First things first, well done @addison @poktblade @Poktdachi @pierre - you saw an opportunity with a high potential pay-off, and persevered, notwithstanding the uncertainty of the outcome.
This idea would have just fallen by the wayside in an ordinary organisation. But, thankfully, Pocket is no ordinary organisation! DAOs win when they create the conditions for a broader group to participate than is possible under a traditional org structure.
Before getting to my thinking on this proposal, I think there are many things to unpack wrt this thread as a whole. Namely - in my mind, at least - the following:
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How we communicate with each other
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How we come to decisions as a DAO
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How we value work
How we communicate as a DAO
So much context is missed when not addressing someone face-to-face that principles like non-violent communication are essential. Maybe it’s just me, but I felt a lot of heat in the comments on this thread. Heat, which I would have felt triggered by if I was the original poster.
Look back at the FAQ for this forum - FAQ - Pocket Network Forum
We all need to remember some of the core principles of this forum:
I don’t want to go line by line through every commenter’s text, but I think we can do better and approach feedback with more compassion.
How we make decisions
It would be helpful to formalise the fundamental principles of how we discuss proposals as a community, as I feel that some of the comments in this thread are missing the wood from the trees.
I personally take a lot of inspiration from sociocracy in my thinking around decentralised decision making. I appreciate that all votes are ultimately subject to voting by DAO members. Still, to push a proposal to a vote, I believe that the community members should not object to the proposal at hand, i.e. it is within our range of tolerance while ensuring we prioritise progress over perfection. And, of course, any proposal must align with our values as a community.
We should also take it as a given that no proposal is ever a fait acompli. It’s the starting point of a discussion with the community, with time allocated for everyone to ask clarifying questions and suggest amendments to any proposal, and for the proposer to have time to respond to the discussion points and reformulate the post as many times as is necessary to overcome any substantive objections that would make it unsafe to proceed as drafted.
Instead of asking, “is the proposal perfect?” We can ask, "Is it good enough for now, safe enough to try?"And when we object, a sound objection should argue that a particular decision will irreparably damage or reduce our ability as a community to achieve our goals. When this is the case, it is crucial to object to the proposal as it stands, and to suggest a change that will make it safe to try for you. This may require the proposer to reduce the scope and scale of the proposal considerably, and that’s okay
Applying a framework like the above to this proposal, I think @luyzdeleon did the best job of explaining why the proposal doesn’t work as it stands, and how he would be comfortable with it. Points I 100% agree with, which need to be clarified before this proposal moves to voting, IMO.
All of the other objections are about how much the DAO should pay for this work. Instead of just saying $2m is too much, we should give opinions on what is an acceptable range for this.
In addition to the points from @luyzdeleon (as well as suggestions 1-4 from @shane in his most recent post), I also object to the proposal as it stands based on the asking amount.
Which brings me to…
How we value work
I agree with @o_rourke about not making every proposal for profit. However, I’ve said before on different forum posts that we should overpay our community contributors as we want the best people to devote their time and skills to Pocket Network without necessarily joining the core team.
Comparing this proposal to how much core devs get paid is beside the point. It’s comparing apples with oranges. Each core team member has POKT grants and wins from any successfully implemented proposal that brings value to the network. Contractors always get paid more than employees. And specialised work gets paid even more than that. Particularly when a lot of independent thought and research has gone into it. We need to encourage risk and reward innovation to thrive as a community.
I also have to admit that I don’t like the Proposal value model from @shane - I find it too corporate and overly granular, aspects that most community contributors want to avoid. And are a turn off for many. We don’t have enough high-quality proposals, so we should aim to encourage more, not less. We should also strive to take some risk in funding proposals to benefit from the upside versus trying to overly protect the downside. The joy of retroactive public goods funding is that we can see the product out in the wild first. And reducing every contribution to a $ amount per hour is overly reductive. Yet, trying to charge a rake on the overall value that could be created by a community contribution is overly extractive. We don’t want to create a culture whereby every piece of open source code in the community has a cut associated with it. We can put a premium on novel impactful work, without creating a tax on future value creation.
Saying all that, we should still use benchmarking to understand if we are completely overpaying. And any payment should also be made in light of available DAO funds.
In terms of benchmarking, high-quality protocol engineers get paid a lot. (I’m very happy to provide data points from across our portfolio, if helpful). Provided this proposal is appropriately specced out and implemented in line with how the protocol team deem necessary, then we should pay well for this work. In addition, having more teams working for the protocol outside of the core team will make Pocket more sustainable in the long run. And if we have to pay more to core contributors over time, that’s also fine. But is an entirely different point to funding this proposal.
However, I object to funding this ask for $2m at current prices. This is simply way too much for this one piece of work given how massively undervalued POKT is at the moment.(The fair value of POKT right now is likely around $1, and we all expect it will be much higher in the future.)
I appreciate the proposal for including a vesting element along with a cliff. Still, I would more comfortable with an ask of around $400k at a price of 20c per POKT that has a 3 month cliff post delivery and 15 months of linear vesting thereafter.
This gives massive upside to the contributors without causing too much of a drain on the DAO’s treasury.