I agree this is a great suggestion for guiding the discussion about the reimbursement amount:
num_hours * $/hour plus infra costs
A clarification that could be helpful to include in addition to that calculation would be how many GeoMesh contributors there are (is the asking amount representative of a team or individual effort?). It’s not necessary to break down an allocation by contributor, but thought it could be a good data point for further discussion about the asking amount alongside the man hours. Thanks!
I don’t want to go too off tangent here- but If a Core Dev does their day job, ‘comes home’ and then starts work on something additional for the Project that is beneficial, I 100% support that and would vote for payment.
I don’t want to be another person agreeing with Ethen in a 24 hour period… but he’s right that we should be doing everything to incentivise good devs to make more + better products, both within PNI and externally as additional contributions. If someone who intimately knows Pocket wants to spend their evenings and weekends doing additional building - we should be throwing money at them.
Nothing like a hot cup of coffee on a Saturday morning, for some forum contributing
I’m very appreciative of where this conversation is going. POKTScan submitted this as a per-proposal, which means it was submitted for feedback before presenting a final proposal to the DAO. Major props to them, and others who submit per-proposals, who are asking for specific feedback before publishing a final proposal. Much thanks to the GRIP team for helping construct this system.
We are at a place were it’s important to show that all contributors are treated equally in the DAO. As @ethen regularly says, “DAOs are in the people business” and I can’t agree more. He’s regularly talking about how the DAO should be investing more into people, which I completely agree with, but in the people business folks need to be treated with equality, objectively, or people become divided and demoralized. Spending more is great, but there has to be a system of equality, which is why I’ve been very consistent with attempting to establish measurable value metrics. I literally called this exact situation back in July with the first LeanPOKT proposal, because in the people business, equality in how folks are treated is paramount.
Yes, you can call me Nostra’sha’mus
Equality For Client Work
We need to decide if a value breakdown is only to be applied to specific proposals, or all proposals. One of the fastest ways to create division would be if we have a system where some folks can arbitrarily value their proposals, while other have to have value breakdowns.
So far to date, there has been basic expectations for reimbursements to have, at a minimum, a break down hours and expenses. For POKT Lint, there was extra demand that wasn’t required of others, which is why I created the Proposal Value Model, to help quantify more aspects of value beyond just hours.
Right now we have two core client proposals, this Geo-Mesh one, and PoktFund’s Lean POKT. Right now the v1 team has expressed that client work should have a value breakdown but has only mentioned it in regards to this proposal. Does measuring work only apply to Geo-mesh, or should PoktFund be required to provide a value breakdown as well? ThunderHead has said they are going to submitting a proposal for 3M for their work on Lean, so which treatment will they get? Also, what about the v1 team, how are they to be treated in all of this?
These kind of conversations will show up time and time again, especially if we don’t treat all proposals equally with the same standards.
Solution
Reimbursements
These reimbursement proposals be based on measurable metrics that relate to the work done (with an emphases on work hours) and expenses. Any contributor to the POKT ecosystem should be able to look at a reimbursement proposal and understand what it is paying for and justify the amount.
Ecosystem Value Awards (EVA)
The DAO should setup a system to then reward contributors for the extra value their contributions brought to the ecosystem. This is done outside of the reimbursement proposal. The DAO, and potentially in conjunction with PNF, looks at all contributions, regardless of the company that it came from (including PNI) and grants EVA’s to specific contributions.
It would be rather straightforward to create a committee with half PNF folks, and half community reps to reward EVAs. It can be given a large quarterly budget (or a % of DAO income) and community members can nominate contributions they see as worthy of an EVA.
In this case, both Lean and Geo-Mesh could likely get notable bonuses for their outstanding work. In the same spirit, the v1 team could get notable bonuses as well for their work.
By separating EVAs from reimbursement proposals we keep things equal across all contributors. I’d love to see @deblasis get an EVA for outstanding work on v1, just as much as see ThunderHead get an EVA for pushing Lean forward. Regarding Lean, the PNI core-devs that provided blueprints, testing, and code reviews can be treated equally as well. There is no road-blocks to rewarding everyone.
