[Temp Check] Community Contribution & Steward Performance (CCSP) Awards Campaign

DAO-Wide Temp Check
1

Community Contribution & Steward Performance (CCSP) Awards Campaign

Purpose

This proposal is an attempt to address the following fundamentals:

  • How can ENS DAO be improved?
  • How can significant ENS DAO contributions be recognized, contributors be encouraged, and efforts rewarded?
  • How can we attract new contributors?
  • How can Working Group transparency be facilitated?
  • How can incentives be aligned in decentralized governance (and ecosystems)?

I propose that all of these can be achieved by recognizing and rewarding exceptional efforts that have improved ENS DAO through an awards campaign, in which participation is entirely voluntary.

The objective is to provide awards that are significant enough to induce participation and friendly competition, while minimizing the potential to “game” the system. Accountability and transparency are happy side effects.

Rationale

It is my belief that the most robust form of decentralization is when each participant is acting in their own self interest. Imagine a spectrum, in which the opposite extreme is coercion.

Since motivations and incentives are often different for elected WG Stewards than for all other community participants, I propose award winners be considered in two separate (but complimentary) brackets.

Specification

[The following amounts are entirely flexible - these are essentially placeholders.]

Steward Performance Awards

  • Steward of the Month
    • Award: qualify to be nominated for quarterly and yearly award. (Stewards are already compensated monthly)
  • Steward of the Quarter
    • $2500 (USDC)
  • Steward of the Year
    • $10000 (USDC)

Community Contribution Awards [Non-Steward]

  • Contributor of the Month
    • 25 $ENS
  • Contributor of the Quarter
    • 100 $ENS
  • Contributor of the Year
    • 500 $ENS

When?

The campaign will run from June 01, 2022 - May 31, 2024.
It may be extended before expiration if the DAO decides to.

How will winners be determined?

Nomination:
On the last day of each month, anyone may open a thread on the ENS DAO Discourse (discuss.ens.domains) using the following format:
[CCSP Award Nominations] Tier, Covered Period

Examples:
[CCSP Award Nominations] Monthly, June 2022
[CCSP Award Nominations] Quarterly, Q4 2022
[CCSP Award Nominations] Yearly, June 2022 - June 2023

Anyone can nominate themselves or someone else for any award, as long as they qualify.

Nomination Template:
One or two “bullet points” using the following format:

  • Who are you nominating? What was done?; What was the impact?

Each item should be no longer than 100 words.

Examples:

  • I nominate François. Translated ten ENS Learn Docs to French; improved accessibility to French speaking community.
  • I nominate myself. Created an ENS sales dashboard; provided detailed statistics about secondary market sales.

Vote:

  • After seven days (on the 7th of the following month), the same person that created the nomination thread should open a poll using the same format as above, replacing “Nominations” with “Vote” in the thread title.
  • The poll options will be the top upvoted nominees (hearts + thumbs ups) from the nomination thread.
  • Poll should be set to end on at 1 PM UTC on the 10th of the month.
  • Poll results should be set to “show after poll ends”

A minimum of five nominees is required, and a maximum of ten.
The winner can decide to keep the award, give it to another person or project, or donate it to a Working Group treasury to be used as they specify.

How can “gaming the system” be avoided?

  • A minimum of five nominees are required for any award to be considered. If there is not enough participation, the award is skipped.
  • Nobody can win the same level award consecutively, except for Steward of the Month.
  • To qualify for a higher level award, all lower level(s) must have been awarded to the nominee. Ex: To qualify for quarterly award, you must have won a monthly award. To qualify for best of the year, you must have won at least one previous month and quarter.

Budget

Total Requested (for two years, as currently written)

  • 40,000 $USDC [from Ecosystem WG]
    • 8 x Steward Performance Award, Quarterly
    • 2 x Steward Performance Award, Yearly
  • 2,400 $ENS [from Community WG]
    • 24 x Community Contribution Award, Monthly
    • 8 x Community Contribution Award, Quarterly
    • 2 x Community Contribution Award, Yearly

Thank you to all that gave feedback on draft versions of this proposal.

Voting ends in one week.

If the majority vote “Yes,” I kindly request @Ecosystem_Stewards and/or @Community_Stewards continue developing and executing this campaign.

Should ENS DAO run this award campaign from June 2022 - June 2024?
  • Yes
  • No
  • Maybe Later

0 voters

1 Like
2

Reposting because I accidentally made the poll question for one year instead of two years the first time, and it erased votes when I changed it.

1 Like
3

Thanks for putting this together, @daylon.eth , I reckon it has a lot going for it.

I know that the Stewards do a hell of a lot of work but I think that the community awards pool could be larger.

For instance, if the Community contribution pool was tripled, we could give three monthly rewards, three quarterly rewards, etc.

