I’m a bit unhappy with something and I thought I would post on the forum to get some consensus.
It’s based on this post and our S7 Snapshot, in which the Grants Committee asks for 100K additional BANK this season, because they posted some forum posts. This would be on top of the existing funding for Grants Committee, which is…
50K BANK base pay
+ 25K BANK for each lead
+ a piece of a 250K BANK coordinape each season
The 250K coordinape was added in S5 to help account for some of the extra work that GC members were doing in reviewing posts and improving the Grants Committee procedures.
My issues with this:
The GC post has not reached quorum. It only has 27 votes.
They aren’t setting the next cohort up for success. I actually believe the Grants Committee should get a raise - this will help us attract more talent (we don’t even have a full cohort next season). Unfortunately, the way this “raise” has been handled, only this cohort gets this bonus. They could have written a bDIP to amend the constitution to help us beef up our Grants Committee, but decided instead to focus on only their cohort.
I am glad the Grants Committee exists, and has been improving the grants process, but I’m pretty unhappy with the way this one-time bonus has been handled. Am I missing something?
Perhaps members of the Grants Committee could chime in on why this 100K bonus is justified, and why they don’t think there are governance quorums, and why they didn’t write a bDIP for this?
Are you happy with this one-time bonus for the Grants Committee as described above?
Yes
No
Maybe
0voters
Do you think the Grants Committee should get a raise in general?
While the S6 grants committee spent more time on stage with 2 weekly calls (one being strategy related - sometimes even both weekly calls when there were no grants proposals) there is the argument to be made that the primary task of reviewing proposals was in fact less work compared to previous seasons.
i don’t think the point of this is to get semantical or even specific, but to raise concerns about how we are making decisions. centralization of decision-making authority has its place (I think we need more of it in the DAO!), but no where less so then here. i would mark this, yet again, as a failure in the seasonal transition process (funding and otherwise), and less so a comment on the particular motivations of the movants.
omnibus voting has proved to be a failure, again and again, here and elsewhere. the efficiency gained is notable, but the processes we have to get there are immature.
I’m not sure how I feel about GC getting a bonus, I suppose I need to look again at the proposal, but does above quote with the heading “they aren’t setting up the next cohort for success, be more of a reason to not get a raise?
However, that being said. I figure I would need to get a better grasp on the reasoning for this bonus
I see the original proposal as invalid because it doesn’t include success metrics requested by the community.
Failure to supply these should be a breach of GC duty of care as part of mandate (quoted in the proposal itself amongst other things).
Also from OP post
We made this poll to test if the 250K comp for this work is enough or if it should be more. In the past GCs have not been transparent enough with how this bonus would be paid, which is why we suggested KPIs.
This sounds like the OP poll was a test and thus should not be acted upon.
The original S5 post which approved a bonus for GC did not come with KPIs, which is why we wanted to gather feedback on this. However it is not possible to implement KPI based unlock without first having consensus on what and how it should be. I trust that S7 GC would work on this
The core problem here as @hirokennelly correctly points out is:
I think you need to take a second look at your sources
Looking at these posts, the first one was not a governance post and the second did achieve quorum.
According to the linked post (and your own post): « A bonus salary should be granted as a Coordinape round. This bonus salary should compensate for Grants Committee members who e.g. initiate process improvements to the Grants Committee, initiate an evolution of the Grants Committee mandate or initiate an evolution of the DAO as a whole within the mandate of the Grants Committee. »
Sounds like operations to me.
I don’t feel your 4 changes are higher output than any previous grant committee. But regardless of my feelings, you took the changes to the DAO and were unable to achieve quorum on a bonus.
…I mean, YOU were the one who was asking the bonus to be included. Why are you pointing at the seasonal transition process when you were pushing for the non-quorum post to be included?
I agree seasonal transition could be improved, but people insisting there is no governance quorum is a far more dangerous issue IMHO
What other category will you put the first post in? or who decides which category this goes in?