This way, all work is treated equal, while also rewarding the impact the work had on the ecosystem separately. Lean and Geo-Mesh proposals can be reworked to be about the nuts and bolts of the work done, meanwhile we get a structure down for EVA’s, give it a budget, and start moving quickly to reward the extra value these contributions held. We can also start providing EVAs to the v1 team as milestones are hit. This kind of system encourages transparency and communication about what is being worked on and accomplished, which would also be great for the ecosystem as a whole. @jdaugherty and @Olshansky, and many at PNI have been leading examples recently regarding transparency. EVAs would motivate more transparency overall, beyond PNI.
This would be addressed with EVAs. If you do something awesome on a Tuesday that is a novel innovation (or you do it on your off hours) and it has an impact on the ecosystem, you should get an EVA without having to go through any hoops. I personally would love to see @Olshansky share some awesome innovation his team did and nominate the individuals for an EVA. The community gets transparency, contributors get the notoriety they deserve, and the bonuses that are due.
NOTE: The more generous these EVAs, the more inventive there is by all to do more work that has the highest impact on the ecosystem. We can find the balance and drive innovation, while maintaining equality on reimbursement proposals.
Conclusion
I’d love to know your thoughts on this, and thank-you POKTScan for hosting this conversation on your per-proposal They are a 5 star host in my book
P.S. I understand parts of this could be hosted on other parts of the forum, but the conversation is here right now in regards to valuing specific proposals and proposal equality. If folks like what I’m proposing with EVAs then I’m happy to start a separate thread.
You cannot compare full-time employees to DAO compensated contributors.
One can say “I don’t have that much $Pokt and have never been paid that much”.
Well, How much have you been paid in USD from Pocket Network Inc.? You could have used that to buy more $Pokt.
I agree with you, I could have used that fiat to buy $POKT I guess… but… lemme be transparent:
My annualgross billing amount to PNI is a sexy ~69% of the current proposal ask in $ (I am an independent contractor effectively because I am based in London).
I took a big pay cut to be here and I am not regretting it, I love what I do, the team, mission, etc, etc. where I wanna be/help taking this project, these fiat amounts are going to be irrelevant … but clearly I need to be exposed to that somehow… hope is not a strategy.
Seeing these numbers makes me want to reconsider things and/or reply to proposals like this. Sorry for pestering you all with my keystrokes!
I could make way more fiat (multiples) elsewhere AND contribute externally and get huge amounts of POKT apparently. Sounds like a no-brainer.
I know for a fact that I have the capacity and skills and experience to handle even two completely different full-time jobs simultaneously (in different timezones) and be told that I am killing it in both.
When I joined PNI, I negotiated to have 1M POKT (that sounded like a lot) but in 5y instead of 4… that shows how much I believe in the project and also that I am willing to work hard and make things happen. Or simply that I am a terrible negotiator
My POKT holdings (from a reward or two and high fives) are ~20K currently.
I just wanted to give the full picture because I realise I might sound a bit like of a [insert favourite swear word] or that I just woke up on the wrong side of the bed choosing violence or both.
Rest assured that if I knew there was the need to figure out the issues described by @shane that lead to the development of GeoMesh and that the prize for doing so would have been ballpark 5.3M POKT, I would have done that as a priority over a second job if that makes sense.
Absent other alternatives, that’s how I build my bag, exposure to the upside, useful stuff for the whole ecosystem. Even better, I would have teamed up with big guns like @Olshansky or some friend with complementary skills that I wanted to get involved with the project to do so.
I understand we want to grow the ecosystem and diversify but maybe someone else looking for bounties (@Jorge_POKTscan perhaps) would have beaten us with speed, quality and/or lower asking amount. Bummer, but that’s just business and markets and it’s totally fine. Ultimately value wins.
