Please find attached GWGs first funding request to cover costs related to stewarding the delivery of NDC V1 Gov led by the NEAR Community. The GWG’s mandate is to steward and facilitate Gigs, RFPs, and Roles to BuiDL and deliver NDC V1 Gov by late Summer '23.
This is our second time around requesting funding from the Community Treasury. April’s bounties are almost paid out in full, and it’s time for us to get rolling on paying out the May bounties.
This time around we changed the process a little bit:
We based the request on actual Bounty Requests rather than anticipated
For this reason we also had to delay the process, to allow all requests to first come in
We also gave the Trustees a chance to review this Funding Request before posting it officially
We introduced a Gigs board on BOS, which we used for a lot of the one-off gigs and bounties. Have a look here for details.
In summary, we are requesting $148,311 to cover May’s Retroactive Bounties, down from the original $187k which was budgeted for May in the Q2 Budget.
The following are the budget overruns we saw for May:
IAH full redesign, switch of provider, combined with delays in recruiting full stack team member. Used INC4 for this, resulting in $7k overrun on Full Stack line item.
UI/UX work for the nominate widget +$2k
Tech PM recruited at $6.5k was asked to take on more responsibilities, requesting increase to $13k. Their justification can be found here.
2 core team members increased by 33% due to increased workload (up from $4.5k to $6k each). Theri justifications can be found here and here.
Budgeted for 5 moderators by increased to 6 in May (will return to 5 in June)
More meetings than anticipated increased cost of note taking. Planning to reduce in June by leveraging AI
We also saw significant savings or reductions compared to budget:
Delay of IAH due to switch of provider resulted in pushing the “Guerilla marketing” to following months
Finally got started on Gigs, but not as many as hoped for
PikesPeak delivered more than expected in April, saving us on May budget
No events, travel or swag in May
Funding Request Details
The table below outlines the details of GWG’s request for funding from the Community Treasury for bounties incurred during the month of May 2023.
Good Post!!
Well detailed on the MAY budget and how it was spent.
But my concern is there’s no information on what it was spent for? What was the worth of such amount, Report on Activity done.
I think the Community needs to know too, why is this person been paid for this whys the budget for this activity like this in general I mean a proof of work, since we are driving to be more decentralized I think we should be more opened and transparent………….
My Apologies incase i jump the gun, but I suggest maybe for the next budget or in the future all Contributors have to make a report on activities done and what they’re contributing just a suggestions, then all report link can be integrated to form a transparent report for budget for the community.
And I’ve a question “Who decided the pay for this roles? How do we determine if it’s fair or not ? Was it voted upon ? How can we track how these work are been done also how can we track if activities are been carried out by the categories.
We need to see a progress report something to be Overawed for
My Little thoughts for now….
Thanks as we all do well to give the community the best and an explicit report
I’m totally in support of what you said @Psalmy, The NDC is a better system. I know transparency is a major factor towards decentralization. The NDC is doing great already.
To avoid questioning the Transparency of the NDC, this is community led, the community I think should have a breakdown of each contributor’s work, I know it will promote fairness and increase understanding.
@Kazander you and your team has done a great work… Kudos
Thanks for your thoughtful comments. For every retroactive bounty request we have asked folks to justify their request and also provide links to either their gig, their deliverables, or an invoice. In many cases we received several links and have reviewed them all. I have made a practice of only posting the individual pay-to addresses, amounts, rationales and links at the end of the process, when all is said and done. The Q1 payments have all been posted, the April details are almost complete and will be posted soon. And the May details are then also to be posted in a few weeks from now.
Part of the reason for this is that we want to be extra careful to only post the right info, another is that if someone for whatever reason couldn’t be paid (example couldn’t pass KYC etc), then we don’t want to unnecessarily have added them to a public table.
In regards to how we’re roles assigned, the answer is “it depends on role”.
The Core Contributor, moderator and note taker roles were originally assigned on a first come first serve basis, many of them back in Q4. Whoever stepped up to the challenge and did good work became the first cohort.
Subsequent Core Contributors were posted as open roles when there was a new need or when someone needed to back away, and interviews were held to find the best fit
We started a new Gigs board in May and the role assignment process was described in each gig. Most were first come first serve, one was RFPd, and others were assigned by the mods.
The charter drafting was self-organized by each work group. If more than one person per WG asked for a bounty, then I asked them to agree amongst themselves first on split before submitting a request.
In some cases the TechWG and/or Blaze asked people to step up and contribute. Examples of this include the graphic design for the Summit, and assigning INC4 to help when they were short on devs.
The compensation levels is something we’ve struggled with and continue thinking on how to improve. The comp for recurring roles was originally based on what folks requested. Subsequent roles were posted with an indicated monthly bounty, but we’ve recently found that this has needed adjustment. You can see that three such adjustments have been requested this month. As we don’t have a leader that we report to and can set our salary, we’ve had to find alternative solutions. The process we’ve landed on, which is outlined in our charter, is that you have to post a public request and rationale and that two other Core Contributors have to support your request.
Bounties for gigs are discussed in the group before posting, and we come up with a suggested bounty based on our collective experience.
When it’s a larger gig with more unknowns and broader scope we use an RFP (request for proposal) procedure to ask devs for their suggested pricing before we select the proponent with a combination of best price, best skills and best solution.
Hope this helps. Let me know if you have more questions.
Some of the Core Contributors have recently started sharing their reports.
Blaze posts his “My madness” on a daily basis since two weeks back
Illu posts his weekly report on the forum since a month back, you can find a summary here
Zarmade and Sarah also recently posted their first reports on SayAlot
For my own part I have four thoughts
I’ve been using the daily standup / office hours meeting that I host almost every weekday to report on what happened the previous day and what I’m working on. The meeting minutes from that meeting has served as my “report” to date. Find Q1 here and Q2 here (note that last week’s notes are still being processed and will be added shortly)
We hold a community update every Tuesday and I’ve been either the host or at least a speaker on the agenda every single week (I think I missed one). The slides are made public and are available for the record.
As part of each of my retroactive bounties I’ve added a rationale, much like everyone else. It’s always been published along with everyone else’s, every time a bounty has been paid.
I’ve been thinking about also following the same example of Blaze and Illu and also add a weekly report in addition to the daily standup. I’ll take your comments as a clear signal that this would be appreciated, so will make a commitment to do my best to post one every so often, I’ll aim for bi-weekly. I’ll spend some time later this weekend summarizing the work I’ve done in the last month and post it on SayAlot.
Those of you who know me will also know that I’m one of the biggest advocates for building in the open. I always encourage meetings to be scheduled with open invitations rather than limited groups. I’ve put in place a program for us to always have a dedicated note taker in every meeting, and to publish the notes openly. We recently started experimenting with either recording and/or adding an AI notetaker for even better record keeping. So it’s not like what we’ve been doing is any secret at all. If my four bullets above isn’t enough, there is plenty of evidence of my participation and contribution, and that if all other contributors, in those meeting minutes. We build in the open.
Having said this, I’ll start adding a bi-weekly report to my routine, as my personal summary and journal on SayAlot. I also encourage all Contributors to do the same.
as we all do well to give the community the best and an explicit report