Proposal #8: 2021 Ops Distribution

Governance Proposals
#7

Considering the numbers displayed from SourceCred and previous iterations the number has fluctuated significantl. My specific internal proposal request was for 2000 robot for the past 15 months of work. The SourceCred distribution is entirely subjective. I my opinion it does not match expectations and my personal cred in this process has trended downwards since I raised concerns.

Our token was work under $7 as of 4 months ago. During my over one year of service I believe the support, marketing and brand ambassadorship is worth well over my requested grant. I believe I have been a critical component in our success.

My requests are not based on current token price but based on previous grants extended to partners. I proposed assuming only a 16K robot distribution and requested 2k of the other 16k that you said was not going to be distributed and a path for allocating that robot for future contributors.

I am surprised at the response and friction. I make no claims about how important my work is verses your work. I do everything within my ability and limits at all times. My contributions are significant and have been asking for more transparency for the past year. It is now put to public opinion without my work grant which is what I call my consideration for the last 15 months.

I will abide by whatever the community decides and appreciate the opportunity to present my case. I propose:

-16000 robot gets distributed to the Coordinape circle
-700 Robot for Twitter posts
-2000 for new contributor grants
-2000 Robot grant for myself for the last 15months of services
-11500 Robot reserved for future ops distribution

#8

Penguin, I put together numbers based on what you’re proposing here. We’ve had a lot of back and forth, and may be assuming a background of context, calculation, and vocabulary that isn’t shared by everyone evaluating this.

Penguin's Proposal:
Contributor GIVE Received ROBOT allocation
Penguin 136 4059 (2059 + 2000 “Grant”)
METADREAMER 179 2710
Drew 150 2271
Weseeclearly 150 2271
Felipe 83 1256
Esteve 65 984
Sergio 60 908
CryptoAccord 56 848
Jin 45 681
Sinkas 35 530
Kiba 28 424
Jush 17 257
NiftyFifty 16 242
CPTNSkeletor 12 182
DogeMaxi 11 167
0xJoshua 9 136
dysbulic 5 76
TOTAL 1057 18000

My personal vote is to move forward with the numbers in the original proposal [as authored by Metadreamer], sharing the weight between Sourecred and Coordinape equally. I believe that, together, they capture more nuance than either alone. Hard (“heart”) numbers: Sourcecred picks up the contributions of 72 fellow robots :robot:, who would not receive any $ROBOT if we only rely on Coordinape. It is important that we build toward a scalable, repeatable, and reliable process going forward, especially when it broadens the web of value flow around our entire community in all the ways that we participate.

We are not the only DAO facing distribution woes :wink: By using a spread of tools like Sourcecred and Coordinape, we are contributing to their improvement, diversifying the landscape, and directly shaping the future of decentralized work. I believe the answer requires constant fluid rebalancing through specialized tools, that cover each others’ blind spots.

I also want to reiterate that the Sourcecred numbers above are not purely automatic. The baseline is formed by an entire survey of our Discord interactions, which offers some counterbalance to the recency-bias of Coordinape; meanwhile, Metadreamer has also manually added weight from the #props and #did-a-thing channels, as well as accounted for fiat compensation.

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#9

Thank you for adding numbers for the proposal. And for acknowledging that this has been an ongoing discussion.

For additional context the full robot allocation was not discussed until after I repeatedly questioning why the 16k robot distribution did not match the robot distribution chart agreed upon for ops milestone payments.

Other contributors and core memebrs were either given substantial monthly cash payments or were previously considered in ops distribution. I question a process which values my work for almost a year less rewarding than my customer reward and is directly attacked as being “less valuable.” I have proven to be a MF robot soldier and consistently made money for the organization, with the promise that I would be taken care of. Instead I found another game stacked against the people and claiming dev work is far superior to what I do. As a full stack software dev for over a decade, I confidential say my work in MF is just as highly skilled.