As for the second one, the quorum for a major update is 63, now the post itself does not claim which type of update this is. So in case of disagreement who decides?
That is my point, there is no consensus on what is quorum for governance posts, we can’t even agree on what post is a governance post and what is not? Let’s take the the example of this post itself, is this a governance post’? what is the quorum? who decides this?
Can you point to the source which states what quorum we have for governance posts?
I agree the constitution does a poor job in defining what different kinds of “proposals” exist. It states that there are only two types: grant requests and bDIPs (governance proposals). Personally I disagree with this. The DoinGud and Seasonal spec are both not bDIPs, so clearly the constitution is lacking. I think we both agree here.
HOWEVER, in the same section linked about, it clearly states quorums for governance:
Thank you for pointing this out. As you have clearly identified, there are no other posts except bDIPs and Funding asks according to the consituttion, however, Shield Voting and DoinGud both failed to be in these categories and yet have proceeded to snapshot. This means that the quorum which you point to is only restricted for bDIPs
@Jengajojo I will also mention here that we seem to be doing a lot of experiments that end with no analysis or follow through.
I am curious, what is/was the goal of this experiment?
I would also like for us to strongly consider the ramifications of experimenting with contributor payments.
I would also like for us to consider a few standards for these experiments - to reduce ambiguity and presenting facts and options in a clear way.
Governance quorums have been discussed previously. For reference:
In regards to this post specifically @links, I agree with you. I voted no. We shouldn’t receive this one time bonus. Reason being - as I have stated during GC meetings - we should value quality over quantity.
I think a more reasonable reading of this is that all proposals that aren’t grants proposals have the quorum requirements listed above.
As for your specific examples
DoinGud was a grant request, not governance (IMHO) so one would expect a grant quorum to need to be reached. I think we should look at this as an outlier as it was passed right after the constitution and the follow through on the constitution was pretty bad. I would not expect another proposal to follow this path, it fell through the cracks
Shielded voting achieved minor governance quorum and was pushed to snapshot.
DoinGud was more than grants since it involved the following:
A dedicated number of seats in DoinGud DAO governance.
Collaboration on future events (including priority sponsorship tiers at a discount).
Amplified exposure as a community for good (recognition on website and social media).
A sizable discount and allow-list access to the DoinGud membership NFT sale upcoming for all BanklessDAO L1+ members.
If we are to question or excuse ourselves for the decisions made in the past, then it reflects poorly on our ability to make decisions, which is what Hiro pointed to earlier and is the crux of the problem.
Shield voting does not state what category of upgrade it is. You might say its a minor upgrade, I might claim that it is a major upgrade, someone else might claim that it’s just a patch. This is exactly the problem with quorums framed as bDIPs,
All ‘governance posts’ need to fall into one of the three categories
We all need to agree on what category anything falls under
The post then needs to meet that required quorum even though it is never intended to modify the constitution
We agree on so much @Jengajojo. Perhaps we should discuss the points we don’t agree in the next governance call?
Personally I think a bigger problem is acting like we are a long-standing, established institution like a Supreme Court where all previous decisions set precedent which are then binding forever. We are a group of mainly volunteers who are attempting to build a next-generation organization. Mistakes will happen. Rather than embed those mistakes as “precedent” and march off a cliff, we could learn from our mistakes and make ourselves more resilient as an organization.
The rest of your post are your opinions, which while I’m glad you have them, don’t really have standing here. The only people with the authority to push proposals to snapshot are the BanklessDAO multisig. Since they have this authority, I believe they also have the responsibility to ensure that these proposals meet quorum. In this case, they failed in that duty.
This comment isn’t relevant or helpful to this discussion. I believe if you were to ask this question in the appropriate place - which is Discord Ops channels in my opinion - then you would have many useful responses.
Seeing as we’re here, Ops Guild workstreams are where we ensure Discord, Notion, Community Call, and other essential DAO operations are kept … operational.
