Interim Compensation Guidelines - Draft

Diamond DAO
#1

Background

@lemp.eth and I have been working on interim compensation guidelines.
We envision that the guidelines will evolve as Diamond DAO evolves. In the meantime, we intend to publish these guidelines as a stopgap to promote transparency and fairness in Diamond DAO’s compensation.

I am sharing this draft to collect feedback before “turning it on” for future contributors. In the future, after we’ve established the appropriate legal framework, we will formally adopt contributor guidelines and other bylaws through Signal Proposals. Please share questions, concerns, or suggestions by Friday, February 24

Draft Guidelines

Welcome to Diamond DAO’s compensation guidelines!

The page starts with guiding principles and a compensation rubric, before applying the principles and compensation rubric through case studies.

Please share any questions or suggestions in the #general Discord Channel.

Who is this page for

  • DAO members who want to create a new #Bounty
  • DAO members who are creating a Diamond #Residency proposal

Guiding principles

  1. We take pride in our work.
  • Our work is important so we expect it to be done professionally.
  1. We reward execution.
  • Ideas are great, but Diamond DAO rewards contributors for making things happen.
  1. We are transparent.
  1. We require clear evaluation criteria.
  • Provide a framework for evaluating your work and encourage others to do the same.
  1. We communicate with stakeholders.
  • Check in with people in the working group/s relevant to your bounty or residency before proposing it.
  • Regularly check in with with the people who are affected by your bounty or residency.
  • Don’t hesitate to ask for help or support.

Determining compensation

We look to relevant experience, time commitment, and performance when calculating compensation.

Types of experience

Diamond DAO considers three dimensions of experience: practical experience, Web3 application, and Diamond DAO application (in that order).

Practical experience - demonstrated competency in the skills required for a task.

  • The task requires data analysis. Can you demonstrate your experience with data analysis?

Web3 application - experience applying the skills required for a task in a relevant Web3 context.

  • The task requires supporting an outreach initiative. Can you demonstrate experience designing or implementing outreach campaigns for Web3 communities?

Diamond DAO application - experience applying the skills required for a task in the context of Diamond DAO.

  • The task requires designing a component for Chainverse. Have you participated in the Diamond DAO UX/UI working group?

Draw on relevant experiences to choose a comfort level.

  • Getting comfortable - I don’t have a ton of relevant experience, I’m going to need significant support to complete the task.
  • Comfortable - I have a fair amount of relevant experience, I might need to do some research and ask some questions, but I’ll figure it out.
  • Snug - I have a lot of relevant experience. I have a few questions, but can clearly see the path to completing the task in my head. I would feel comfortable teaching someone how to do this task.
  • Cozy - I have a ton of relevant experience. I am widely known as a leader in this area or have received formal credentials to recognize my competency in this area.

Please provide specific documentation to substantiate your comfort level. Resume and CVs describing your work are nice, but Githubs, personal Websites, Twitter accounts, or forum posts/proposals describing your work at other DAOs are best.

Including specific documentation serves two purposes. First, specific documentation builds community confidence in your comfort level assessment. Second, specific documentation helps prospective contributors understand the type of people contributing to Diamond DAO.

Calculating base comp with comfort level

Base compensation is paid in USDC. Compensation levels were chosen with reference to other compensation guidelines (i.e. DXdao’s compensation guidelines), precedent from past contributors, and Diamond DAO’s current budget constraints ($35,000 USDC a month).

Getting comfortable - $20 an hour

*Comfortable - $*45 an hour.

Snug - $60 an hour

Cozy - $80 an hour.

Calculating hours

  • Provide an estimated hourly commitment range (i.e. 20-25 hours) and calculate payment by selecting the middle of that range (i.e. 22 hours).
    • If you select this method, you request half of your stablecoin payment upfront, and half of it after completing the task.
  • Manually track hours.
    • If you choose to track hours manually (not recommended) request all of your funding after completing the bounty

Calculate share/token comp with results.

Base compensation won’t always be competitive with what your services can demand on the “open market.”

Diamond DAO rewards contributors with #Shares in Diamond DAO and Diamond DAO’s #Token.

  • Shares confer voting power. Shares also confer a (nominal) claim to assets in Diamond DAO’s treasury, calculated by Your shares / Total Outstanding Shares
  • Diamond DAO isn’t ready to start issuing its token to contributors. When we are, community members will receive an allocation of Diamond DAO’s token based, in part, by how many Shares they hold in Diamond DAO and Diamond Bank. After that, we will release guidance to calculate token compensation.