Another thing to keep in mind, I think individuals employed by a private company have a different work ethic than someone contributing to a DAO. Please don’t lambast me. I come in peace.
Individuals given a paycheck and $Pokt as part of their employment contract likely go home and don’t even think about work, whereas DAO contributors think about present and/or future contributions all day.
*lambaste - dammit mfker
I see where you are coming from but generalizing work ethic is a slippery slope IMHO. you gotta look at results, quantifiable metrics and the hard to measure “intangibles”.
We are all different and therefore we see things differently.
If my relationship with PNI ended tomorrow, I think I would get another (probably boring) fiat job and continue contributing as a community member (maybe I’d get more exposure to the upside from the looks of it…), that’s because I think about present and future of the project all day. I know for a fact that I am not the only one that’s constantly thinking about it ( the team, one of the best in my 20y career).
Thanks for sharing @deblasis. You make solid points and I think it’s fair to say that the DAO should remain neutral to what company a contributor works for.
Where I believe it is important to distinguish between contributors is “are they being compensated with an hourly wage during this work?”. For the v1 team, they are given an hourly wage for working on POKT, so there is no reason for individual contributors to submit reimbursement proposals. Even if you did crack geo-mesh, you should not be submitting a proposal for reimbursement because you were already paid. PNI already submitted PEP-49 to help fund your wages.
Meanwhile, a company like POKTScan invested the better part of 3 months into geo-mesh, involving many engineers. That work was paid for by POKTScan and the idea of a reimbursement proposals is to recoup what it cost that company endured. That is absolutley fair.
@deblasis this isn’t a proposal that is to pay individual contributors on-top of their regular wages, this proposal is from a company that invested it’s own resources heavily into open-sourcing what others were doing closed-source. This proposal is not to pay a single developer like @Jorge_POKTscan personally, this is to reimburse a company for the cost they ensured. Framing it as a “prize” is a mischaracterization. What you mean as prize I’m defining as an EVA.
This is why it is important to distinguished what is a reimbursement and what is value add bonus (which I am calling a EVA). POKTScan should be compensated for the time and resources they put into open-source work in the POKT ecosystem, that is what the DAO treasury is for. Instead of a PEP-49 format like PNI did, they are going for a reimbursement proposal and a specific good they did. I agree that with proposals being essentually “black boxes” it is hard to distinguish what is what. The only way to proceed in a fair manner is to have transparency.
@deblasis I would love to hear your thoughts on the structure I proposed above.
With this type of system, companies like POKTScan can ask for specific reimbursement with measure costs associated with it. Then the “prize” factor of contributing to something that had such an important impact on the ecosystem can be part of a separate system, the EVA system. Anyone, including yourself, can be a part of the EVA system.
There is a lot of good discussion in this thread but mostly I think it is veering into broader questions of DAO priorities, values, compensation and ancillary issues. Geo-Mesh is not an avatar for solving these broader questions for the DAO. PNF will make some comments shortly but I think we should try to focus on the specific purpose of this thread: Geo-Mesh.
Please do continue to illuminate broader challenges or ask questions about priorities and values here:
And please direct your unique issues, questions or POV related to compensation and equitable contributions here:
And of course, questions on the specifics of POKTscan and Geo-Mesh reimbursement should continue to be directed to the POKTscan team in this current thread
@Jorge_POKTscan - Could you please explain what from the current development for which you seek reimbursement survives into v1? Would you bring geo-mesh to v1 with a complete code rewrite with zero anticipated re-use so that the DAO may anticipate a similar sized reimbursement request in the future following geo-mesh v1 or would there be significant carry-over of IP, algos, code or whatever so that it will take much less additional development work to bring this feature into v1?
I am rewording my reply and moving parts of it where appropriate following @b3n recommendation.
Sorry for hijacking the conversation too far from the initial topic.
Meanwhile, a company like POKTScan invested the better part of 3 months into geo-mesh, involving many engineers. That work was paid for by POKTScan and the idea of a reimbursement proposals is to recoup what it cost that company endured. That is absolutley fair.
