I think the issue with this is that it doesn’t give the stewards much control over who does a job, and it doesn’t give the people doing the work any assurance they’ll be paid. It’s difficult to see how you’d run a swag store, or manage an endowment, using a system like this.
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The exact same mechanism used for this proposal can be used for mine to control this. Like I suggested:
Neither does yours.
My idea was actually created to ensure this, two months ago, and it does, more-so than this proposal. There aren’t any further assurances in your proposal to assure people getting paid, than there are in mine, in fact, there are fewer in yours due to my idea solving the expectation of compensation.
No. You’d use the same mechanisms for gating as you’d use here.
I’m not sure I understand your proposal, then. As I understand it, you would have an open bounty, anyone can do the work and then come to the stewards afterwards to be paid. How does this provide assurance they’ll get paid, or prevent multiple people doing the work?
Can you write up parallel examples to the ones I gave, showing how they’d operate under your proposal?
It’s a system intended for closed workgroups. As it stands now, those workgroups contains selected people and aren’t open to the public. I’d share your concerns if the bounties were open to the public.
The same gating mechanisms used for your proposal, would be applicable to my idea and final approval of accepting a task or approving work altogether before payment could easily be in the purview of stewards.
ENS doesn’t have “closed workgroups”. We have elected stewards of each WG, but WG membership is open to anyone.
In that case I don’t understand how your proposal differs from the RFP process.
Can you please provide examples of how it would work in practice, using the examples in my post?
They are ipso facto as closed or open as your proposal entails, neither more nor less.
I think that’s more clearly explained in my original post A Dynamic Task Reward System for Workgroups
I don’t understand what this is supposed to mean.
Your original post doesn’t provide any examples of the process in action either.
I’ll try to think of an intuitive way to explain it by tomorrow afternoon.
I think some worked examples mirroring the ones in my post would be simplest and most illustrative.
I’ve written up a proposed process for dealing with RFPs in this docs pull request. If there are no strong objections I would like to merge it and try the process out with some initial RFPs for stuff we’ve already identified that needs doing.
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I like the concept and specially having always a clear ownership model of proposals.
I do think however that not all RFPs should be DAO wide. Funding a swag store should be coming from the ecosystem group, and only if that is not happening should there be a wide snapshot vote to tell them to do it.
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DAO Docs
Tasks that needs to be done are published in, for example Clarity, like we do now, except a base and maximum reward is attached to it. The price will gradually increase from the base reward to the max reward until someone accepts the task and starts working on it. Then that task will be “off the market”.
The task has a set deadline by which it needs to be changed to “In Review” status by which point stewards would look over the quality of work and if satisfactory mark it as finished and pay out the reward, or send it back for further edits if there are smaller things that needs to be corrected.
In the case of work being done very poorly or not at all, stewards could change the ownership of the task to put it back on the market and/or assign someone else.
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Does this explain it more clearly? It’s not intended to encompass things like running a swag store in and of itself, but rather to act as an incentive to get work done through tasks.
By open/closed to the public I’m referring to how anyone on the internet can’t just log into the task platform and start accepting tasks. There are gating mechanisms (albeit not intended as such) in that you need to request access to the DAO, speak to someone to get added to the workgroup etc.
While anyone can do that, it eliminates most of the issues with “open to the public bounties” in practice.
I’d like to add that in my experience working in workgroups, the main issue isn’t tooling or communication, but over-managing and far too much bureaucracy for the size of the workgroups. It seems as if the top is designing systems to facilitate thousands of workers for global cooperation, while active workers are <10
The idea that multiple people would submit proposals to do the same thing for ENS to then sit back and cherry pick the best ones is pretty far removed from the reality of the DAO right now. We don’t have enough active workers for that.
I really think that the best thing to do, in order to make the DAO conducive to work being done, is to stop managing it from the top and instead let it grow naturally from the ground up via the workers. I fully expect that different workgroups will need different models, and the best way to figure that out is to just start the work with as little red tape as possible and then see what works and what doesn’t work.
Just my 1c.
Right, this is handled in the process docs - stewards can choose to pay for an RFP directly out of WG funds.
The problem with this is that it pretty much enshrines hiring the cheapest bidder. We could spend a lot of time waiting for people who are incapable of doing a job to fail, so that we can put the job back on the market and try again.
