Grant Committee compensation discussion

Thanks for your post @links

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.

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The cohort before this one also had two weekly calls.

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Yes, but only twice and not weekly as the S6 cohort :slight_smile:

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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.

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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

Answered no to both because GC hasn’t posted any KPIs or progress towards KPIs.

Happy to support performance related incentives, but as it stands no metrics are set up or openly communicated.

Similar reason to the comment by @Icedcool on the OP proposal [Community Vote] Grants/Funding Strategy for S7 - #2 by Icedcool

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.

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  1. This post Snapshot did not pass quorum and was sent to snapshot
  2. Snapshot Voting - Implement Shielded Voting did not pass quorum or snapshot and yet it is being implemented in the current snapshot

Thus it is not necessary to pass quorum for governance posts to proceed to snapshot

The GC bonus was not meant to compensate grant operations but grant strategy according to [Community Vote] Season 5

In line with this mandate, the S6 GC strategy meetings has resulted in 4 outputs, which is much higher than any of the past GCs referred here
a. [Community Vote] Grants/Funding Strategy for S7
b. Purpose Driven Guild Funding

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:

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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

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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.

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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.
  1. 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.

  1. 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

If that were true, then:
a. Coordinape Incident Report and next steps
b. BanklessDAO - Tokenomics 1.0

are both governance posts and since I consider them as major upgrades, they should receive 63 votes, but I am sure that someone might disagree with me

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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.

@Icedcool @frogmonkee @0x_Lucas @Eagle @RedVan @Kouros @AboveAverageJoe do you care to chime in? Since you 7 are the only ones who can push stuff to snapshot, do you have an opinion on whether or not there exist quorums to do so?

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This post is only to highlight one thing that I have noticed here and of other threads during the bDAO’s Season 7 related posts.

Why do we have an Operations Department?

I agree. There are better methods to work this out.

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.

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I agree with your stance here, links - this part in particular resonates:

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.

Likewise your query about whether the multi-sig members would like to chime in resonates with me. It’s my understanding that a couple of these members are very active and engaged (and appreciated), and it seems unfair to them (and the rest of the DAO) that the others really aren’t.

I suggest that might be one reason things ‘fall through the cracks’ so often. One of the tasks I have committed to in recent days is to produce a database of all DAO-wide governance decisions in Snapshot and the Forum, in an attempt to capture the governance path as it stands, without the need to click back and forth to compare various proposals and their outcomes. That is in progress and I’ll commit to doing it for future votes as well.

One of the early Snapshot posts caught my eye though - it is dated Sept 2021 and is for the transfer of the DAO multi-sig from the Genesis team to elected DAO members. In that proposal it states:

Timing & Tenure: One month before the start of a season elections will be held to determine the multisig wallet holders for the upcoming season. Eligibility Any DAO member is eligible to apply. There are no term limits.

This is one of those situations where everybody’s job has become nobody’s job, and is why a Governance Dept probably is a good idea. As a DAO, we have been remiss in ensuring an appropriate refresh of multi-sig signers, or in fact requiring multi-sig signers to remain informed and active in DAO operational and governance. Given that these members are the ones who can bring votes to Snapshot, it’s crucial that they do so on an informed, consistent basis. It’s fallen on our most active signers to try to be across all this for too long.

I think we will be more resilient as an organisation if we respect precedent but recognise mistakes and take the time to figure out which situation applies together, as a community. Lately all our governance decisions feel very rushed (is that just my impression?). Our priority for Season 7 must be to sort out the Constitution - the introduction of which only seems to have quadrupled governance confusion across the DAO.

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Hey everyone :slight_smile:

I’m excited about the engagement on this posr (and in general on forum, lol) despite crypto-winter and the bear market. Some of the most valuable contributions a community member can make is engaging in discourse, trying to solve a complex problem to come closer to the truth, as a community. This contributes to the process of building the organizational resilience we need in order to thrive as a community, during ups but also during downs!

GC Mandate & Compensation

Per bDAOs constitution, the GC is responsible for reviewing midseason funding requests. The GC had a strong focus on governance in S6. We had two weekly 1hr calls (one on Monday one one Tuesday) leading to very vibrant governance discussions. The impact was several proposals submitted to the DAO, including project & department funding templates, a project assessment framework, and a purpose-driven guild funding model (as alternative to member based guild funding).

The S5 GC cohort had the DAO-wide coordinape round to cover for governance procurement. Before Coordinape was games, this was a good way to receive recognition for governance related work. Given that DAO-wide Coordinape rounds aren’t conducted anymore, one could argue that the 100k ask by the GC was to somehow compensate for that. However, one can also argue we had less midseason grants request to review, so the S6 cohort workload must have been lower than in S5, hence why the 250k Coordinape could have been enough to compensate for that. On the other side we don’t have enough GC applicants, so the GC could need a raise to incentivise members to apply for positions. It seems to me that no matter how you turn it, there is no ideal solution. However, I think it’s clear that the S6 GC had no bad intention asking for more governance rights in form of BANK for the governance related work that has been done, especially given that DAO-wide coordinape rounds were paused.

Setting the GC up for success

What the S6 cohort may have missed along the way was to reevaluate whether asking for a 1-time funding is the best solution to account for the two-folded approach we had in S6. This is why I’m really glad @links started this discussion. Asking for a 1-time funding hasn’t really setup the next cohort for success but a raise in general maybe would have? I don’t know, only 28% of the members seem to support this.

Multi-Signers - Governance - Rights & Responsibilities

To also add my 2 BANK to the multi-signer discussion.

Most bDAO multi-signers aren’t active community members today. They may represent our values and the DAO IRL, however they don’t really serve the DAO as active community members. @Icedcool & @AboveAverageJoe are doing most of the work. Work, that’s supposed to be done by 7 people. This begs the question whether our mulit-signers are set up for success? Certain rights & responsibilities on the smart contract level shall define the roles of our multi-signers are thing and they should be active community members!

I consider multi-signers to be some sort of community leaders. They are able uphold the DAOs’ vision, they hold contributors accountable, they move consensus on-chain, they „ideally“ are a diverse set of people (as bDAO is very diverse), they could be geographically decentralized, so spread across the world. These folks are responsible for bDAOs core governing body and could give the community direction, help innovate, drive culture & value to the DAO. They are the guardians of our funds and the DAO. They ensure we have our stuff together on the core level, so all other organizational units can work properly and value-aligned. If a tree trunk suffers, its branches will suffer. Currently, bDAO suffers and over 50% of our signers are not here to help. I don’t imply causality, but there may be some correlation. Maybe people don’t feel led. Maybe people need a voice of faith in difficult times. Our signers could ensure the bankless values transcend over time. They have a track record and served the community in the past and they are ready to serve the community going forward.

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