Based on the extremely healthy deliberations held here, we think it’s time to escalate this proposal to a Snapshot vote to gauge community sentiment.
Below I have provided the link to the Signal (Snapshot):
https://signal.ampleforth.org/#/ampleforthorg.eth/proposal/0x68bec26956fd0b8dac85de9f6602ba173d4b856bc198ad328234aebdcbb9acfb
We are steps away from a monumental moment for the FORTH DAO.
$FORTH
I think starting the vote is a bit premature - we seem like we’ve yet to resolve a few points of concern:
And unless I’ve missed them I think we’re still waiting on self-introductions from a couple of the proposed reviewers too.
In addition to what Fiddy stated, I think it might be best to eventually take all of the names that have been suggested and then do a Signal with Approval Voting before the signal for the formation of the commitee itself. Perhaps the top 5 reviewers are selected?
I’m a little confused why this has been moved to a snapshot already before incorporating feedback. As it stands, I’m going to have to vote “no” without revisions.
@Fiddlekins
I believe @Brandon addressed your first point by stating “I also support @Fiddlekins idea of adding @ducc as a reviewer.” There could be one of two things that occur here: (1) we add a 6th reviewer, being Ducc; (2) We hold an election to see who is voted as being part of the FGC.
To your third point, I believe the per hour model still applies here. Why? Because the committee will be reviewing numerous applications at a time while also scheduling calls with applicants to scrutinize, assist, and further decide upon the feasibility of the application in question. Operating on a per proposal model could potentially incur higher costs (assuming there is a high volume of submitted applications). Another question that’s to be posed is: How would this “per proposal” model be valued?
@G-Yes95
I do agree with a Signal vote for Committee nominations after the first term is complete. I was under the impression that there was an understanding/agreement after @Brandon’s reply. However, if the community agrees that an election process should be initiated prior to the launch of the Grants program then I support this as well.
@ducc As mentioned in my response above to G-Yes95, I was with the understanding that we could proceed with escalating the proposal to a signal vote.
All things considered, I do agree that a more formal introductory process should be given to the community - especially for those who don’t know of the nominated committee members or of myself.
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:
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.
Happy to give a pitch for myself as I was nominated to be a reviewer… You can add this on snapshot too if that is the decision.
If approved as a reviewer i’ll be a voice focused on AMPL ecosystem/community growth. If you are not generally on twitter or discord - I started https://twitter.com/amplcast to host twitter spaces for the AMPL community of which there have been seven recorded episodes highlighting AMPL projects and initiatives, the goal to add another medium for people to digest the discussion from the discord/telegram groups. My hope is FGC can be a catalyst for many more ampl adjacent projects to be proposed and successfully launched.
I agree with @ducc and prefer no compensation for my role, and no issue if the DAO chooses elections for the first cohort of FGC.
I think full transcript reports of any conversations between FGC members is a good idea, and the FGC should publish reports on kpi outcomes of each grantee at the end of each funding round.
Lastly, I think a set time to application submitted to being reviewed and rejected/accepted should be clear in the proposal. (i.e FGC will expect to review applications in a 10 day window etc…)
That sounds sensible, but I’d add that there should be an asterisk attached that means it’s non-binding in the event there’s a backlog of proposals which makes it unfeasible to review all within the ideal timeframe.
As I mentioned earlier in other models reviewers were not payed for their work. I still believe that people who are not the lead do not need to be paid, whether per review or otherwise. Brandon mentioned his support for this here.
I really think we should address this issue before moving forward with the snapshot vote. The snapshot you posted still contains the program lead as a signer and not the 5th review @ducc that was also mentioned to be added. I believe the incentives work out better as proposed in the original UNI version, where there is the majority of the work from the program lead’s side to convince 4/5 reviewers that are separate from the program lead there is a project worth funding.
I disagree with an hourly rate per proposal as it creates strange incentives to get as many proposals as possible from the reviewer side, and it introduces overhead I thought we didn’t want in this committee. My understanding was the reviewer role was meant to be a lot less time and the program lead was supposed to do the in depth research on the project and convince the reviewers it was worth funding. This would mean a reviewer would spend maybe 1-2 hours of time per proposal. In the end in order to make it simpler, keep the incentives intact, and to make the group move with more agility we should not deal with payments to the reviewers, especially having them not be elected for this first round.
To be clear I’m fine with no elections for reviewers, if they are doing it as a volunteer role because they want to commit their time to improve the ForthDAO ecosystem, not because of payment. The program lead requires more work as I understand it and should definitely be a paid role and is critical for the success of this committee.
To clarify, my post was focusing primarily on the compensation for the Lead role rather than reviewers.
I can understand the argument for keeping to paid per self-reported hours rather than per proposal - mostly revolving around the fact that some proposals will come through that don’t require much time to dismiss, and thus shouldn’t be billed at a full rate, and that the best way to abstract this out is to ultimately just bill per hour rather than proposal. Perhaps the extra visibility I’m seeking comes more from what I outlined with “formalised strategy” bit instead - speaking of which, do you have an opinion on that? I’m not sure if the “overhead […] we didn’t want” comment is referring to that or not.
