversight” of the DAO proposals. There is overhead in engineering that goes beyond the code that is written. The DAO does not have the budget to create a management structure around engineering.

I’ve been in tech for over 20 years, having worked in development, data architecture, and devops. I have built development teams, and worked on major projects for both Fortune 1000 organizations and major FOSS projects. It’s not lecturing anyone to relate my experiences in that space.

And I don’t HAVE a team working in the Pocket ecosystem, so your criticism of another vendor in the space has nothing at all to do with me. I’m a minor partner, investor, or advisor on a number of projects. That has nothing to do with how we structure compensation for the DAO.

I’ll let the irony here speak for itself.

2 Likes

If you guys want to manage the ecosystem and DAO like a staffing agency, go for it. I’ll leave it to PNF to make that decision.

Of course not. They’ve had those businesses up and running. Also, the amounts they are getting are not anywhere near what PNI has gotten in the past. Over $25m spent and 300m in pokt tokens. Not the same thing.

An matter of fact, whatever the team decide to build, they should be able to point to their staking service. PoktScan to their staking service. Pokt.Watch to tpokt. CompareStakingServices to SendWallet.

It’s not PNF’s or the DAO’s job to manage dev work. It’s everyones job to recognize who the best players are and let them play. Including you. The talent in the community is inspiring. To put things in perspective, we have 2 of the smartest kids in the world building in Pocket Network. One is going to MIT and the other is not even in high school. We should be developing this talent, not making them work for bounties. Who is gonna tell Addison what the network needs? Addison?

Alchemist had a 1% inflation, about 10,000 tokens every 14 days. 5,000 went to a staking program, 2500 to a treasury controlled by thegostep, and 2500 to a wallet for building. I was mostly in charge of these payouts and they were approved by the multisig signers. The engineers got paid the most, and Ritesh would design for all of the projects. We’d payout for everything, from translations, nft project, to a radio station. These payments were managed on a weekly basis. The payouts were one of the most important parts of the DAO. You can’t make progress if you don’t trust the community to do their job.

If a startup has 12 months of runway and raises a round, they don’t raise a round and start micro managing the finances. Of course keep an eye on burn, but they spend. Hence why they raise more and more. The DAO has 95m in pokt. Where and who is it going to go too?

I want to share my opinion on this topic. I am new to the community and have only really been focused on contributing to V1, so this is what I will talk about.

I really believe in this project and can see @Olshanksy has an excellent mind for not only the work that he does but also in how he can see what needs to be done. For this reason, I think the bounties are an amazing way to get people (like myself) working on building this protocol into what it is meant to be. The tasks are very well outlined, and this makes working on them easy to get into. Their evaluations are fair. I believe @Olshansky and @jdaugherty assign them values after discussing the task. I think it is unrealistic to think about hourly wages when it comes to the bounty system and instead, it should be focused on the impact of the task at hand. There should be no penalties for work done efficiently and fast.

The actual payments for the bounties, I believe are going to be sorted out soon with the new changes to the DAO meaning they can actually be paid out :partying_face:

Regarding grants and payments to people contributing to the protocol. I think that this is a tricky topic and should really be thought over very carefully. People have already mentioned about the overlap of many of the gigabrains in the community working for “Pocket” companies. This may be controversial but I think grant payments to these individuals should not be allowed. This is purely based on the idea that if they are working for a company already, then the company should be paying them. If their contributions are to benefit the entire community then these should be put forward in a DAO proposal asking for payment after the fact (as I am assuming these individuals are being paid whilst working on these projects). If however the individual is not working for a company in the ecosystem and doing these contributions out of their own free will, a grant would be an ideal olive branch to extend to them. I will sound biased here but those are simply my thoughts.

Overall I am very much in favour of the bounties system - and I hope the payments become more frictionless as time goes on. I think the idea of low friction grants from PNF are also a good idea - however the individuals that receive these grants should be focused on the community as a whole and not have any vested interests in private companies.

10 Likes

Glad to have your input here, and on the ongoing v1 work. Welcome!

3 Likes

Staking is not a profitable as people think.

This is old world thinking. New frontiers require new payment methods.

Love what you’re doing @h5law, keep it up!

2 Likes

Osmosis has a pretty well developed RFP system, worth looking at here:

1 Like

ENS uses an RFP system as well:

1 Like

It’s great to see this discussion and the sharing of different perspectives - having these discussions around pain points and root causes in the open makes for better solutions. I think for now this thread should not be too opinionated on solutions and should try to welcome as many different viewpoints around key issues regarding people’s ability to contribute and get paid.

One other point before responding directly to some comments is that resource allocation for Pocket should flow to our shared goals and priorities. This is why PNF wanted to deliver Project DNA as our first priority - so it can create alignment around what those priorities are. Then teams/individuals can make their own decisions around whether they mobilise towards those priorities - in the knowledge that resources will be available and frictions will be reduced - or whether they prefer to work on other things, which is of course their right and should be welcomed, but in the knowledge that availability of funds and the outcome of proposals might be less certain.

Ok, responding to some specific points raised:

At PNF we have identified this as a pain point. There is no ROI for someone investing a full month navigating the proposal process for small payments. This is an unnecessary burden. We plan to address this through the creation of “Sockets” - low-friction seed grants for working towards the goals and priorities of Pocket. By providing seed grants optimistically we can avoid needless debate and make continued funding contingent on evidence (of impact and results) rather than “ideas”. This broader compensation discussion might be best to focus on bounties and these smaller “seed” grants first. PNF will soon share more on the Sockets program and anyone wanting to provide input to make the program better will have plenty of opportunity to do so.

