Yeah, wasn’t sure where to post it 
It’s very relevant to here as well.
A code review crew would be great with just ensuring reimbursements are fair. The IMPACT a contribution had in driving ecosystem value can be measured separately with different metrics all-together.
Love to hear more thoughts.
Given @deblasis 's comment on the other post, I found this notable as well:
I think the EVA idea is interesting, and would think everyone who shows up on these lists could potentially be eligible.
We don’t want GRIP creep. At the same time, however, part of GRIP’s mandate as per PEP-45 is to use its expertise to help technical proposal drafters determine appropriate compensation:
Accordingly, it makes total sense for GRIP to play a role in budget assessment. I like Cryptocorn’s idea of a three-person committee: GRIP member, PNF member and a DAO-appointed representative. For small asks, I don’t see anything untoward or controversial about GRIP providing a budget assessment on its own. After all, that 's part of GRIP’s mandate. But I do agree that for large funding requests (and at the contributor’s request, for smaller ones too), the assessment should be done by a committee (including the GRIP member).
Centralisation and issues of “who’s on the committee” are valid concerns in regards to decision making, but much less so if the committee merely suggests a budget and lets the proposal author decide. However, to allay what concerns may exist, the DAO member could rotate among a roster of qualified individuals who get compensated for their participation. Also, the GRIP technical specialist could change from time to time.
Before Pocket, I had never come across this word.
The proposal template is being revised: here’s the related Google Doc (feel free to add comments). “Imbursements,” for clarity, may be replaced by “Advance Pay.” While surprisingly “imbursement” is an actual word, as Jinx notes, it does not mean “advance payment.” See the Wikipedia entry.
I strongly agree. A Treasurer? Convert some POKT to stables, perhaps U.S. dollars and invest. What are other DAOs doing?
Interesting idea. We definitely need to factor diminishing DAO reserves due to inflation cuts into our spending decisions.
Please read the excerpt from @RawthiL 's post
There was something very similar from @Cryptocorn in some other post of his about educating the community, answering their questions on a consistent basis.
I agree that we should generously reward good actors from the community volunteering their personal time towards the project, as long as there is no other way he/she is getting compensated for the same work.
It’s an incentive to drive good and responsible behaviour, and also increase community time of many qualified actors.
So the suggestion is to put this under “Rewards Program” that we don’t have yet.
The above is just an outline, the mechanics such as who selects the samaritans and others can be worked out once we decide to go ahead with the plan.
The scope of the above suggestion is much larger than the discussion around compensation. Compensation is just a subset.
Includes things such as risk assessment, diversification (such as stables), security, allocation, etc.
Might also include investing to grow the funds such as how it’s done by college endowments.
In the meanwhile please read the article I shared earlier to get an idea of how other DAOs are allocating their funds.
Bottomline is we should consider active treasury management of the DAO funds that also includes budgeting and planning.
I might start a fresh post on this.
Hi there, I was diverted here from @b3n since the conversation was derailing way too much from the topic in POKTscan Geo-Mesh Reimbursement - #21 by shane
@shane:
I think I didn’t make myself clear, I apologize.
I am still quite ignorant 
, still learning the ropes of DAO, PNI, PNF and their interactions and also the terminologies (reimbursement, EVA, etc).
I haven’t read this whole thread either, but I will catch up.
Also, I have a bit of tunnel vision with V1 and I don’t know much of what’s happening in V0 and overall in the node-running community.
Where I believe it is important to distinguish between contributors is “are they being compensated with an hourly wage during this work?”. For the v1 team, they are given an hourly wage for working on POKT, so there is no reason for individual contributors to submit reimbursement proposals. Even if you did crack geo-mesh, you should not be submitting a proposal for reimbursement because you were already paid. PNI already submitted PEP-49 to help fund your wages.
I am not and would never ask for a reimbursement as you define it for something I am already being paid for. 
I was talking about something innovative and/or that solves real problems developed outside of my regular responsibilities and duties, in my spare time, beyond what I am already being paid for.
I won’t do that anytime soon, I was talking hypothetically just to challenge some of the ideas.
I have used GeoMesh purely as an example since it’s v0 related and clearly doesn’t fall under the umbrella of “v1 protocol development”.
I realize I have used the word “prize” erroneously in my previous message in the GeoMesh thread.
I agree that with proposals being essentually “black boxes” it is hard to distinguish what is what. The only way to proceed in a fair manner is to have transparency.
I totally agree that transparency is necessary otherwise trust is lost and we are back in the Web2 realm.
Transparency has several shapes and forms. What if it’s the process of selecting fairly that becomes transparent?
