Category: Treasury Management - Budgeting
Scope: 3,000 Badger
Status: Pending
Objective: Make it easier to use fast bounties and rewards to bring the team and community closer and help us find and engage top talent.
TLDR; 1-3 sentence summary of BIP:
Tritium keeps offering bounties he’s not authorized to pay out. This requires significant governance/management work to deal with. Grant Tritium 3k badger to pay out at his own discretion over the next 6 months. Bounties will be posted on the Badger Discord in the Badger Bounty Billboard channel, tracked and reported by Tritium, and paid by the treasury. No single person will receive more than 300 BADGER from this program.
Overview:
The team is super busy and the world wants everything built and perfect, sooner than soon:tm:. This has created a real talent crunch at badger where most of the key team members are so busy they don’t have time to find, evaluate and onboard new people.
Over the last weeks I have been working to bring the team and community closer together by trying to figure out where/how we can tap resources from the community to help us build. Last weekend we set a bounty to track flow across the bridge, and by Sunday we had 2 good solutions, the cost, 150-200 badger.
This BIP is to grant Tritium discretionary budget over 3000 badger to pay out in bounties. No single person will receive more than 300 badger of this money.
Details
This BIP will expire 6 months after approval or when all the allocated funds are spent. The time/budget may be extended by another BIP, or other budgetary process that exists at that time. It is my hope that this will be a one time BIP, and that this program will not remain a personal endevour.
Implementation
All badger will be held in the treasury, payments will be tracked and paid out/accounted for in the same way as our other grants are paid out at the end of each month.
The specific bounty recipients and the amount they received will be listed on the monthly Grants BIP as information only.
These bounties will be excluded from grants consideration and voting process as long as there is still budget available and the person in question has received under 300 Badger through this program.
The Badger used will be pulled from the Dev Mining Allocation.
Stipulations based on comments:
All bounties of over 10k USD on the date of completion of bounty are subject to approval by the Badger Council.
The Badger Council holds veto rights over all bounties.
Tritium will sequester himself from all council deliberations concerning this program.
Should we allocate 3000 Badger to be spent on discretionary bounties.
The idea of creating budgets to be managed by individuals building out segments of the builder team makes sense, but I’m strongly against this proposal until we come up with a proper structure for doing so.
I think before we allocate some arbitrary amount of Badger to Tritium, we should at least have a high level budgeting plan for the appropriate “groups” and designated “group leaders”.
A structured BIP for sub-budgets should include what would qualify for funds from it, the parameters/limitations/time frames, and how this would coincide or conflict with the Badger Grants Program
This BIP is not part of the grants program, but an exceptional request for a small amount of funds to fund a program that is very visible by the community, successfully delivering results, and is based on promise of Badger that has not actually yet been approved.
I see this as an experimental program outside Badger Grants or the normal structures currently in place setup to bring the community and team closer together and quickly attract added talent to get right to work without the need for a lot of assessment and evaluation of applicants. This is the right thing right now for a busy and growing DAO.
I think what’s happening is clear, and see nothing out of order with requesting some secure funding from the DAO holders to insure this program can continue, precisely without the team having to spend time considering every bounty/grant.
The program, and its results, can be assessed at any time and/or upon completion (badger is spent) and used as a model for the sorts of frameworks you mention.
Also note that 3000 badger is not really a significant amount of money in need of a complex budgetary process.
I’ve seen the people Tritium has been engaging and believe that overall this is a reasonable request with some rails to provide the DAO full insight. The people he wants to bring in will help increase the tools available to the community to transparently and fairly participate in the DAO through increased access to information.
I agree with @DeFiFrog in that it needs more structure but think it can be hashed out relatively quickly.
For example:
6 Months, 24 weeks with 3000 Badger spread evenly across it would give @Tritium 125 Badger a week the discretion to distribute for valuable contributions
I suggest that on a weekly basis all grants from that period are highlighted. A twitter thread would suffice. If at any time the DAO feels that Tritium is no longer able to identify good contributors/contributions then a vote may be brought forth.
I’m not sure that makes sense. I pushed out 4 bounties this weekend for varying amounts, that may be completed at various times. Take a look at the Badger-Bounty-Bilboard on Discord and see if you can come up with a better structure.
Happy to give the council, which is an elected body (I will not participate,) veto power if that helps. Or very open to hashing out a more open structure that works.
I suppose payouts can not be more than 125 a week if that helps and people can wait in line to get paid, but that seems silly based on how much badger we have in the treasury and how little badger this is relatively speaking.
I do not see why VLK is getting so much resistance?
Using the metrics of why badger.com domain name or why new hires were given $1 million for approx 12 months contracts, it only makes sense we expediate VLKs request.
Bounties are there to help Badger DAO grow. VLK clearly says this is an experimental run and is using his own initiative to get off the ground. We should not be putting up barriers rather let this experiment run.
I’m happy to take a few more suggestions to make it proper and fair and follow good governance. It’s fine for people to question stuff, to change the BIP as a result, and make it better. I wish we did more of it.
I have already added a line to the BIP giving the council veto power over payments as a matter of good process. I 'll continue to accept any and all feedback for the next 24 hours or so, and then promote this around Discord a bit and see what happens. If it doesn’t get through snapshot and pass, I’ll just take 45 minutes of everyones time in meetings once a month explaining why everyone should get paid. This is also fine with me, and I am confident bounties will get paid.
I encourage suggestions/ constructive feedback. This is what a DAO is all about. However, by the same token the members who have raised issues with the proposal are the very people that got their BIPs pushed through in a short time frame.