As for whether reviewers get compensated or not, I don’t have a strong opinion but would lean towards not mostly because the sums involved shouldn’t be that large in the first place.
What I would say though is that any gas costs incurred by reviewers should be subsidised by the DAO. This has the added advantage of providing a solution for allowing a reviewer to remain anonymous and their main wallets private whilst being able to publicly sign the multisig. They would create a new account for the sole purpose of signing it, which would be given a bit of ETH by the DAO to cover the gas costs of signing the multisig. This allows for them to engage without having to connect the account to any KYC service.
EDIT:
I think there’s another question to resolve too: how many members of the multisig need to agree on a proposal for it to be passed?
My understanding was that it was a simple majority of signers, so with 5 signers it would be a 3/5 majority required to pass a proposal.
I’ve seen it suggested that it might be 4/5 instead however? Curious what everyone’s thoughts and opinions are on this matter, I don’t have one myself.
Hi all, John here. I think this is a great initiative and will spur dev’t in the AMPL ecosystem and that is the reason why I decided to join when I was nominated. I found out about AMPL right before the ICO and have been assisting with social media moderation ever since.
As many have already stated above, going through FORTH voting for proposals may be the best way to gain the community’s sentiment on a proposal but it’s not ideal. It’s a slow process and raises conflict of interest issues especially when you have a large holder/friend voting for a proposal he submitted. Also, another issue I’ve seen is people voting for whatever option is winning at the moment and not taking time to read the proposal to see if brings any value to the ecosystem. I believe having a small committee of people is a good compromise that will streamline the process.
If nominated for this position, I’ll make sure to take the voice of the community into my decision-making process. I’m active on the AMPL discord and Telegram community channels and think that I have a good sense of community sentiment on very topics which will be vital to this committee.
I’m ok with zero compensation for helping review projects and also fine with voting for committee members if the community prefers that route. Hats off to @Guz_MassAdoption for putting this together.
Sorry my mistake, I was referring to reviewers. I think calculating it this way for the lead role is fine.
I believe it was mentioned to be a 4/5 multisig earlier which means 4 out of the 5 reviewers must approve the grant for it to go through. See:
My comment is assuming we add a 5th reviewer and remove the lead from the reviewer role.
I’m very much in favor of this proposal and would like to thank @Guz_MassAdoption for all the work out into this!
On the other side, I agree that the current snapshot vote does not yet incorporate enough community feedback and will therefore vote with no.
However, I am optimistic that we will work out the outstanding points and am looking forwards to further discussion and a new snapshot vote.
Many thanks to all participants in this discussion! I think we are on the right track 
It’d be remiss of me to mention and applaud the incredible amount of diligence, effort, and scrutiny exhibited for this proposal. This said, please allow this reply to serve as a working amendment that - once met with consensus amongst community members - will be applied to the original proposal (showed above).
Amendments
A. 1 Lead & 5 Reviewers
B. 1 Lead & 6 Reviewers
All members of the FGC must introduce themselves using the template provided below:
The Multi-Sig is controlled by the Reviewers operating with a 4/5 or 5/6 signing threshold depending on the outcome of FGC membership.
It is the FGC’s objective to operate in full transparency with the FORTH DAO community. This said, the FGC must do the following:
A. Hold all conversations via a visible channel within the Discord’s Ampleforth server.
B. Publish monthly reports mentioning: (1) Amount of funds disbursed, (2) Applications approved, (3) Description of Grantee projects, (4) KPI tracking.
C. Hold monthly twitter space events allowing grantees the opportunity to showcase their project, discuss the intentions behind applying for a FORTH Grant, and the roadmap associated with the project moving forward. These events will be recorded and shared in a dedicated #ForthDAO section within the Ampleforth discord.
@ducc @Brandon @Pricelessjohn @Nestor @richy please give everyone a quick intro. using the template below:
I’m a bit confused, what’s the argument in favour of the multisig being 6 people? I thought the standard practise was an odd number to ensure no ties, and I don’t recall seeing anyone argue otherwise in this thread.
I’m personally still in favour of the following option, which isn’t represented in the poll:
1 Lead & 5 Reviewers, the multisig is just the 5 reviewers, the lead doesn’t vote.
I don’t think anyone’s discussed it but is there any opposition to adding what I discussed about Reviewers have gas costs reimbursed by the treasury?
@Fiddlekins the addition is with the inclusion of @ducc being a part of the committee.
Do you know if it’s possible to conduct these on a section of the forum that only FGCP members can post in? Discord’s a decent option, but there’s still an account registration barrier to viewing any content on it, whereas the forum can be read freely by anyone with a browser and an internet connection.
I’m actually in favor with this suggestion.
Curious to hear everyone’s thoughts.