There’s a lot I could say here but I also have some code to write so I’ll try to summarize:
I think it’s important to distinguish between different ways of contribution (I suck at naming things, bear with me):
Why this distinction?
Let me use a couple of metaphors:
If I need some work to be performed around my house I ask for a quote from multiple parties, too high? Next. Nobody else? Ok, I’ll take it, I really need a roof! If I can’t really find anyone with my budget I raise it until I find a bid. (efficient markets)
I am chilling in the garden minding my own business and someone comes to me saying: “you could really benefit from some solar lights in your garden, it would really increase the value of your property, etc, etc. I have some for 4000 POKT in my trunk, I am gonna give them to you at cost, trust me. Should I bring and install them?”
What if… in the push model you would have something something like:
I personally think that reimbursements alone are probably not the optimal way to handle things.
A group of individuals cannot possibly evaluate with fairness something that a team has built even if bills, timesheets and even team lunch recipes are presented. Costs are different for different companies. It’s never an apple vs apple comparison.
Only the market has the capacity to determine the “fair” price for something IMHO.
Competitiveness is key.
Example: I live in the UK but I don’t compete in the UK job market. The Web3 world I want to live in doesn’t care about the cost of your real estate. It only cares about the value that you bring to the table.
Using again GeoMesh -just as an example-, since Web3 is all about incentives, I think I would have created a public bounty to
“develop a solution that levels the playing field in the node running community since there are node runners that are seeing 2x-3x the rewards leaving the others dry” (or better technical description).
Along with an estimated budget that I think should be small initially and grow until there’s interest from community builders.
Like an auction. Similar to what happens in the public administration world with their suppliers for goods/services.
Contributors submit their carefully estimated asking amounts to deliver within a deadline before they commit and do any work.
At the deadline or when the first contributor submits a solution, there’s a verification process (performed by a trusted committee, you guys might have already talked about something similar above, I think my eyes caught something while scrolling the thread, GRIP?).
If all is good (we’d need an objective way to determine if the solution is acceptable, sometimes it’s easy, sometimes it’s really hard and time-consuming, TBD) you reward the contributor.
If something is wrong, the competitive auction is back on until the contributor addresses the functional issues (the other contributors might have given up completely or not).
Again, the first to submit for verification is the runner-up to win the bounty but they cannot submit twice in a row if there are other runner-ups. This should increase the quality of the updates to the initial submission and also reward both speed and quality.
The whole thing should be conducted in the open apart from showing implementation details of the various solutions to competing contributors (you’d need again trusted folks to manage the process of course. Immediate termination for collusion/corruption, and harsh measures to be put in place to deter any shenanigans).
If the process stalls because all the contributors gave up, you auction again and repeat the above.
Quitters should be motivated to stand up and try again leveraging the partial work already done thanks to the bigger incentive.
This way you have a Darwinian selection of the best solution at the best price IMHO.
Easier said than done, that’s for sure.
As I said in the other thread, fairness is subjective. Only nature and its approximations like “fair markets” can be fair and if you are on the losing side you can only 
and try again or quit altogether. That’s life isn’t it?
Is it fair that the lion eats the gazelle? Ask both of them… or the zebra that’s observing the whole thing from afar.
Working on something and ending up not winning or ending up spending more than the amount initially auctioned for should be considered a business risk to learn/evolve from. (you are the gazelle)
Having a lean organisation, because of geography, headcount and/or skills should be considered a competitive edge that allows you to win more bounties, scale, repeat. (you are the lion)
Of course, since it’s all open source at the end of the day when the winner’s solution is merged/made public, other contributors can learn from the winners and try to reverse engineer their success formula… next time they might have a better chance. (you are a hyena that dreams of becoming a lion)
Again, the natural selection process aims at improving things at every iteration, including the internal processes that would make all the above possible.
I felt I owe a clarification for the last sentence so that there is no misunderstanding. I have refrained from commenting directly on reimbursements (except corn’s) because I don’t have the same insights to history as most of the seasoned community members do and also because I am not a DAO member yet.
However, I still believe that there needs to be a transition point between status quo and a structured approach to payments that we all roughly seem to agree on. And one of those possible transition points could be V0->V1.
Basically the plan (whatever that is) ideally should be put together and rolled out before V1 test net (before Q4) with an effective date .
Otherwise status quo will continue to prevail in V1 as well.
This post is not addressed to any individual, it is to the community.
Gotta say, I love the way you communicate deblais. 
Innovation doesn’t work like that. And I don’t think we want the brightest minds of our community thinking “this is a great idea, let me write up a proposal for it”.