100% PoktScan should be compensated, I have never said the opposite.
It’s only the numbers that triggered some frustrations and I think I have provided more than enough context to see my point of view. Perhaps the right/fair amount of POKT is even higher than the ask… Read in my reply in the other thread what I mean with that.
What I vocalized here is only my point of view but I might be utterly wrong of course!
I agree that with proposals being essentually “black boxes” it is hard to distinguish what is what. The only way to proceed in a fair manner is to have transparency.
I totally agree that transparency is necessary otherwise trust is lost and we are back in Web2 realm.
Agreeing with deblasis and Olshansky. PoktScan team should be rewarded but these amounts are way too high and they are directly demotivating v1 core team. All respect to PoktScan team, but this request amount has to be cut down a lot although Geo-Mesh is a really nice thing.
Also, msa pointed out nicely to see the amount of v0 effort that can be used in v1. It’s very worthy contribution if all of this helps v1 to be much better, otherwise PoktScan team should focus on v1 and request reimbursement for it.
POKT needs as many v1 builders as possible, leaving v0 to the past, where it belongs. POKT is all about v1, it always was.
@msa6867 right now so far I know it is impossible to know/understand if the code will work or not because v1 is something that will be ready in 6 months or more. So until they have something ready to use and research I cannot confirm whether the v0 code will or not work with it.
With this update from Jorge, I believe PoktScan team should be compensated approx. 1/5th of the requested amount now and then compensated additionally when it will be much more clear if Geo-Mesh can be used in v1 in any way. Work should be rewarded, but not in the amount which directly disrespects most important part of the Pocket - core V1 builders.
I don’t think its pertinent to disclose things like hours if y’all even track that in the first place. I mean, how would such a metric even be verified? It might make sense to use hours on a project that is clearly scoped & that any average developer could do but when we’re talking about something as impactful as GeoMesh & taking in mind that it wouldn’t have been identified or made it to release without PoktScan, we can’t cramp that innovation with something like logging hours as if they are a consultant company. Let me give an example of why hourly rate is detrimental here. If Poktscan is to work on something less technical and could be very clearly identified by community members i.e. making discord bots for automating dao pathway, would it really make sense for the DAO to compensate them based on their hourly rate? We’d be charged hundreds/h for something with low technical requirements that a hobbyist developer could do(+% premiums don’t really solve this either). This is why we need to look through a different lens and abstract away from hours. The way I see it is the DAO voters are leveraging the treasury to “purchase” (in a loose sense) a client as opposed to “employing” a team and purchasing developer man hours.
The questions I ask myself are this:
Was this identified to the public prior to PoktScan’s involvement?
No. They made the first post about it and it is uncertain if anyone else would of stepped up to release the research.
Would it have been released without them?
Probably not in any reasonable time frame.
Has the value add of the client surpassed the asking amount?
100% yes. I’m not going to go deep on specifics here but its clear cut that this client has brought value well beyond the asking amount (even in the short time that its been released) and will continue to do.
which leads me to my conclusion as a dao voter…
The asking amount aligns with the value of the deliverables and I am in full support of this (pre)proposal.
First and foremost, I would like to thank all for taking the time to engage with this proposal and offer your insights, comments, and criticisms. We appreciate the diverse perspectives you are bringing to the table.
About Poktscan:
I’m sure that all have used the poktscan.com portal and know through the grapevine that at Poktscan we run nodes. What you probably don’t know is that for now, Poktscan is sort-of a pseudo social enterprise that combines the principles of a traditional for-profit company with the mission-driven focus of a non-profit organization. This is why, for example, poktscan.com is free for the community.
We have a team of ten talented engineers working on a number of products that will help the Pocket ecosystem grow and scale. More on that in the coming months. You probably know some of our most vociferous members - Jorge leading engineering and Ramiro leading data science and AI. The rest of the team is not very visible and like it that way. We have have Alan and Alexis working on pixel perfect UI’s (v2), Jeff and Seba on our backend and a ton of other stuff, Julio on our orchestration product, Vini on infra, Nico on data science and AI, Pablo on pure math, and last but not least Fede on design and keeping honest our engineers.
