Hello All,
I’m just now seeing this and have some thoughts.
My thinking is that by focusing on “the how we work” for scoring compared to “the what”, the results will be better balanced.
This is only possible because PNI/PNF have outlined clear objectives for a given quarter already, so the results everyone are working towards are already bought into.
And this is only possible so long as clear objectives and key results are published, and bought into continually on a regular basis.
If people don’t agree with a given set of OKRs that’s a different debate, but lets assume we all agree at the results are good enough at keeping everyone directionally focused.
Here I will focus on the impact factors, because I believe with well designed impact factors, most other calculations are taken into account, whether directly or indirectly.
Another benefit of focusing on impact factors is that a tool can be created to have the community quickly weigh in on proposals/contributions. That tool may also have its own set of risks and design considerations so I will leave that out here. But it could be as simple a scorecard app, or as web3 as a prediction market like system.
In given seasons of pockets lifecycle, you can adjust weights to the impact factors to signal importance, and incentives behavior’s.
I think this is extremely valuable. Some factors are more valuable at certain times then others, and quarterly (and very rarely ad hoc) that should be understood and made public.
Anyway, my proposed impact factors.
The are structure as 3 guiding values, each holding 2 competing forces. So 9 total.
This design is because we have to acknowledge the fundamental tension (which I think the authors of this have done a good job at btw) of a DAO trying to be productive without centralizing.
The tension is in efficiency and resilience. resilience being a function of diversity and interconnectivity.
Long term we want more people contributing with self sustaining business models, but there are limited resources.
Here are the impacts I think that would be a good starting point.
Relevancy:
This is my favorite one because it ties directly into the what we need to do (OKRs)
Lets use leanPOKT as an example.
If the objectives were published for that quarter with the highest prioritiy being
Cut network infrastructure costs by 80%.
Then the relevancy of this proposal not only demands a high score for potential reward, but a high score for active vetting of the solution to ship.
Whereas if that same month, someone proposed to do a mareteing campaign.
Although that is important, it is not as relevant to the needs at that time.
Thinking with this guiding value in mind, and evaluating based off it I think will do wonders for proactively aligning the community.
The more this is weighted the less time will be spent on irrelevant discussions.
The competing forces that sit within it are speed and cost.
These ones are self explanatory.
We want cost to be as low as possible, but the faster we need something done, the more its going to cost, in most cases at least.
There are additional considerations of cost as well that are interesting. Like QA time from core team.
By fleshing this out we will understand deeply the hindering costs in terms of time, opportunity, and finite resources.
By increasing the weight of speed, you will incentives smaller more iterative contributions.
By increasing the weight of cost, you will incentives larger more collaborative/innovative contributions.
Cost could be renamed to something like “frugality” or “affordability” maybe also.
Diversity
Diversity does not mean completely different things. Diversity means a healthy distribution of teams working on similar solutions.
For example we still want more node runners, even though there are already node runners.
The same applies for all tooling and iniatives in the ecosystem.
Including diversity as a weight within the impact factors will open the door for healthy competition within the ecosystem.
By weighting diversity more, you will get more competition and novelty. By weighting it less you will get more focused contributions.
The competing factors are innovation and synergy.
Innovation is explained well in the exisiting impact factors.
But I believe that needs to be paired with synergy.
The contributions should seek to build with or upon one another in ways that make sense for the compounding value of this networked ecosystem.
Without synergy, you may get a fully fractured community where nobody is incentivized to connect, learn and grow.
Weighting innovation will incentivize autonomous novelty, while weighting synergy more will incentivize interoperability and ecosystem wide UX.
- Can you tell how fun it would be to make the impact score card a dynamic weighting system? seems really powerful to me.
** Accessibility **
Accessibility seems like synergy in some ways, but the difference is in onboarding.
A highly accessibly contribution, results in dumb proof UX or grade A documentation/support resources.
It also results in increased capacity to be improved upon, whereas synergy leans more towards “works well with”
The competition forces here are Efficiency & Collaboration gains.
Effiency gains save time, resources, and tend towards disqualifying potential participants, much like how AI will displace many jobs.
Collaborative gains tend towards creative perspectives, culture formation, and universal basic contributions such as rallying around a narrative that everyone understands because they were taking along the whole process.
Weighting efficiency more will get you faster optimizations
Weighting collaboration more, will get you broader interest and potential energy leading to things like new community members rising to stardom, or broad guerilla marketing like viral word of mouth stuff.
Conclusion.
- I believe the use of a score card/rating system is very important for broadening community contributions
- I believe the use of dynamic weighting and competing forces is important for finding how to walk the line in any given season of the organization
- I think those 9 factors are a great place to start, but could probably be improved upon. Except relevancy, i think that is a must.