It’s a shame actually that developers have to come here and talk about pay standards. But I do think we are making progress. This has turned out to be a fantastic thread.
@deblasis
Back to what you said about a 4 year vest and -69% of the total Geo-Mesh spend. I don’t think we can continue paying out contributors with outdated payment methods. 4 year vest is a lifetime in crypto. I’d like to see us move to 18 month vesting with the initial cliff happening on the 1st or 3rd months. Of course anyone signed to an agreement like that has already proven themselves to be valuable withing the community and ecosystem.
A chatGPT excerpt below
“The practice of paying employees for their work has a long history, dating back thousands of years. In ancient civilizations, people were paid in goods or services, rather than money. For example, in ancient Greece, workers were paid in olive oil or barley, while in ancient China, they were paid in rice.”
I also think we should speed up our decision making. More of the thread respondents need to throw out actually numbers.
Not ok with 5.5m Geo-Mesh? ok, how much?
LeanPOKT 7m too high? How does 6m sound?
To the PNI employees - I’m sorry that you feel the disconnect between potential dao contributor payouts and pni staff. We really shouldn’t compare the two. One of the main reasons DAO’s exists is so that we can unlock these new payment methods and structures. Crypto and web3 are all a game and the same rules do not apply.
I agree with Ethen here and I was also thinking of writing this but I kept missing- The objective behind having better governance and a structure around compensation (the topic of discussion) is not to add bureaucracy and to make it painful for the contributors, vendors, the deserving to get paid and rewarded. That’s not the vantage point I come from.
It also involves removing unnecessary frictions (roadblocks & bureaucracy) or the possible ones, and at the same time uphold values such as meritocracy , transparency through a set of agreed rules.
Sorry, had to rant
I want to resurface this idea because I think it is the first clear and cogent deliverable from this conversation. Having the EVA structure in place would allow for reimbursements to segment recouping hard costs and pair that with additional milestone bonuses in a way that would both help reduce sticker shock (spreading the ask out over time) and allow for many different contributor types to benefit. Teams like @poktblade and @RawthiL 's get the added value of impact measurement, and core contributors like @deblasis and @Olshansky can participate in a meaningful way above and beyond the requirements and compensation of their full time position.
I’m going to ping @shane to rough out some ideas, and see about getting a pre-proposal together.
Hi @Jinx , am curious about the scope of this post. “Compensation Structure for DAO Contributors” has a much bigger scope and encompasses all kinds of comps. And I believe that the community discussions around that have been great. Solutioning (getting into specifics) is the next phase.
Your proposed solution above addresses “reimbursements” only (if I understand it correctly), which is a subset of DAO Comp as a whole.
So my question again is, what is the scope and the agenda here?
Are you thinking of breaking this down into smaller subsets (reimbursements in this case), solve them one by one basically?
Correct, I started the topic as a larger conversation instead of a preproposal because I expected that multiple proposals might be generated from it, and I outlined some of those goals in OP:
The EVA idea is one of those, and we’ve started work on a draft for it. But there are still a number of open questions. My ideal outcome would be to see some working models created, with 2 or 3 proposals around them to be ratified by the DAO.
Thanks @Jinx and @shane for leading this debate
Thank you also to everyone else for your contributions to this debate.
No different to everyone else; we at PNF have been thinking about this problem for a while too. And we have some suggestions to bring to the mix…
We cannot reduce human ingenuity to an algorithm.
A valuation analysis of a public good is an inherently subjective exercise. Instead of attempting to reduce 100 different variables - from time spent, to location of the team and so on - into a simple equation, we suggest that we focus on improving the language and tools we use when we debate.
As per Aaron Dignan in Brave New Work:
No formula is going to sufficiently capture the complexity of a real workforce. Only transparency, dialogue and judgment can make sense of what is fair…
While we want to have lots of people spending lots of time on Pocket related matters, if we want to create a meritocracy, such effort can only be fairly valued on the output it results in. The impact of our collective contributions is all that matters to the future of Pocket. And we should value each other’s contributions accordingly. That doesn’t mean that something very valuable should receive all of the DAO’s treasury, but it does help us understand how to value each contribution relative to each other and what we need to incentivise. Once we understand where the contribution fits in the grand scheme of potential contributions, we can then decide how to calibrate the reward based on how we think about trade-offs, such as needing to incentivise more contributions but also needing not to overpay anyone and keeping enough POKT in reserve to continue funding more impactful contributions over the lifetime of the project.