I see your proposal doing good for Badger DAO. Some things require less discussion then others. In my opinion this is one such example.
My point was more to create a rate limit or decide boundaries upon which the community could step in if necessary (it won’t be IMO). If the council is up to having veto power I think that would be a good option.
More generally I think having initiatives lead by an increasing number of people is favorable for our status as a DAO and ultimately we can build a lot of tools to empower communities to manage their DAOs across the ecosystem just by building things that will be useful to us, which is what I believe your goal is and why I’m supportive
Let me know if you think the BIP can be further improved beyond granting veto power to the Council.
There is also a limit set of 300 badger per person, which at todays price is about $9k. Based on the points @MoMoMo made above. I don’t think it seems that unreasonable to pay any technologist 9k for a serious bit of work, regardless of whether we use it, as a way to attract talent and encourage our community to focus on building.
I could lower that number to 150 or 200 if you think that would be better and require Council approval above that. Or how about more than 10k USD at time of bounty completion requires council approval?
I would be a fan of creating a $BADGER locked discord channel with a ~1 badger threshold.
Spitballing here because the game theory needs to be examined but… In this channel the council could have the only posting rights. At any time any council member could put up a proposal and get community consensus via emoji voting. Thumbsup/thumbsdown.
If it reached a certain threshold a BIP would be posted explaining the change during which a ~48 pause would be observed on grants while it’s reviewed.
I don’t believe this would ever need to happen with your grant, but would be a beginnings of an extensible budgeting/decision framework
I’d like to see the Council get more active. If we asked them more questions, they could figure out elaborate of all kinds to consult the community, and if they don’t the community can replace them First we have to ask them more questions. Does 10k USD seem like a good limit or lower.
I’m not paying any of it, you are at the end of the month I assume with everyone else. The council can look over the list and decide if anything is off, or the team can take any concerns they have to the council.
Shall we just say that all bounties are subject to approval by the council, which will be done at the end of each month prior to bounty payout?
This money isn’t given up front. It’s given to people who successfully complete work that badger needs done and interact with our code at a time when we are starved for good tech talent.
For example I offred 150 badger for someone to build tracking for the birdge for Daowatch this weekend.
@gosuto from our community submitted this within 36 hours Dune Analytics. He is now helping the team with other analytics tasks. I think this is worth 150 badger (we won’t also pay him full time this month or anything), do you disagree? Go look at the bounties posted and let me know if any of them seem unreasonable. That’s actually more interesting to me than autonomy. I can just pretend I have it anyway and then figure it out afterwards
We have another submission for the bounty for daowatch, we’re polishing off some last bits. That bounty will not be considered complete for payment until it’s finished.
No one is paid a bounty that doesn’t consider work that at least a few people think has merit. This is asking for the autonomy to offer a price up front for work done (it’s more engaging) not to pay someone for work they have not yet completed.
I can’t comment on @jamlog and his bounty because I was not involved in the assessment and do not know if the work was completed or to what standard.
Further, what’s done is done and can only be learned from, and I agree we shouldn’t pay people before work is done or if they didn’t actually do that much work. I also wonder about some of the people on our payroll month after month and wouldn’t mind a bit more detail from the team about what everyone was actually doing.
I think a lot of the strategic advisors are around to help Spada figure out how to manage a 1 billion dollar DAO and a growing team which erupted over night, but I’d think they’d all be interested in sharing a little more with the community about their advisory.
As to the other grant recipients, I can only say that I’d be more than happy to write up a few sentences about my work each week to be considered for the BIP and answer any polite questions about it. That being said. I’m more extrovert and have more patience than many. If we are to do this, I think it would only be fair and reasonable that the core/seed team members do the same.
I personally would love to read 2-3 page review of everyones comments from the ground. People are busy, and I think it can be hard for the person putting this together to collect all that information. We’re working on it. These conversations are good. They just have to be constructive and not about holding grudges or digging up dirt.
Sorry i didn’t read everything. But based on the first replies and my POV:
3000 BADGER is a lot , especially for 6 months. So i can understand that some people are against this. BUT it’s also important to have quickly available found to pay for “daily stuff” . Just for info, I just received my prize for the DIGG logo contest. It was a few months ago ! I think this is not very serious. Especially when people are working full time and on tasks dedicated for that. And it’s even more important for bounties as people are really spending time and doing a proper job (not so important for a logo contest)
Personally I’d support this idea and @Tritium . Some other members are very hard to reach and communicate with. But @Tritium is always here and accessible and helping to make collaborations with other projects.
Maybe something to do. It to create a small multi-sig for this purpose. I think the core team is composed of several people for communication/budget/marketing/grant … And those members are full time.
So setting up a small multi-sig for small bounties should be very easy to do and the Tx should be approved very quickly. So we keep the flexibility, and all those $BADGER are not directly control by VLK.
Thanks for your example. Part of the joy of doing a bounty is getting paid fast for your work and feeling good. It’s kind of like this basic dopamine kick thing that facebook makes a business out of.
While I don’t think it’s the end of the world to take weeks/months to pay someone on a bounty. The whole point is to make people want to do more constructive work with and for badger. This works so much better when good work is quickly followed by a good job, it being highlighted, and payment being promised/made in a reasonable period of time without any kickback/bs.
I take pride and full responsibility in and for the things I do. The main point of this BIP is making sure that I have the autonomy to provide bounty hunters trying to get productively involved with Badger a positive first experience that makes them hungry for more.
This BIP gives veto rights to the council which is a mix of team and community as the kind of mini-multisig you suggested. This was in response to @mason’s constructive feedback.