I risked a lot by voicing my opinion and have have had my work marginalized. I am a team player and have been always been an all star Robot. I have supported MetaFactory before we even had a discord at the genesis medium posts about Brand Factories level. I laid and ran our first sample and even generated all of the images used for our face masks.

I have been met with challenges and want to work through issues. I said my peace and appreciate the space to speak freely. Thank you for this amazing opportunity these last 15 months and for any support that I get. I am not fighting, only trying to claim fair work for my services. I have concerns with this distribution but will be happy with whatever the community decides.

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#10

I appreciate the open dialog here. The conversation and transparency are the only way we are going to improve and shape compensation models for decentralized projects and working groups. While I do see improvements can be made, I believe that what has been proposed so far and the discussions that have taken place to get us here do fairly represent the contributions of everyone involved.

I also believe that the combination of SourceCred, Coordinate and MF-specific weighting adjustments are a great baseline and starting place for measuring ops contribution based on impact / value provided. These solutions aren’t perfect, but in my opinion, they have done a good job of establishing a workable and fair baseline.

Specific to your situation @penguin, I don’t think anyone ever trivialized your contributions or intentionally sandbagged you. If you truly feel anyone has acted maliciously or out of line, please raise the concern and we will address it. That said, I don’t think such comments are fair in this context because they paint a different picture from the open dialog and discussion that has taken place up to this point. You raised your concerns and from my perspective, they were acknowledged and discussed amongst the core team for a few weeks prior to involving the greater community. That said, in order to establish a transparent and objective baseline, we needed to leverage the tools available and include the greater DAO in the conversation. We also made adjustments to weighting based to your feedback. In fact, from my understanding, the proposed distribution numbers have netted out very close to the number you originally expected and proposed for yourself (~2K ROBOT).

Short of saying, ‘Penguin should receive an additional X ROBOT because he has requested it’, I am not sure how to reach a solution that considers everyone else’s contribution in equal measure. I also believe that such actions set dangerous precedent because the decision isn’t rooted in any formal, objective approach. Perhaps, however, you have a more specific proposal for how we bridge the perceived gap here?

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#11

The only people that got any fiat payments were the ones who otherwise couldn’t afford to work on MetaFactory and we would not have been able to bring them on at all. The monthly payments were not “substantial” at all, just the minimum amount they needed to pay their rent and keep their lights on. No one who could afford to work on MF without fiat compensation got paid anything, and you are the only one receiving additional ROBOT for not taking fiat compensation.

You also received ROBOT in the previous ops distribution, more than even Felipe who was doing more actual ops work rather than technician work (which, as mentioned before, has its own reward tier). If you had a problem with that distribution it should’ve been brought up then, there was ample time and many iterations of feedback we had where you could’ve raised these concerns. I don’t think it’s fair to critique past distributions after they already happened to justify getting more tokens in the future.

#12

Hey MF crew, I’m excited to see things moving forward on the governance side of MetaFactory.

Hope to get more time to dive into this stuff moving forward, in the meantime I stopped by to read through this thread and I am looking for some documentation of @penguin’s work that makes up for the 2000 extra ROBOT requested above ?

As of this thread I see a “Grant” request, but I don’t know what it’s for ?

To @burningfiatpoint here:

Short of saying, ‘Penguin should receive an additional X ROBOT because he has requested it’, I am not sure how to reach a solution that considers everyone else’s contribution in equal measure. I also believe that such actions set dangerous precedent because the decision isn’t rooted in any formal, objective approach. Perhaps, however, you have a more specific proposal for how we bridge the perceived gap here?

I’m not sure how we as a community could grant this amount of ROBOT ( currently valued @ $100K+ ) to a single contributor for unspecified work :sweat_smile:

I may not know this “ins & outs” of MetaFactory operations but I think the allocations that were initially proposed look really fair to me. Let us keep in mind that this project still has so much upside and many more milestones to hit.

