FGP: FORTH Community Grants Program

1. The Ducc Question

There is (within this thread) seemingly unanimous support for Ducc to hold a reviewer spot. However for the sake of velocity we will skip elections for the initial reviewers. Instead, we’ll vote on the proposal as it was, without modification to include Ducc as a reviewer, and then wait 6 months until the first election period comes up.

Does this make sense? Why wouldn’t we adjust the proposal to include Ducc from the start?

And if there’s any contention around this, then I think it makes far more sense to do things properly and elect the initial role holders rather than push forward without.

2. The number of roles

There are two options considered in this thread:

  • 1 Lead & 4 Reviewers
    • The lead is responsible for analysing and presenting the proposal material to the reviewers to decide on
    • The lead and the reviewers all hold a spot on the 5 person strong multisig
  • 1 Lead & 5 Reviewers
    • Once again the lead is responsible for preparing the material for the reviewers to form their opinion on
    • However the multisig is controlled by the 5 reviewers alone, with the lead having no direct vote on the matter.

How much difference does it make for the lead to also possess a vote, versus having no direct vote but nevertheless being responsible for the material the reviewers rely on to make their decision? Probably not a lot at the end of the day honestly, but it feels semantically cleaner to maintain the clearer separation of duties in my mind.

In effect the lead would go from needing to convince 2 out of 4 people of his opinion, to 3 out of 5.

I don’t think having an extra reviewer would represent a significant burden to the process, and it also makes the Ducc Question a lot easier to resolve, so I’m in favour of 1 Lead & 5 Reviewers option.

3. Compensation

Quite simply - we estimate a rough average for the time consumption of handling a proposal, and then multiply it by the arbitrary figure we pick for hourly rate. If unchanged, that would $75, and thus supposing a proposal took 10 hours to review we would be looking at $750 per proposal, with a rate limit of 3 proposals per week.

The actual figures for time consumption per proposal should probably be proposed by Lead candidates as part of their election bid, along with a breakdown of their intended strategy for analysing a proposal.

By strategy, I mean the sequence of actions they would take - eg. read the proposal (30mins), research the underlying project (3 hours), research the individuals involved, interview them over a call, etc, etc

Formalising such a strategy would also give the DAO greater awareness and thus confidence about how the process is conducted, and leave a record for any future Lead candidates to inherit knowledge and experience. If a particular proposal has unusual requirements that exceeds this baseline strategy, there’s no reason it can’t be handled differently. I’d also anticipate the strategy being something that evolves during a term as well as unanticipated issues are encountered and overcome, so there’s no need to think that the proposed strategy at term inception is something that must be rigidly adhered to for the next 6 months, but I think it would really help to outline an initial plan.

Once this has been done and an initial time estimate per proposal given we then have a decent foundation for the community being able to recognise and agree on the work the Lead has undertaken and thus the fair compensation for this. I maintain that basing it per proposal rather than per reported time spent makes this a lot easier for everyone to come to an accord on.

4. Am I being overly demanding?

Yes.

But also no.

I’ve asked more from candidates that I was hiring for a 30k p/a job than I have here.

Take the 30 hour per week cap at $75 and multiply it up and we reach a maximum annual salary of $117k p/a. When companies hire for that sort of salary bracket it’s typical for several interviews at a minimum, and generally an aptitude test of some sort, and often working with multiple candidates to compare and contrast their skills and personality in a bid to find the best fit.

I see no reason why as a DAO we should not be similarly diligent, and I would prefer to move slower than to handwave mistakes that then require more time, effort and potentially gas costs to rectify.

Also since we’re still lacking a few of the proposed reviewers’ introductions I’m going to go ping them on discord as I guess they’re not aware of it.

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