Grant Committee compensation discussion

Governance
21

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.

8 Likes
22

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.

3 Likes
23

@senad.eth I 100% agree with you - In all areas and aspects we should be setting up those that come after us for success.
In terms of the multisig signers, I agree with you on some areas, other areas, I am honestly not sure if I do agree with you, although it may only be due to lack of context in how bDAO is suffering.

If is due to proposals not going to snapshot, then why not change the Snapshot Admins?

The main responsibility of any multisig signer is to effectively steward the treasury. Do you feel this is not being done? Have there been transactions that the signers weren’t available for?

Until, as you mentioned the the rights and responsibilities are clearly defined, I don’t believe it to be fair to expect more from the current signers than they consider the requirements.

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GM @Sprinklesforwinners :slight_smile: I’m glad to read we’re aligned with the majority of issues!

I believe every human (organization) goes through periods of suffering & thriving… just like the markets turn red & green. As our last line defense, multi-signers play an important symbolic role for the people, which are beyond their rights & responsibilities. Generally speaking, if we had 7 value-aligned bankless members helping & supporting our community during ups and downs, we’d suffer less.

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hey @links. I recall seeing mention to this a few times. Why isn’t the GC set up for success?

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The idea was: the GC is stating they need more funding because the work they had to do was greater than the compensation offered.

Ok - well if that’s the case, then every GC would have more work than compensation, so the compensation for GC as a whole should go up (ie they should write a bDIP to change the constitution).

Instead, this cohort asked for a raise for themselves but not any other cohort, probably because it was easier. But in doing so, they are leaving the root problem on the table ie there is more work than compensation.

We had the same issue in GC during my tenure, and our approach was to reduce the long-term effort (ie member-based guild funding) while increasing compensation for the next cohort (ie the cohort which worked on a raise didn’t get any benefit of that raise).

IMHO this GC created a bunch of work for themselves that was outside their mandate then asked for compensation for that work. That’s not setting themselves or the GC up for success.

2 Likes