Genesis of Geo-Mesh:
The need to build Geo-Mesh does not come from a community or a PNI requirement but from a network anomaly identified through our data and algorithms monitoring network fairness and behavior.
The red flag for us was that a small number of nodes were being assigned relays beyond the limits established by our network models. Till then, you could not have the same nodes at multiple locations hence traffic per node per session was limited by response times. This was an important competitive advantage that only a few had. This anomaly led us down the path of discovery, and later building the product we launched last year. You can read more about this in our initial post (POKTscan’s Geo-Mesh).
Network fairness and equal playing field are at the core of our mission, so rather than reap the benefits of the technology for personal gain we decided to share with the Pocket community.
Estimates and Funding:
We decided to put forward this proposal at the request of several members of the community. Initially, I was particularly hesitant due to reasons not germain to this proposal, but was convinced otherwise due to its value.
Our proposal estimates are based on two components: 1) Cost to build, plus 2) Cost of opportunity. The cost to build is what they are and can be seen below. The cost of opportunity or benefit to the community was trickier given that there is no model to follow.
We looked at the following impact criteria: traction, benefit, and ecosystem-wide significance. We decided to use 25% of the total development cost vs ecosystem impact given the fact that it’s something unmeasurable at this time. We all concur that given the fact that Geo-Mesh provided an opportunity to compete for relays to small and large node-runners was worth at least 25% of development costs. Please note that we are requesting $325K and not $324,862.50. This will be adjusted in a final proposal to reflect the exact amount.
We believe that the funding request is fair, evaluated professionally and methodically.
Consensus and voting can be complex processes, especially in larger groups. While it provides a mechanism for making decisions that is transparent and democratic, it can also discourage participation and lead to frustration among members. In our particular case we welcome the engagement, however others may shy away from “town square” debate. Process guardrails may be necessary to encourage participation.
@michaelaorourke I appreciate the context and all the details around the team’s structure and the project. Given the size of the team and the scope of the effort, my main goal right now is to understand if we’re only reimbursing GeoMesh, or poktscan.com with support with forward-looking support.
The origin proposal state that Geomesh timelines were:
Looking at the numbers:
T: Total number of hours across three months (sum) = 3208
A: Average number of hours per week per individual (estimated) = 50
N: Num individuals work A during T = 3208 / 12 / 50 ~= 5
tl;dr The proposal implies 5 FT employees working for 3 months.
I believe the asking amount is fair if we are framing it as GeoMesh + PoktScan V1 + PoktScan V2 reimbursement. Given that the amount of work something like PoktScan takes is significantly larger than GeoMesh, the asking amount could be seen as:
A reimbursement for helping reduce the network’s latency. This is important for the quality of the service but is also a vanity metric on various sites that help in Pocket’s industry presence, even when 10ms don’t actually make a practical difference.
A donation to help continued support of potkscan, an invaluable tool in more ways than one.
In my opinion, 5% of the DAO’s treasury is fair if re-framed as stated above.
When moving this to proposal stage, I recommend updating the asking amount language to the following:
The $POKT equivalent to US $325,000 (using 7-day trailing average of $POKT/USD price at time of approval) to cover development costs and initial maintenance.
Thank you @michaelaorourke for your willingness to disclose your numbers (labor hours etc). I think that is more than sufficient to answer various misconceptions that somehow it is more lucrative to contribute to the ecosystem as a community contributor as opposed to being a salaried or contracted core developer.
Here are my two-cents for what it is worth . I will post almost identically to PoktFund proposal (and TH proposal if/when that comes out).