For #Season 0, share and token rewards ranges will remain constant regardless of time commitment.

  • Getting comfortable 5-9 shares
  • Comfortable 10-20 shares
  • Snug 19-30 shares
  • Cozy 29-40 shares

To qualify for the upper-end of each range, you will need to achieve one or more agreed upon KPIs that go beyond the baseline expectations for your task or residency. These KPIs are agreed to between the person proposing the bounty and the DAO on a case by case basis.

Example

Say you are proposing a bounty to organize a series of workshops to teach Diamond DAO members how to query smart contract data.

You are an experienced data analyst and co-created a popular course on querying smart contract data in #Dune Analytics and #The Graph.

  • Comfort level = Cozy
  • Time commitment = 20-25 hours
  • Stablecoin compensation = 22 * 80 = $1760
    • Half requested up front, half requested by the end.
  • Share compensation
    • 29 shares for completing the workshops
    • 35 shares if more than X people attend your workshops
    • 40 shares if a Web3 data influencer attends your event or tweets about it.

Exceptions

  • Service providers that provide specialized services (i.e. lawyers, smart contractors) and accept a higher level of management and supervision than general contributors may command a premium to the posted guidelines. Service providers are paid through Diamond Bank.
  • The compensation guidelines for stablecoin compensation apply to team members (i.e. @amphiboly, @Christian Lemp). The team will work for Diamond DAO pursuant to a Services Agreement that will be posted for approval in Diamond Bank coming soon.
2 Likes
Proposal: Creating the Tokenomics for Chainverse
Proposal: Creating the Tokenomics for Chainverse
Funding Proposal - Tokenomics/Partnerships Residency | 3 months
#2

Additional thoughts/clarifications:

  • Any Member of the DAO can propose a bounty
  • Additional detail on evaluating work. Who evaluates? Should each bounty specify a person / working group to evaluate?
#3

Also, as a process comment:

Do we want to keep the #bounty-boarding channel on discord? I see this as a place for a more formal discussion around bounties execution and guidelines. Maybe with a clear process (like this one described by the post) + more Clarity use, this could get less relevant.

From my personal experience, to share and discuss results from bounty tasks, channels like labs, dev, and both Chainverse product and ideation are being more useful.

1 Like
#4

Overall looks great to me - thanks for putting this together! Some stray thoughts feel free to take or leave based on relevancy:

  • Is it worth putting in any comments about re-evaluation of these numbers as the market changes?
  • Is there any option for contributors to choose to balance their base comp vs. shares differently than outlined above? Say they’d rather be compensated percentage wise more in shares than base?
#5

Yes, I think we should re-evaluate on a season by season basis as market conditions change and as our treasury situation changes (i.e. revenue, grants, fundraising, etc).

I think that would make sense. Do you have any suggestions for what that could look like?

#6

The bounty boarding channel essentially directs people to those working groups anyways, so I think we could retire it.

#7

Good questions. My first thoughts are that yes, identifying an evaluator should be mandatory. I think the working group will be best-positioned to ensure the work is completed, but it has to start with the individual. The person who does the work should self-evaluate first, that gives the working group additional context.

It would be helpful for the proposer to include the evaluator in their proposal - do the thinking up front.

If it’s a partnership project (eg, research and report for a partner DAO), then the partnering DAO should have the opportunity to provide some quick comment/evaluation.

An additional question: what’s the outcome of the evaluation: is compensation scaled back if the work doesn’t meet expectations?

#8

Simplest way to handle alternative compensation split would be to include a statement in the framework like,

“if you wish to propose an alternative compensation arrangement, include a detailed rationale for the alternative in your proposal.”

most people will probably stick to the framework

#9

This looks really good, great work both! I really like that the framework opens doors for people who may be looking to develop skills, rather than just gate the work for people with experience. I wonder if we could make this more explicit somewhere/somehow, like in a guiding principle or with ‘types of experience’.

suggested wording: “we support learning through work” or “we believe in supporting diverse skillsets and experience, and that work is intended to grow both the DAO and the person doing the work”

Also, if the monthly budget cap is fixed (ie, inflexible) It would be useful for people to see the funds remaining for that month before they started preparing a proposal. Then they could decide to wait until the next month, reach out to ask about timing, save themselves a bunch of work if we’ve already allocated monthly funds.