TJ Rush asked a good question in our Discord this week:
I’m reviewing some of these projects, but I have no overall feeling for the total budget. What is the size of the pot? How much money is being granted in total?
Also, has there been any consideration to standardizing on the hourly rate for all projects? I know people can just play a numbers game and claim smaller or larger amount of hours, but a discussion in one proposal saying the hourly rate is too high (as I’ve seen) would seem to me to apply to every grants. I feel utterly unqualified to determine the hour rate needed to distinguish cat herding for example from interviewing for a podcast from building a medical privacy solution. We should ask how many people the project will be paying. How many months of support they are requesting. And have a fixed hourly rate and then let them figure it out how to distribute it. Otherwise, it’s literally impossible, and way too much work, for me to figure it out.
It started to make multiple members think that Moloch DAO should:
come up with some proposal reviewing criteria. Like, what should a good proposal include, what’s reasonable and unreasonable for hourly rates, etc.
This is a problem I am personally passionate about helping bring more clarity to the DAO.
How I propose we solve this:
- We can either have a single thread and talk about all topics (like in this thread here) - or we can create a new thread for each topic below (and other topics that people think of)
- Every Moloch member participating in this research and discussion can bill their time and be paid $75/hr (or whatever is the standard operational rate of the DAO at the moment)
- We try to do our discussions as asynchronously as possible using the forum as opposed to live meetings, to make developing these standards easily accessible to all members and have a better history in place for how we reached our conclusions.
- We hold one meeting before the next grant round starts and summarize/consolidate the results of our forum discussions into new guidelines for Moloch Members. This will be included in the handbook.
Proposed Discussion Topics:
- Hourly rates: What’s reasonable and unreasonable? When does it make sense for projects that apply for repeat grants to ask for new rates? (Research: What are the pay scales for other prominent DAOs?)
- Budget: Should the DAO have a budget? If yes, what should that budget be? What does that budget mean as far as how we manage our treasury? (Note: Obviously, we cannot enforce any budget due the nature of the smart contracts)
- What type of applications for funding does Moloch DAO accept? Many people have commented on DAO proposals saying they are out of scope for what Moloch DAO funds. Does Moloch DAO want to be that rigid?
- What are the guidelines for different proposal types? If we are accepting applications from DAOs for funding, what are the different guidelines and expectations for their proposals compared to discrete projects or guilds? What is considered a good proposal for each type of application?
- What sort of feedback should be avoided? Are there ways of giving feedback to proposals that are potentially destructive to the community and should be avoided? What are ways we can all help each other become better communicators and reviewers without triggering one another or feeling attacked?
Questions, comments, concerns regarding this proposal?
- What do you think of this proposal? Shall we move forward with trying to establish these standards?
- If you think this is a good idea, are there other guidelines/criteria we should discuss that isn’t listed?