That’s an intentional feature in order to help with sustainability and avoid careless spending of public funds. It’s generally viewed as desirable when dealing with public funds in non-profits and most countries even employ laws like that for government contracts.
When that isn’t used you inevitably run into issues with nepotism and corruption.
The one worry I can see is that the lowest bidder would produce work that isn’t good enough, which is where final approval of the work before payment by the stewards comes into play.
The idea was made to solve exactly that. I came up with it because the docs workgroup stalled for months. The way it’s intended to solve it is by putting the reward as a direct incentive to complete the task on time. If you don’t complete it you’re not paid, and since it’s intended for bite-sized tasks the due date can be set pretty aggressively (say 7 days) and each user would be limited in how many tasks they can simultaneously accept.
You’d be able to have the task fail to be completed by 12 different users before you’d reach the same level of delay that currently exists.
However, I don’t think it would be a big issue right now. The workgroups are quite small and if someone repeatedly doesn’t finish tasks they could be excluded from the workgroup. If and when workgroups grow large enough to encompass thousands of users the idea might need to be modified or changed, but we’re not there yet.
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I don’t know if governments and non-profits are a shining example of good execution 
Given how large the ENS treasury is, and how slow the DAO has been to start thus far, I’d be much more concerned with making sure we actually start spending funds than being worried about being too inefficient, at the moment (it’s easier to go more restrictive later than the other way around, in my experience). This is a problem I see a lot in DAOs generally: massive treasuries, but skittish about spending any of it.
This is why a lot of DAO tools companies still raise from VC, even though many would rather get funded by DAOs, btw. DAOs make it too hard / too long to get funded, while VCs will write you $1M literally in a day in the current environment.
If we could come up with a more predictable model, I think you’d see more groups coming in for smaller amounts, more frequently, because they have a reasonable confidence they can get the proposal through in a reasonable timeframe and get what they need, as long as they have proven execution ability.
The other issue (and I hear this a lot from really prominent groups in the space) is that often a group will make a proposal to do some work for a DAO, go through a whole proposal process, and then another group will basically fork that work and get their own proposal through instead before the first one gets approved. If this can be addressed in this RFP model @nick.eth , I think that would be really good!
Basically some sort of guarantee at some point that if the DAO wants X work done that you are proposing, that after a certain amount of time spent going through the process, they won’t just choose another identical proposal without a good reason why the first proposal wouldn’t be good for the DAO.
Not getting paid is not enough of a disincentive to not grab the work if you’re not confident you can do it, imo. If you want something like this to work, I think workers would need to stake and have that slashed if they don’t complete the work (or get an extension approved, etc.). That could put undue burden on the workers though (and lock out anyone that doesn’t have the initial capital to spare), so still think the RFP model would probably achieve better results.
That point is exactly why I’m focusing on sustainability. People have a tendency to be careless with spending while the coffers are high, only to engage in extreme cost saving measures when it’s too late and it ends up causing damage.
By trying to be sustainable while the coffers are high means that ENS doesn’t have to suffer through periods when the coffers are low. The more we save now, the more ENS has available to spend later, if necessary.
Just because one is rich doesn’t mean it makes sense to spend $1k on a newspaper. It makes sense to save for a rainy day.
@nick.eth Would you still want to reserve 50% of the treasury funds if the ENS treasury was managed sustainably?
Where those laws exist, they generally require accepting the lowest qualified bidder. And they often lead to substandard work that has to be redone at great expense. I don’t think they’re a model we should strive to imitate!
I’m happy for WGs to experiment with models like this for smaller tasks. It’s pretty much how GitCoin bounties work, and they can work very well in certain circumstances. I just don’t think it’s viable for the larger or longer-term things that RFPs can be used for.
This is a good point. One way to handle it would be to specify that bids have to be submitted privately and are only revealed at the end of the submission process (but before a decision is made).
The goal of the endowment is to ensure there are stable operating funds regardless of revenue, so yes.
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I already answered that concern in the actual post you’re omitting from your quote:
If DAO funds are managed sustainably, that implies that there are operating funds regardless of revenue. There isn’t a reason aside from this to set aside 50% of the treasury funds that you’ve explained.
It’s not actually an answer, though - we’d still be accepting the lowest bid, and just trying to fix things after the fact.
This is probably a subject to discuss in the endowment thread instead of here.
It does answer it, well.
I just did.