This is another pain point we identified at PNF and have on our roadmap as a priority - we are working on design of an RFP process because we recognise that larger pieces of work need to make their way to highly capable builder teams and PNF will work to facilitate that. We are meeting as many teams as possible in the next weeks so we can understand their needs and capabilities more and hopefully finalise a design for this soon.

I also empathise with the perspective that bounties maybe don’t fully recognise the importance of certain contributions. I want to say clearly that PNF thinks anyone delivering a bounty is a critical part of Pocket, these people are a reason for our success that we should recognise and celebrate more, and also there is no task important to our success that is beneath any of us - no matter whether it’s called a bounty or something else.

I think Shane summarises it nicely - To do what? Energy and funds will flow more effectively when we have clear and focused priorities as an organisation, because then it’s easier to allocate more/larger work and funding to different teams and businesses.

However, asking what the DAO needs done doesn’t mean we should craft this need into a job description. I strongly believe we should be allocating work to different projects/teams rather than ossifying into a set of full-time “roles”. The power of Pocket grows from the success of the teams in our ecosystem to pursue creative solutions and their ability to work together, not from building new teams in “the DAO”.

This is why PNF has kicked things off with Project DNA and will next be launching new grant mechanisms. We must first answer the question of what the DAO wants to prioritise, then direct resources to any builders wanting to pursue those priorities. Depending on the nature of the priority, this may take the form of a bounty, or a “Socket”, or an RFP. But the point is that we will not be building out a large and ossified team of full-time roles, which would defeat the purpose of a DAO, we will be maintaining a pipeline of opportunities for DAO contributors to tap into.

One other point on this: We are a technical, engineering-led project and this will (rightly) always be our top priority. But without product, marketing, BD and design focusing on the customer, and economics, governance and operations people in the background optimising our systems, we will never be a success. We should not create two classes of citizens - engineers & “the rest” - because we are completely reliant on each other. We don’t want to lose builders - or any talent - that we have across the community. It’s on us all to make sure that happens by working together.

Harry’s perspective is not inherently more “right” than anyone else’s, but I’d just say that he and @Olshansky have a unique experience of using the current system successfully for v1. We also have @deblasis who joined PNI after working on bounties and @PoktNews who is on a rolling bounty each month - let’s hear from them, and equally we should listen to and hear from anyone who feels like our current systems don’t adequately meet their needs, whether that’s @dire , @donvincenzo , @poktblade , @addison , @pierre , @msa6867 or anyone else. Being open and user centred in our approach to solving the daily challenges will help us optimise what we already have, and I think the biggest reason to be optimistic is the crazy amount of talent in this community still to unlock. Let’s hear more of their voices before we jump into solution mode - either here in this thread or within the DNA survey**

8 Likes

This is a great point and I had thought of including something similar in the DNA form.

Pocket should always be “engineer/engineering first” ; also want to humbly remind the “buildooooors” out here-

Without y’all this space wouldn’t have taken birth but without the enabling functions listed above (and more), this space will die a martyr or at best stay at fringes.

Let us please respect the value of diverse competencies.

7 Likes

I’m very much looking forward to hearing more about the Sockets.

3 Likes

I cannot believe I reached the botom of this thread! :exploding_head:

There were a lot of topics addressed up there, so I will try to be succinct… (yet I failed…)


First, as @Cryptocorn said, we should not use geography to modulate rewards. If POKTscan would follow this path I would not be here (as many of the other great people there), talent should be rewarded as talent, independently of where it resides. Also there is the problem of anons, how are you going to weight their geolocation?
Please be very careful with this.


Second, DAO hiring and committees was once debated, I still think that hiring is not the way. Bounties and reimbursements should be enough if the conditions are clear.
I think that requesting payment for work already done is not that bad, the only problem is to know how much are you going to be able to claim for it beforehand.


Something related to the last point.
I kinda agree with @h5law when he says that contributors that already work for companies in the Pocket ecosystem should not be awarded grants, sometimes being part of the community is part of their job. We should measure this carefully, I can only speak for myself, but I suspect that other members of Pocket companies function the same way.
Much of my work is behind the scenes in POKTscan, however some other part of my job is to lurk around this forum, telegram and discord and stay up-to-date with the latest rant. This should not be regarded as a contribution, as being an active in a debate or arguing in some proposal is difficult to separate from the “duty” to you company. What I see is that there are three kinds of jobs for someone in my position:

  1. Keep track of socials and comment on things that affect your interests.
  2. Use your paid time to contribute to the ecosystem.
  3. Contribute to other stuff in the ecosystem / help people.

The first one should not be paid for, you are doing it for your own interest.
The second one should be paid to the company, since it has already paid you to do it, then discuss with the company your rewards.
The last one is a side effect of the others and could be rewarded. I find myself sometimes talking to random people asking for advise on random subject and random times. Nobody pays me for that, but I have the knowledge and I can help them. I would be in all my right to just ignore these people. If the DAO thinks that this kind of interaction is worth of being rewarded, then they should be included as candidates for rewards.

9 Likes