Did the contribution advance our priorities as an ecosystem? If so, how impactful was it? Did it get us to v1 quicker? Generate 10x more paid demand? Bring in 50 new contributors? Or something smaller, but still impactful?
We have prepared a framework for valuing each other’s contributions using such a perspective on impact. Please see for yourselves here.
The scorecard includes the following five factors:
Please bear in mind that this is ultimately a work in progress and the scorecard is merely a tool to help align our thinking. It is not an exact science.
Most proposals should fit within a reasonable range, so we believe we should agree on an appropriate range and reserve debate for genuine exceptions.
We should apply a soft cap to proposals that the DAO should only exceed in exceptional circumstances. For example, we believe that any one complete piece of work shouldn’t receive more than 4% of the treasury / $300k, so that we have enough left in reserve to fund many more game-changing proposals over the life of the DAO. Further, grants at the top end of the range should be reserved only for truly exceptional contributions that meet such an incredibly high bar that they should be a rarity in practice. The more contributions we have, the easier this will be to gauge.
The scorecard should never be the sole arbiter of the truth. If it is to be useful, it should empower all of us to use our judgment. This is why you will see questions following the scorecard that ask you to consider other factors such as whether the score you gave in the scorecard appears to result in a reward that is too high / low in comparison to previous rewards, the actual work done, and so on.
While it is largely the role of PNF to maintain a coherent public strategy for managing the DAO’s treasury (something we are working on, and which is why we suggest the relevant soft caps that we have in the scoredcard), it is the role of the DAO to determine what impact means for this community and to opine on value creation. Such a subjective exercise benefits from aggregating our collective perspectives.
We hope that many active contributors - including groups like GRIP - will submit their own versions of the scorecard to each debate proposal. And that we can then work together to iron out our differences and align around the fair share of the DAO’s treasury to award for the proposal in question.
While such an exercise will always be inherently subjective, aligning on similar frameworks for understanding value creation should lead to richer debates and enable us to learn from each other while doing so.
In an ideal scenario, we can crowdsource improvements to this framework using this powerful hive mind of ours, as well as a growing bank of precedents as we learn from more community contributions. We will always have our differences, but at the very least we should be arguing about the same things and using similar language to do so.
We look forward to hearing everyone’s thoughts and working together to reach alignment on a more productive way forward.
We have shared the scorecard already with the Poktscan (cc @Jorge_POKTscan @michaelaorourke ) and Poktfund (@poktblade @Poktdachi ) teams, and hope that this approach will be used to advance those conversations too.
One more thing! @b3n plans to share more details on the other programs that PNF is launching soon, which should ameliorate many other concerns around the proposal process. Namely, the friction of paying a contributor upfront, the friction of getting paid retroactively for smaller impactful contributions (eg sub $25k) and an RFP process for identified ecosystem needs.
This is a phenomenal stab at organizing and systematizing an approach to a very complex subject, Thanks
This is helpful. But it raises the question of ‘who scores the scorecard?’
I feel that a useful addition would be a 3-person non-binding committee that offers its scoring, alongside the proposer and any community member who would like to contribute their own version.
Thanks @Dermot (&PNF) for putting this together.
So basically we are taking a more qualitative approach (instead of a quantitative) to arrive at a valuation model.
Intellectually speaking, I would like to further clarify your following lines:
It depends on what kind of public good we are talking about.
The air we all breathe can be considered a public good and I agree that it is hard to quantitatively value air and assign a number.
But on the other hand, public blockchains and protocols are public goods that can be quantitatively valued, and very conveniently because the metrics and their definitions are available in the industry today. Referring back to the debate I started on den about Pocket Network’s financials. A followup is due there.
Protocol is a public good, DAO is a non-profit, foundation is a non-profit; however the entities that are building on them most likely would be for-profit.
We could come up with a fully quantitative valuation model for the for-profit entities building in the eco-system but we don’t have the means to go and audit their inputs, that most likely would be “cost based”. I mean nothing is on-chain and it would be hard to standardise and templatise. I guess we could but that would involve a lot of trust and conflicts.
The challenges above apply to “reimbursement” type compensation.
And therefore I agree with the “IMPACT” based evaluation model.
Questions/Concerns/Suggestions:
@Cryptocorn has already asked the question about who will do the evaluations. I agree with the committee approach. I believe @Cryptocorn , @zaatar suggested PNF + GRIP + DAO member + Community member, or something similar.
And I sincerely recommend proactively managing possible centralisation/concentration, abuse of authority, unhealthy coalition formations, etc through timely rotations and other measures.
More on this here and here . Not trying to be a cynic, this is just risk/conflict/COI management.
