I’m more than happy to read the discussion here on forum. I wrote an essay as an attempt to address the issue at hand from my perspective.
Introduction
There’s no denial that Coordinape has been and is still a fundamental component of BanklessDAO and any discussion about it was going to lead to ‘heavy’ input from our community. This is good. This is desirable. The more input we have the higher the likelihood of aligning on a path forward that brings us closer to meaningful compensation systems, while the ‘experiment of decentralized compensation’ continues, as @links says. However, as many here pointed out and @Sprinklesforwinners mentioned explicitly, we have to question whether Coordinape, the way it functions as of today, fulfils it’s intended purpose and if not, why? I will attempt to explain my thoughts as concise and precise as possible, in a structured manner, in the following course.
Coordinape - an artefakt?
It might be useful for you, the reader, to know my general theses with regards to the topic of discussion. I don’t want to pretend I’m ‘right’ in my thinking by any means. I’m just trying to offer my take to the problem at hand. I hope the approaches below won’t be dismissed by you, in case you disagree with me. However, I think responsible human beings have to be constantly open to ‘the unknown’ because it uncovers the personal ignorance and allows to grow ones’ knowledge. This is at least my Philosophie. Alright, the theses I was able to think of so far are:
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The better we (the DAO, on every level) are able to scale & compensate members for work - past, present & future - the less we can use Coordinape to do that for us.
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Coordinape is a useful tool for projects in the early development stage, particularly for the ‘not-yet-vetted projects’, and becomes is inaccurate and playable later, where it can be ditched.
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The larger Coordinape cycles are, the higher the likelihood of fraudulent behaviour, as a concentration of contributors can more effectively feed their personal interest on at the expense of everyone else in the round.
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Global (DAO-wide) Coordinape rounds may be subject to an allocation bias, as participants are tempted to allocations similar to the ones conducted locally (guild/department/project).
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The more effective we onboard new members to guilds, departments and projects, the more confident we can be running Coordinape locally, instead of globally.
Coordinape - bootstrapping BanklessDAO in development stage
To understand how I concluded the above one has to understand what Coordinape was useful for. The DAO was launched in May of 2021. A small group of people was given the responsibility to build the foundation of the community-driven organisation, that had yet to become BanklessDAO. These members barely knew what ‘needs to be done’ at that time. How should they? There was the ‘idea’ of BanklessDAO to help Bankless HQ reach all corners of the world, something David & Ryan were not able to get done on their own and needed the community for. This is the narrative I have in my mind. As far as I can tell it’s one we can all align ourselves on, as it has yet to be told differently. So how exactly is this to be done? How to build this ‘flagship’ called BanklessDAO with a few value aligned folks and a token called BANK? How to incentivise current & new members to thrive by contributing to projects and getting stuff done?
Coordinape helped reducing operational overhead. For any project in its early stages, this can be useful as it allows contributors to focus on building. Early stage disputes can be avoided that way too. Further, I believe Coordinape can support a working culture that similar to something like: build something you’re passionate about & you consider meaningful and see if it works. If you succeed, you’ll have a project that can pay you. If you fail, your contributions shall be considered in the next Coordinape by the members.
It’s worth mentioning that we have a Grants Treasury to support project-building. We also have the bounty board to bounty out work and support i.e. freelancers. Coordinape seems to become redundant as a project develops and the scope of work becomes clearer. BanklessDAO distributes 4.5m BANK each season in DAO-wide Coordinape rounds. Per current BANK/hour standard this equals to 4,500 hours of “unpaid work” from community members to be compensated by coordinape, that is not already paid through salaries, locally-run Coordinape rounds, bounties, etc. I have yet to see the economic output that’s equivalent to 4,500 hours of unpaid work a season. With all respect to our community members, this seems like an unreasonable number to me. It’s also not clear to me how this helps the DAO move forward and create a productive environment? To me Coordinape, on a DAO-wide level, has “done its duties” and became an artefact of BanklessDAO and more problems will arise the longer we keep it running at that level.
Effective onboarding to guilds/departments/projects
The more effective we onboard new members to guilds, departments and projects, which shall happen right after joining the DAO by talent coordinators, the more redundant become DAO-wide Coordinape rounds. These organisational units may be the solution ‘at hand’, until we start the next compensation experiment. I’m of the opinion that one has to master the art of DAOing first, then the art of being a guild/department/project member before dealing with DAO-wide governance problems in third place. This seems to be the way of becoming DAO-native to me, not the other way around. Further, governance procurement globally, such as proposal writing, could be compensated soon with a governance body, that has yet to be established but we are getting closer. Paid governance is good governance, right @Jengajojo? No one has to work for free and why should we consider otherwise?
Conclusion
The more I think about Coordinape, it’s flaws and potential improvements, the more I appreciate it for being around. It reduced overhead and allowed members to focus on building, rather than budgeting. It attracted contributors, such as myself, with an uncomplicated way to earn BANK during an epoch. Coordinape serves our smaller organizational units and helps build out our community from the bottom-up. It also helps expressing appreciation for folks to stick around, as we are able to thank them with notes and tell them how important they are to us! Coordinape is also a useful tool for project champions to help them bootstrap internal operations, reduce accounting overhead for a project that has yet to come out of validation- & team-building phase.
That being said, it’s our responsibility to ensure the health of our internal economy. Token inflation happens on expense of hard-working contributors we can’t afford to lose. We have to be careful, mindful and honest to ourselves and the next steps. I hereby second @Jengajojo in his proposed next steps/solutions. We can even go one step further and think about how to utilise these 1.5m BANK? These tokens can i.e. be used as incentives to survey, evaluate and establish ‘hard facts’ about Coordinape and ‘why it doesn’t work anymore on a global scale’ for example. If there’s consensus on my hypotheses, we can use and try and falsify them. It’s quite interesting that BANK has been lend to other members so they 'can experience something of ‘higher value’, that’s something interesting. The context may have been fraudulent and was conducted on expense of others, though we may discovered a potential utility for BANK. This unjust and unfair procurement may allow us to explore something beyond our imagination, something yet to be perhaps invented? There’s a solution ‘at hand’ IMO, and we don’t have to spend more BANK. However, the next experiment might be better than Coordinape, an innovation build for DAOs in growth stage. Maybe it’s out there or we have to invent it… maybe we have to embrace ‘the unknown’ and overcome our personal ignorance another time to start the next stage of innovation at BanklessDAO.