Edited 09/20 to change BAG Holders to Foundation.
Attributes
- Author(s): @b3n @JackALaing @jdaugherty @Ming @Olshansky
- Recipient(s): Contributors via the Foundation
- Category: Allocation of DAO Treasury
- Related Proposal(s): PEP-41 IDEAS
- Asking Amount: 600,000 POKT
Summary
TLDR: PEP-42 secures a budget for one-off contributor activities via a Pocket DAO bounty program through the end of 2022 with the initial goals of supporting contributions to the V0/V1 protocols and some small collaboration experiments between external contributors and core team functions (i.e., potential Reddit moderation, Event Ambassadorships or others TBC). Pending the success of this program, the authors intend to work with the community to seek an annual budget to fund contributor bounties through 2023.
Motivation/Rationale
- Provide more paid opportunities for DAO participants and community members – Ecosystems are emergent and must pursue opportunities for value creation flexibly and rapidly to help Pocket capture this value. Packaging discrete and emergent work into bounties and incentivising contributions can create more momentum in having the community contribute to Pocket in new and meaningful ways.
- Further progressively decentralise Pocket Network’s workforce – By creating a wider range of available tasks for participation, we can establish relationships with new builders and participants that can build long-term value for the network. We see bounties as a way for people to start entering and contributing to the Pocket Network via the DAO and beginning a pathway to building more complex contributions or associated businesses.
- More closely fuse Pocket Network, Inc. team activities with the DAO – Decentralising more work will further enmesh the community and core teams in the most important thing - working together. These types of work experiences not only can generate value in task completion but more empathy and trust and greater visibility to both the community and core teams.
- Learn through small-scale experiments how to optimise contributor experiences and work collaborations, including onboarding, payments, etc. – We are at the start of decentralising work at Pocket. The whole ecosystem of web3 is grappling with challenges around onboarding, payments, accountability, growth, and many other things that web2 or traditional companies take for granted. By creating more of these discrete experiments, we can benefit from more learning opportunities and start to build playbooks that can optimise our ability to work in this way.
Operational Considerations & How it works
We will identify a (hopefully) increasing number of contribution opportunities for external collaboration with Pocket Network, Inc (PNI). We will also, where possible, use this bounty program to help action community suggestions that are provided by the IDEAS mechanism outlined in PEP41.
The DAO will make these opportunities for community and external contributions visible to all via Dework. Dework acts as a middle layer for community contributions and integrates with existing tools like Discord and GitHub, limiting friction with existing workflows as we scale. It is also a Web3 native product that can accept token payments, NFT gating, and other functionality that will allow us to scale over time.
We aim to create pathways for both permissioned and permissionless contributions. That is:
- Permissioned: People apply to take up contribution bounties to the Pocket DAO via Dework
- Permissionless: Trusted contributors who have achieved certain trust/role thresholds can self-assign work bounties without the need to apply or seek approval
These contributions will be completed for the Pocket DAO and will be supported by the following accountability mechanism:
- CREWmates: All bounty contributors will have CREWmate. CREW stands for Contributor Rewards and Effective Work. The CREWmate is the main point of contact for support of the bounty contributor and is the person who will review and sign off on the successful completion of work. The CREWmate will be assigned and communicated to the contributor at the commencement of their work by the Head of DAO Talent.
The Bounty Contributor’s CREWmate is their main connection point should support be needed when completing their work. The CREWmate has discretion to approve that work has been completed to a satisfactory standard for payment and the Head of DAO Talent will work with contributors and their CREWmate to help ensure the most effective outcomes. Work can be paid for completion, pre-agreed value, or milestone payments, but not solely for the effort expended - we reward results.
Note: Over time, we will further define the nature of contributor relationships, systems access, and other needs as relevant to completing the work and provide guides and playbooks that should facilitate the improved and rapid integration of community contributors.
We will document as much as possible, work in the open by default and provide monthly updates to the community via the Foundation through this forum to update the community on work assigned, results achieved, and funds disbursed.
Budget
We are proposing 600,000 $POKT from the DAO treasury be allocated to the above described bounty program with the goal of funding 50 tasks across 10+ contributors.
How did we arrive at this figure?
Estimating the speed of operation, aliasing this can be difficult, particularly as we incentivise new types of contributions. Because of the broad range of possible types of contributors (highly technical to non-technical) our logic is based on task hours. We have priced this budget on expectation of:
- Months of funding required: 4
- Contributor goal: 10+
- Task Completion Goal: 50
- Average task size: XtraSmall (XS) to Medium (M); Some Large (L)
- XS = 1-2 hours (10%) - $50-100 = $500
- S = 3-6 hours (30%) - $150-300 = $4500
- M = 1-3 days (50%) - $400-1200 = $30,000
- L = 4-8 days (10%) - $1200-3200 = $16,000
- Estimated Contributor breakdown:
- 5 V1 developer contributors (40% of tasks) - 20 tasks
- 2-5 V0 developer contributors (10% of tasks) - 5 tasks
- 5 community contributors (20% of tasks) - 10 tasks
- 5 Marketing contributors (20% of tasks) - 10 tasks
- 5 Experimental contributors (10% of tasks) - 5 tasks
- Average Contributor Rate: $50/hr
Note that these are approximations to help us calibrate the budget requested. The actual distribution of task type/value may differ.
Total for 50 tasks: $62,600 = ~600,000 POKT
Payment currency & mechanics
Payment will be a 50% Split $POKT/$USDC . 50% of the total budget will be converted to $USDC at initial funding to act as a hedge against price movements during this period.
We want to incentivise owning and holding POKT, but we need to hedge against possible price movements during this period and be pragmatic that many web3 contributors today have expectations to be paid in ERC20 tokens due to their convenience for living and operating expenses.
The Foundation will be responsible for maintaining the budgeted funds. They will make monthly payments after a reconciliation of bounties approved in Dework by relevant CREWmate.
Deliverables
The main deliverables of this proposal will be:
- Systematised bounty contribution mechanism via Dework
- Increased number of rewarded community contributions (Goal: 50 tasks / 10+ Contributors)
- Status reporting on WIP activity and results (both contributions and value generated/saved for the Pocket Network)
- Documented learnings from contribution experiences to underpin a set of guides and playbooks for community contributions
Dissenting Opinions
- The requested budget is too high
- The anticipated work will need to be completed by someone. This request is lower than the cost of hiring Full Time employees in terms of salary costs, attraction costs (hiring, recruiting), and time costs (time to hire, interview process etc.)
- There aren’t enough checks and balances
- We have defined the role of CREWmate who will be the person responsible for accepting that work has reached the standard required for payment for the work. In addition, the Foundation will need to complete their own check and acceptance of the work provided prior to making payments and reporting to the DAO
- Hiring full-time employees means fewer checks and balances within the community because it is by its nature more opaque. We want transparency to act as a driver of accountability.
- We don’t need to focus on this now
- Accelerating our ability to deliver the v1 protocols development, and supporting other types of contributions is a high priority. We are an ecosystem for builders and we want to ensure that building with Pocket is a primary focus for the DAO
Copyright
Copyright and related rights waived via CC0.