So committee’s role will be to sanction or not sanction the grant? Or to decide whether to promote the ask for a DAO vote or not? Because those two are very different in terms of empowerment, and also in other factors such as time and efficiency.
Ok, I arrive at my favourite topic- how will we budget this?
Hypothetically, what if there are 15 requests and each at 4% of the treasury? That’s 60% of the treasury. It’s improbable but not impossible.
Moving forward, we would ideally want more and more high quality proposals. The responsible way forward is to factor those low probability scenarios as well.
And therefore I re-appeal to PNF and to the DAO- we need budgeting and planning.
The DAO treasury is not infinite and therefore will require rationing at times, which will only happen if we do budget planning.
Reiterating that my comments have no connection with the ongoing reimbursement debates.
Thanks to you and @b3n for the above and thanks for reading.
Thanks, @Cryptocorn and @Caesar, for bringing up these great questions
First things first:
We hope that the proposal authors fill the scorecard out in the first instance to justify their request. And then, every community member interested in participating will challenge such requests by completing their versions of the scorecard - it’s only five categories - and asking relevant questions to decide on the weight they will apply to their evaluation.
This type of process should lead to a better debate, as right now, while the community challenges requests, the debates are very abstract and generally quite disconnected from the impact in question. And they resort to ad hominem attacks all too quickly. Additionally, impact - until now - has been banded about in a very loose fashion by proposal authors. As we are an ecosystem, not a private for-profit entity, we don’t have just one stakeholder (eg shareholders) to serve along one primary metric (eg $ profits). Therefore, having multiple frames for considering impact should help get us closer to the right answer.
As there can never be one “exact” answer, more perspectives will help get us closer to this community’s version of the truth, which is why we do not want to delegate this authority to a smaller subset of the community, and actually desire more participation. This is why we advocate for an open process involving more of the community, with PNF in the role of facilitator providing guidance and direct non-binding recommendations where helpful to do so.
On the other hand, for some of the new smaller grants programs that PNF is planning to implement soon, a representative committee formed of PNF plus some community members will be beneficial to shine some light on the practices of PNF and to add more legitimacy to the process. More info on that to share soon
Ah yes, you are correct that blockchains can be quantitatively valued from the perspective of an investor seeking a $ return. But whose perspective should we consider for Pocket? And on what basis if we aren’t taking any equity or tokens in return for the $ and time we give to support the public goods in our ecosystem? As the DAO is not a monolith, and our perspectives and incentives are manifold, any public goods valuation will be inherently subjective and not directly quantifiable.
This is a debate that I have had with many people in the community at this stage! @Jinx and @shane in particular
I agree with this point for RFPs where work is determined upfront. However, in the case of a retroactive reward that was never fully specced out by the community in advance, we cannot give out rewards based on costs for two reasons:
Paying for hours completed rewards inefficiency. It’s similar to lawyers being incentivised to do more hours than they need to. Further, DAO members have no ability to challenge whether or not someone did those hours, or even if all those hours were necessary or not. It could also lead to some strange edge cases whereby a work that required a lot of work, but delivers a small amount of impact would get paid a lot more than something that took less time but was much more impactful
My quote above basically sums this up. If we agree on the right frame for “impact”, along with the revised mission/vision/priorities outputs from DNA, we will have a powerful bat signal to attract contributors near and far to deliver as much value to the ecosystem as possible to drive the priorities we care about. Lots of hours spent on something matters little. It’s all about impact.
And in good news, it seems like we are in agreement!
We agree. We are working on it and will share more thinking on it soon. You will see that there is a question in the scorecard under the heading of “DAO Budget planning” that asks questions / poses considerations such as:
How many more similar grants to this do we expect to funding in the next 2 years?
Can the DAO afford to fund similar grants in the future at this level of compensation?
If this is a unique extraordinary one-off, consider for a larger grant
If we need to fund many more of these types of grants in the future, ensure that the DAO has sufficient budget going forward to fund these types of contributions.
Avoid allowing exceptions becoming the rule
Ultimately, we see it as core to PNF’s mission “to bolster the efforts of the DAO” by stewarding the DAO’s thinking around these points, so it’s a great point. And we are very much in alignment.
This is an interesting idea. Perhaps an example scorecard would be helpful. If you were asked to create a scorecard for your role with the DAO, what would that look like? I would be willing to provide my evaluation to test this concept out. Care to give it a go?
I agree 100%. In the spirit of leadership starts at the top, perhaps the DAO core team should lead this idea with each member creating their own scorecard? Is that a fair ask? The PNF core team is also meant to provide impact, correct?
