Compensation Structure for DAO Contributors

[Dermot (Dermot O'Riordan)]

Thanks, @Cryptocorn and @Caesar, for bringing up these great questions

First things first:

@Cryptocorn

who scores the scorecard?

@Cryptocorn

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.

@Caesar

@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.

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

@Caesar

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.

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.

@Caesar

that most likely would be “cost based”.

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:

1. 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

2. 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.

@Caesar

The challenges above apply to “reimbursement” type compensation.

And therefore I agree with the “IMPACT” based evaluation model.

And in good news, it seems like we are in agreement!

@Caesar

Ok, I arrive at my favourite topic- how will we budget this?

@Caesar

And therefore I re-appeal to PNF and to the DAO- we need budgeting and planning.

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.