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…
Why valuing public goods is hard
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…
Impact is the metric that matters
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.
PNF Impact scorecard
The scorecard includes the following five factors:
- Utilization - how widely used is the contribution? 10/10 likely means that it is the most widely and frequently used product in the whole ecosystem
- Measurable benefit - what is the benefit, and how deep and long-lasting is it? 10/10 would mean the most valuable and long-lasting possible contribution to the ecosystem.
- Ecosystem-wide significance - how detrimental would it have been if the contributor didn’t make this contribution? 10/10 would mean a truly game changing contribution that dramatically changes the course of Pocket’s future.
- Impact of keeping the contribution free and open - could the contributor have easily kept this contribution closed source, and do they benefit from this contribution in any other way? 10/10 would mean the damage of keeping this contribution private would have had a incredibly detrimental impact on the ecosystem, particularly when there was an alternative paid business model available.
- Novelty / innovation factor - it is imperative that we reward creativity and experimentation. 10/10 would be something completely de novo and extremely innovative that involves a lot of risk and ingenuity.
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.
The benefit of constraints
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.
Nothing is a replacement for using your own judgment
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.
Next steps
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.