Saving some of that distribution will definitely provide more opportunities for contributors who will show up looking to contribute to MF in the future, so I agree with that.

One last thing, how do you get included in the Coordinape experiment ? I feel like I must have missed that, because I see others are on there for doing the same thing I do :smile: hunt for collabs and shill the shit out of MF :loudspeaker:

Any thoughts here ?

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#13

I don’t think it is unspecified work, but now we’re getting a bit further away from my understanding of the process.

So we’re going with a mix of Coordinape + sourcecred + MD tinkering based on discord “props + did a thing” information?

What are the date cut-offs for work that is included in this operations distribution proposal?

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#14

You can DM me your ETH address and I can add you to the next one! If you have the member roles in discord via collabland you should be able to see the channels where we onboarded people into Coordinape.

The props and didathing is what goes into SourceCred, the tinkering was just configuring SourceCred appropriately for our needs.

Its just 10k through Coordinape and 10k through SourceCred

#15

Got it, thanks for the clarification. I got confused by the updated numbers. For the final question - what’s the date range on this ops distro? Does this cut off at like May 31 - or are current projects being worked on included?

#16

Current projects are not included in this, the cutoff isn’t strict but the next Coordinape epoch will be for June contributions

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#17

Gotcha, I didn’t mean unspecified altogether I meant in the context of this thread :sweat_smile:

Sorry if there is another place for a summary of this work done by people in the community, but I don’t have access to anything but this thread at the moment.

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#18

Note: My opinion doesn’t really matter compared to people to whom MetaFactory and ROBOT are their actual “job” because this doesn’t affect my livelihood at all.

Some quick questions

  • what are the exact dates that this distro covers? $50k milestone was around last May I’d guess so we are reviewing contributions from 05-2020 to 06-2021 here?
  • Is there a list of activities that qualifies as “Ops”? Would help clear up confusion on what should be considered for these contributions. As it will change over time (e.g. once curation game is out) it will also help people keep track.

SC and Ape is perfect combination of tools. I like seeing the long list of contributors on SC and knowing it comes from wide variety of activities with any effort/skill level, while Ape targets high value activities and is higher signal to noise. Using both and splitting rewards between both scoring systems is best I think.

If we should be taking that into account any salaries, designer rewards, and other distros during this time period it would be helpful to see those records (if they exist like FLOC’s).

Another aspect of recency bias is token price at distribution. We aren’t explicitly giving dollar amounts to people but the amount of total tokens in this distro is affected by ROBOT price since we are only proposing half the tokens. This means that earlier contributors probably would have gotten more tokens if we had done distros earlier. I think @METADREAMER said in discord that SC is time-weighted to early contributions but I don’t think this fully captures the difference. For example at Index Coop I got 1,000 INDEX tokens for working like 10 hours in their first month yet now there are contributors at Index Coop that have worked part/full time for 3-6 months that still haven’t earned 1,000 INDEX despite doing more work because the token price has 30xed so they get less tokens. This isn’t in favor of one side or the other re:Penguin but it hasn’t been mentioned yet and only matters if we are denominating ROBOT rewards based on USD price (which we somewhat are in this proposal.)

I would prefer reserving a bit more for future contributors (15k vs 10k HNS) to give us more runway to recruit new community members. We have a lot of ROBOT in the GEAR pool but that feels locked and not spendable by the DAO to me but if we do want to use GEAR for rewards when Ops budget runs out then I’d be fine with faster release schedule.

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#20

That’s correct, although all the milestones were hit more recently in 2021 (100k was last week of December), so the majority of the ROBOT is still for more recent contributions.