Evaluating funding size in terms of percentage of treasury is good. Even better, IMO, is evaluating it in terms of how much of the inflow into the treasury it represents. The nuance of difference is important, because the first method tends to promote a “lack” mentality (i.e., “once 20 funding requests of 5% of the treasury are approved, the DAO will be broke”) while the latter keeps in the forefront of the mind that the DAO treasury is more like a river flow to be managed to match inflow and outflow. Currently DAO receives approximately 2M $POKT per month. So this ask represents 2 to 3 months worth of DAO budget. This, to me, seems like the right ballpark for an effort and an impact of this magnitude.
The benefit to the project and the ecosystem of open-sourcing solutions for mutual benefit rather than keeping proprietary to self-benefit cannot be overstated. What behavior does the DAO wish to incentivize. Reimbursing to the level that tells contributors that they will be rewarded adequately for open sourcing will incentivize more of the same in the future. Reimbursing at a miserly level tells contributors that in the future they are better off keeping innovation proprietary and milking every last competitive advantage they can for themselves. To me, the former is a vastly wiser and superior course of action.
Applying the “thinking in bets” idea, also results in the same conclusion. The value poktscan has brought to the ecosystem is tremendous. This is a multi-person effort and there has to be reasonable reimbursement in order to keep the team together and contributing.
Repeating myself a bit: this is a multi-person effort; some of the comments made to the effect that “we support funding but the ask is too high” are likely not taking into account this fact and instead comparing their salary or contract labor rate to this ask as if it were all going to one person. It is not.
We are grateful for all the great contributions that PoktScan made to the Pocket ecosystem. That said, we are not supportive of this reimbursement request for the following reasons:
1\ “Geo-Mesh” feature helps a subset of the service providers in terms of competition, but it does not make Pocket Network better in any significant way.
The network didn’t become more reliable, more cost-efficient, or improved its QoS as a whole because of Geo-Mesh. There were nodes in all high-value regions in the first place, and the CherryPicker chooses the fastest nodes regardless of Geo-Mesh. If anything, Geo-Mesh increased the overall cost of the network, because now, all providers must be on multiple datacenters just to be competitive. Free code is one thing, but provisioning all those gateways in multiple data centers is entirely something else, in most cases, ruling out any small providers with less than a few hundred nodes.
In fact, one could argue that a better proposal might be limiting nodes to a region, therefore helping reduce the cost and improve QoS (if a particular region is all you’ve got for a particular node, you do a much better job for that node in that region).
2\ Reimbursement amount of $325K USD is too high for the deliverable.
Just to put things in perspective, PNI recently asked for 20M tokens for the entire company (60+ personnel), for the foreseeable future, and for a high-value deliverable (i.e., v1), and promised they would deliver v1 even without the grant. Relative to that, this reimbursement request is too much. Finally, nitpicking: the calculation is made based on working hours i.e., “5 FT employees working for 3 months”. We believe that software projects should not be priced based on engineering hours --because less skilled engineers would be paid more.
3\ PoktScan, while a very valuable tool, was running ads for their own services until very recently. For all I know, they can start it again.
Just want to clarify some points. I will leave out all the discussion over pricing and over POKTscan (that is not part of this proposal as stated before).
Its OK to disagree with this proposal, but spreading false arguments is not acceptable.
In fact it did become more reliable, cost-efficient and inprobed QoS.
It is more reliable because the probability of entering a session with a local node went up. This means that apps get less failures because of timeouts.
It is more cost efficient as you dont need to pay for Pocket Nodes deployments in each region.
This statement is misleading. CP chooses among the nodes in its session. Session nodes are chosen randomly. Before GeoMesh the chances of an App being paired with 24 foreign nodes was very high for many regions.
This is already a feature for V1. But we wont get geozones until then.
And even then GeoMesh could be used to enable the same node to be staked in many regions.
They are a 5 star host in my book 
sexy ~69% of the current proposal ask in $ (I am an independent contractor effectively because I am based in London).
… but clearly I need to be exposed to that somehow… hope is not a strategy.
or both.
the team, one of the best in my 20y career).
