Addressing concerns about the kinds of contributions we are valuing
Philosophical Misalignment
Firstly, there’s a philosophical misalignment that I’d like to highlight here. I think clarifying this will help set the context for the rest of my answer.
My view is that the governance mechanism should be neutral to outcomes, empowering participants to impart their own localized value judgments, rather than trying to enforce monolithic value judgments.
Coordinape alludes to this in their docs:
each member should allocate their GIVE tokens to other members using whatever logic that makes sense to them with the goal of making sure valuable contributions are recognized and compensated as accurately as possible.
The goal is not to share money equally, give from obligation, or to pay people for spending time within the organization (unless you think that is valuable).
…
Try not to allocate GIVEs based on who is “supposed” to get them, or based on hype. Give them where you see value happen. Give them to people that help you.
Don’t worry too much about getting the numbers right, go with your heart.
We should trust each other to allocate resources sensibly. Given that this power is gated behind the vouching system, contributors can enforce their preferred culture based on who we permit to join the gift circle. If Pat believes we should reward each other based on how much we exemplify Pocket Network’s values, he can advocate for other contributors to reflect this in their gifting decisions, and if they agree with him they will do so, but we shouldn’t enforce it as a monolith.
As Shane & Dermot said,
If we go the other monolithic direction, we risk over-engineering the system, creating more friction and disenfranchising categories of contributions that we didn’t account for in our taxonomy. It will also be harder for us to calibrate when this inevitably happens. Look to the Pocket Arcade quest system, which doesn’t account for every kind of contribution, for an example of how hard it is to calibrate a system like this.
Dermot brilliantly echoes my views on localized governance here
I will generally be pushing for us to localize our governance more over time, for the above reasons and because I believe it is the only way for us to achieve true decentralization.
Functional Misunderstanding
In focusing on the value of specific contributions, we’re forgetting how Coordinape works.
GIVE allocations are not tied to specific contributions, which means we can’t exclude contribution categories or enforce contribution tiers even if we wanted to. And we don’t need to.
In a contribution-based evaluation system, like SourceCred, it’s easy to overpay individual contributions in isolation without realizing that this on aggregate results in the contributor being overpaid compared to another contributor who has less frequent and/or less sexy contributions. I believe this is the kind of outcome that Jinx and Pat are (were?) worried about.
However, Coordinape is a contributor-based evaluation system. Since we’ll be evaluating each other wholly as contributors, not evaluating individual contributions, I expect that this will help us to make sensible comparative value judgments with the full context of the impact of our decisions on the macro-level distribution of value.
Coordinape is not an “output-based reward system” (as Pat cautions against), it is a contributor evaluation system that is agnostic to whichever methods contributors use to evaluate each other.
Iterating on a Simple Foundation
Lastly, I’d like to provide more detail on how I envision this system evolving over time.
Coordinape allows organizations to have multiple circles, with their own epochs, tokens, contributors, and thus their own culture of value.
Rather than enforcing value systems as a monolith, we can allow localized gift circles to be spun up, with competing value philosophies, and request their own % of DAO revenue. These could be circles dedicated to specific types of contributions (satisfying Jinx’s taxonomy idea) or specific value philosophies (satisfying Pat’s “Value our Values” idea).
In the long run, the budget allocated to these competing circles can be calibrated by the DAO based on how successful they’ve been at fostering ecosystem value broadly. Calibrating this will be much easier than calibrating a monolithic value judgment system.
So I would suggest we start with a broad POKT DAO gift circle, see how that goes, then community members can spin up their own circles if they feel the POKT DAO circle is imperfect in some way.