No official list because the scope of activities is ever expanding, the only thing we specified in the past was that design / technician contributions are not a part of the ops rewards. It would be good to make an official list though now that contributor base is expanding. Off the top of my head:

  • Tokenomics, incentive design, overall strategy and execution
  • Dev work (frontend / backend / shop / contracts / distribution scripts / NFTs / bugfixes and maintenance, etc) - I was the sole dev in MF until a week ago
  • Community engagement / cultivation, content creation, social media, newsletter
  • Bizdev (taking calls, having meetings, coordinating partnerships, going on podcasts, etc)
  • Customer support, shop / order management, setting up and releasing products
  • Branding, design work, 3d modeling, etc
  • weseeclearly received 15k USD over the last 5 months (3k/mo) to cover rent/food/bills. As of June they are only being compensated via ROBOT
  • Felipe received a total of 7k USD over the course of 3 months at the end of 2021 to pay for rent / bills / food
  • FLOC received ~25k USD since we engaged them, ~2500 USD / mo which was their breakeven / base cost to keep the lights on for their studio / other employees

All of these were given to cover basic needs of the contributors, most of which who came on before ROBOT had well established price / liquidity. Back then there wasn’t enough certainty in the value of ROBOT for people to work for only tokens when they had hard expenses they need to cover. Moving forward, no one is going to be getting fiat compensation, its all going through ROBOT now (aside from 3rd party service providers / freelancers from Upwork).

Given the numbers and situation in which we gave the fiat compensation, I don’t think we need to heavily handicap ROBOT rewards for those that received it since it basically screws over people who couldn’t afford to work for only tokens even if they wanted to.

Its still 2/3 of the tokens, not half. Although price appreciation is somewhat of a factor, the main one is how soon we hit these milestones. We didn’t expect to generate so many sales so soon before the contributor base expanded. Even if the price was $10-20, I would still want to reallocate because we are at that inflection point of bringing on a ton of new contributors.

We also have the TBD tokens which we can decide to allocate to ops budget

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#21

One model that might help for future grants is to create some core members that will have a stable team (anyone approved by a vote by the community that has provided some work can be a core member). and the rest of the funds can be allocated via sourceCreed and coordinape to the community in a form of grants. A tool like Trello or Github projects can help to track tasks and see who is doing, in the end, core members might have a more easy way to send the GIVE tokens by looking at this board instead of trying to remember.

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#22

I voted “neither” because, if we want to reward individual contributors, I don’t think completely removing SC is the best way to go. SC, as flawed as the current dials may be, is a brilliant opportunity to reward the long tail of contributors and possibly engage them as active contributors. I’m an example of that. My vote was cast, but I’d like to say I’ve changed my opinion: I prefer moving forward with option 1.

Regarding individual contributions, it seems to me Coordinape was designed precisely for this. The pitch of “I deserve X for Y work” maybe should be made before the Coordinape voting session. It’s the “biased by humans” part of the distro. That’s where I would argue to wesee that I deserve GIVE, or post in a channel a summary of my contributions in the epoch.

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#23

Thank you all for considering my grant request and allow me to present my grant proposal.

To define a bit of my work over the past 15 months.

I was part of all Tokenomics calls and discussions and contributed to the design and overall strategy. I also have made several suggestions for token experiments that we engaged in.

I have attended every community call where I have consistently provided feedback which has help to cultivate our culture. I have been a multi sig signer, spending personal gas to execute transactions related to robot distributions. I have help create content used on the website, social media and been a critical component to community engagement. I have personal relationships with many of our clients and recruit and market heavily for MetaFactory. I have also hosted Community Creator calls and been a discord administrator for a bit. I attended and was an significant contributor to the curation design hyper sprint. I have done discord security tasks and channel management.

I have taken more calls than I can consider and work hand in hand with many of our customers to define their designs and actively create novel assets for many of our clients. I brought Sushi’s internal team to the table and have gone above and beyond to considered our clients needs. I was also one of the few people to vocally support Twisted during his drama. I also consistently skill up our designers and technicians.

I do a ton of support for technicians and clients and have been releasing products recently too. I have personally lead over 22 projects that made it beyond the design phases or have been released, and many more that I have had to turn away or explain that we were not a good fit.

