This has been an immense year for the ENS DAO and it was only possible because of the great community. To celebrate the community we are announcing the ENS Scholars 2023: $12000k USDC streamed over a year for the great undervalued talent of ENS and Web3.
We hope to find developers, artists, writers, community builders and anyone who has been working towards the betterment of the ENS community but are not being sufficiently rewarded for it.
It’s a retroactive prize: the scholarship is to reward great work done on the year 2022 which we all hope to see continue towards next year. This isn’t about great ideas or plans for future projects, this is about people who did great and could use some help. It’s also an experiment on governance: if people are paid directly by the DAO via streams, how much value will we get?
ENS Public Goods Scholarships dates:
Nominations: Nov. 30th to Dec. 6th
Nomination review: Dec. 6-7th
Voting: Dec. 8-13th
Confirmation of voting and with awardees: Dec. 13-14th
Announcement: Dec. 15th
Stream set up to start in January: Dec 15-22nd
*Final nominations will be selected by the Public Good Stewards and put to a DAO wide vote. The Public Goods Working Group reserves the right to change the final conditions of the stream and even add termination clauses for it if necessary.
Is this not an ‘ENS Public Goods Scholarship’? Not an ‘ENS Scholarship’.
The scholarship is funded by the Public Goods Working Group, which has a mission to support public goods in web3. It is beyond the remit of the Public Goods Working Group to fund ENS related contributions, that is why the ENS Ecosystem Working Group exists.
Given we already have an ENS Fellowship, funded by the ENS Ecosystem Working Group, which relates to supporting builders contributing to the ENS Ecosystem, naming this the ‘ENS Scholarship’ and not distinguishing it as the ENS Public Goods Scholarship is extremely confusing and undermines the ENS Ecosystem Working Group’s ability to seed similar initiatives without confusion.
So the winners are chosen by a DAO vote, but to even be on the ballet, you had to have been given the privilege by the PG stewards - the same people awarding the money? Amazing. Very democracy.
To help the experiment, if someone does a “great job” there must be proof of it; if there is, why do we need the vote?
The vote must go to approve or not the idea or project presented, otherwise once again the votes will go to those who have not deserved it, it is immoral from my point of view.
Because there are more people who did great work than there are prizes available, and different members of the community may hold different opinions about which kinds of contributions are most deserving of this extra support.
It is important to categorize individuals for the purpose of competition and evaluation in order to ensure that each person is being judged fairly against those in similar roles.
For instance, a chef should not be competing against the best football players in the world, as they have different responsibilities and skills.
Instead, they should be competing with other chefs in a separate competition.
The same applies to ENS, where programmers should not be judged against those who write, speak, inspire, or educate, as these are distinct skills and roles.
To ensure fairness, there should be clear objectives and KPIs in place to evaluate individuals based on merit, rather than personal opinions or cronyism.
By separating individuals into categories, we can ensure that everyone has an equal chance to showcase their abilities and succeed.
The personal opinion of the members cannot define if I have done a good job or not, the KPIs can.
Members must vote on issues that cannot be measured.
There’s a time and place for that, but I don’t think it’s always best.
How would you decide on how many winners each category should have? Who should decide that the second-best chef adds more or less value to advancing the primary objective (public goods) than the first- or third-best football player? There is diversity in the kinds of contributions members of the community value, especially when the primary objective is hard to quantify or measure in a single or hybrid objective and likely-gameable KPI. A vote (particularly in an approval voting strategy setup as used here) seems like a reasonable strategy for the community to reach a collective decision about how to allocate those resources.
The ballot should have included everyone that was nominated, or at the very least, the PG stewards should have explained the criteria they used to remove/disqualify over 2/3 of the submissions.
I’ve asked probably five times and still haven’t got clarification. As it stands now they did it because they felt like it. They basically chose the winners themselves with an added façade of “nominations” and voting. Didn’t even give some canned line about appropriateness or relevance.
Why even have a vote if all of the options are hand-picked? By the same people giving the funding, no less.
There had to be a pre-selection process to ensure that nominees were actually public goods builders that could be funded by the PG WG. If there is no pre-selection process, it falls on delegates to have enough information about what public goods are, to know what to vote for.
With no filtering, delegates would have likely voted for people they liked simply because the builders created projects that aligned with their personal views or beliefs. As you pointed out in your previous post, we have already seen projects receive funding through the PG small grants rounds that are not web3 public goods and should not have been eligible. This occurred because nominations were open to everyone.
So, that’s the tradeoff — either filter nominees to ensure that we are actually funding public goods builders or keep it open and allow delegates to fund nominees that may not be public goods builders.
The first step in the process is to establish categories or criteria for evaluating and recognizing people’s contributions to the ENS. This would provide equal opportunities to all those who work hard to support and develop ENS.
Rewards or recognition should be given in stages, rather than all at once, and should be based on merit and not on the community vote.
Unrecognized work refers: To contributions that are made consistently, genuinely and free of charge over a period of time, but that the community does not recognize or support due to differences in perspective or controversial positions on issues that may affect ENS.
The problem was that the vote was assessing the value of the work done.
The value of this work must be determined based on objective measures, such as statistics, rather than on subjective opinions.
The value of one contribution should not be evaluated over another, for me this is a mistake because all contributions are important.
It is also necessary to clarify what contribution means or what contribution @ens.eth and the DAO are rewarding.
If person X makes a contribution for free without expecting anything in return, or if this person gets a commission for that. Both are contributions, but they are very different.
A compensation mechanism could be created in stages, person X was compensated now and person Y will be remunerated in the future or in another way now. I’m not sure what it’s going to be, we can create it together in the DAO.
We can vote in favor of the idea, for the proposed mechanism, for the date and quantity to be distributed, things like that. But I think it’s a mistake to evaluate someone’s contribution through a vote.
Example:
Nobody, absolutely no one, will say that I have been writing, speaking and discussing in Spanish-speaking spaces in favor of the ENS since 2021. The evidence for this construction should not be evaluated based on how many friends I have, or how many people like me.
It may be necessary to create a contributing research team.