Also, to share the :heart: love so to speak, maybe a community member could only win the monthly reward once a year.

I believe rewarding more community members makes the community stronger :rocket:

4 Likes
4

I found out in the budget EP that the stewards have a semi-annual award (given to the lead steward) within each WG, nominated by other stewards at their discretion, amounting to 900 $ENS per six months per WG; 3600 $ENS in total every term. It makes sense to slash the steward awards and put up more capital rewarding the community of which there are more members.

3 Likes
5

Honestly I think we could probably add a zero to every amount and be fine. The DAO isn’t hurting for revenue.

3 Likes
6

Yeah I don’t know if you have noticed but it doesn’t show. From the looks of it, we are destitute.

2 Likes
7

Specific award amounts aside, I want to see the spirit of this initiative implemented in some form. Yes this was a bump. :sweat_smile:

2 Likes
8

Contributor Rewards
I would like to see something like this within each working group — whether it be a rewards program and/or a discretionary budget where Stewards can reward contributions during a Term.

My feeling is that the Stewards of each WG might be better placed to assess the value of contributions rather than it all coming from the Community WG. Of course, Stewards of each WG would assign grants only after consultation with the community in the form of nominations and feedback.

Steward Rewards
I don’t think we can/should reward Stewards in the same way.

Under rule 10.3 of the WG Rules:

“Stewards may not receive compensation for their role as a Steward outside of that compensation expressly provided for in a Collective Proposal submitted to the DAO in accordance with rule 10.2.”

(This rule was included to guard against Stewards using WG funds to pay themselves outside of what was approved in a previous budget.)

Stewards are already compensated and where a Steward participates in a subgroup, they can also be compensated as a contributor.

The simple solution here is to pay Lead Stewards more for their work or have an amount requested and Stewards decide amongst themselves how that is distributed, based on WG feedback. Going into the Second Term, we have a much better idea of the sort of work and commitment required from Stewards and I see no reason why that wouldn’t be fairly compensated.

If there are strong feelings about specifically creating a rewards program for Stewards, we would just need to include the program in the next Collective Proposal (WG funding requests) before it can be implemented.

6 Likes
10

Alright, voting has ended with a small but pretty clear sentiment - it seems those active here in the forum want this implemented. I request a Steward or Stewards continue developing this idea and take the next steps to make it happen. I would be happy to lead the initiative, just DM me.

2 Likes
11

May I suggest removing this requirement ?

If only four people are nominated, why should that disqualify a deserving award recipient?

2 Likes
12

The rationale behind that minimum is to prevent a couple of people from just winning by default.

2 Likes
13

No one is going to develop or implement this idea for you Daylon. Now that you have the temp check passed, you need a delegate with 10,000 $ENS tokens to initiate the Snapshot poll. I’ll recommend hijacking the delegate DMs and requesting a delegate to initiate the poll for you. If you wait for the stewards to do anything, you’ll be waiting 10 lifetimes. Remember to incorporate the comments and rearrange the amounts though.

1 Like
14

I really hope this gets through, @daylon.eth.

It’s a great initiative and I’m hoping that by rewarding community members, it will make people feel a sense of belonging and that their efforts are recognised and appreciated.

I also hope you can increase the number of recipients for each award to help spread the love because as you mentioned, the DAO is not poor, especially given the recent increases in registrations and renewals.

This month’s figures are amazing, are they not? With more and more people feeling like they are part of something big, these numbers will surely grow and grow.

Let’s get this one up and running :heart: :rocket:

image
image1510Ă—1140 132 KB

3 Likes
15

Thanks a lot for saying that. I hope to have at least planted a seed. I’ll keep working on it.

16

Feel free to write this up as a draft proposal! I’d suggest, though, that either it should be reworked as a DAO-wide proposal, with the funds coming from the DAO wallet into a newly-created multisig in charge of allocating the awards, or it the funds should be added to one WG’s budget request for the next term. Neither WG was expecting to fund this, so taking that much from them for one effort seems unlikely to pass.

4 Likes
17

@daylon.eth Sorry I didn’t respond to this thread earlier. For the record I am definitely for something like this! Please continue work on this and create a draft proposal!

I agree with Alisha though that it technically shouldn’t apply to Stewards though, since that was laid out pretty clearly in EP4.

5 Likes
18

I also support the slashing of steward awards altogether and adding those funds to the contributor awards.

2 Likes
19

Was someone proposing this? This seems like a bad idea.

20

Perhaps some clarification or amendment is required in regard to section 10 of EP4 (Creation of Foundational Working Groups and Working Group Rules) as @Alisha pointed out.

image
image854Ă—296 22.9 KB

21

Since Stewards already have internal awards among themselves, it doesn’t make sense that they are awarded twice. That was the rationale to skip the stewards in this proposal.