I also took the branding assets originall made by FLOC and vectorized them so that we could use the assets in a production environment. I personally hand made coasters for the wicked sunday club. My wife has personally printed, paid for shipping and sent 2400 robot face stickers and are printing 4000 more stickers now for packaging.

In addition I have booked us on several panels and spoken very highly of metafactory in all relevant organizations.

This was not a comprehensive list of everything I have done with no pay consideration. I too have no job other than DAO work and have been relying upon a promise of getting paid. It is disappointing to work so hard and for so long to get 666 as my 15 months of work. I have spent almost $10k in the shop and that is the only reason I have any voting power.

I did my best to resolve this internally and privately and presented my proposal internally directly asking for 2k robot and outlined details of my proposal. Instead of discussing it or providing any feedback, a public forum post was made that ignored my grant request. Now the snapshot vote has already begun and is accepting votes without communicating we were ready for a vote or providing me a chance to respond.

I apologize for any of this being public. I tried to resolve this internally and would not have picked the public forum. I believe it is important for us to be transparent and honest with something as critical as paying contributors and consider my level of activity and support is above and beyond. Thank you for the opportunity to explain my role and I ask you to please consider voting to either continue the discussion until we reach an agreement.

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#24

I’d also like to propose that we create specific working groups focused on each one of these areas (and more). As we grow and expand, work will need to be organized into focused teams. Doing so provides a more clear path for new community members that want to get involved by delineating where they should join based on their specific talents and interests.

Additionally, I’d like to propose that we earmark specific budgets to each of these teams and areas, allowing them to operate with some level of autonomy towards their goals without EVERY small task and related cost needing to be passed through a DAO vote.

Will break this out into its own thread…

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#25

here is the SourceCred data that was used to calculate the contributions outside of Discord / discourse: https://github.com/MetaFactoryAI/mf-cred/tree/master/config/plugins/sourcecred/initiatives/initiatives

That repo also has the rest of the sourcecred configuration

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#26

Upon review of the initiatives, I stand by my assessment of the SC having serious bias and claim initiatives do not not accurately capturing value or weight, especially with relation to time.

Managing these initiatives will require a lot of grooming and commuity perspectives. I think it would be better to remove initiatives, people that provide contributor level work should be included in the coordinape circle.

By removing initiatives we allow the data to control the community side of things and contributors to provide direct perspective on teammates they interacted with. That lets SC operate as with less bias, and will require little to less grooming.

#27

My interpretation of where we’re at:
Re-establishing the proposal before moving back to an official snapshot vote. Evolution was:

  • 32,200 Ops Distribution
  • Voted to remove and carry 10,000 forward to future distros, grants, etc
  • Voted on the Coordinape x Source Cred accuracy.
  • Penguin 2,000 Robot addition for past 15 months labor added, confused the process slightly as that proposal also stated flaws in Source Cred’s metrics and so it had 0 allocated to Source Cred and 16,000 to Cooridinape.

Where I believe it is now:

My thought is if anyone wants to see adjustments to the Source Cred weighting, they need to take the initiative to dive-in and propose tweaks and changes. I know it isn’t intended, but it could easily come across as bot-blocking rewards to those who contributed via SC metrics. I like what @weseeclearly said about "Rewarding people that didn’t expect to receive anything is a bet I’m willing to place on inspiring future contributors." -loose quote, they said it more eloquently! :slight_smile:

  • Could put a robot bounty on translating the SC weighting into pleb friendly speak. We’re already exploring adding the social media engagement aspect via a dedicated discord channel. Could also add a minimum payout threshold to prevent distributing 0.01 $ROBOT – maybe 0.51 or 1 minimum to go eco-friendly and save on gas.

:robot: Resolve ASAP so we can move forward and continue perfecting these systems to the best of our ability; then conquer the world via a swagged out robot invasion.

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