Thanks for reading and the added feedback. Answers in-line below.
Can we clarify what these roles actually mean:
- Radicle Community
- Core Team
- Ecosystem
Sure.
- Radicle Community: catch all for people who have been involved with Radicleās forums, Discord, but who are not on the Core Team
- Core Team: any developers who paid by the Radicle Foundation (as opposed to anyone who might be funded by some other means, such as the Radicle Grants Program)
- Ecosystem:
In leu of going into much more detail, I recommend looking at the current members of the committee. For example, for Radicle Community Reverie (Derek + Larry) have been heavily involved with governance discussions in community forums. Then for Ecosystem there are others like Kei (from Gnosis) and Nader (TheGraph, Developer DAO) who have not been actively participating in forums/discord, but who have some domain expertise in the larger web3 ecosystem.
We do not currently have any Core Developers on the Committee. I made an effort to ask around, but it seemed the general consensus was people were already knees deep with core development work. I would love it if anyone from the Core Developer team wants to be on the committee as their insight on things like RFP reviews would be invaluable. Please let me know if youāre interested and Iāll 100% keep it in mind for the 2nd round of grants!
Going through the proposal again, at least to me, there seems to be more prose telling us how the committee members will get paid compared to what they will actually do.
I think this is largely a function of compensation being the most debated point thus far.
I will add a section outlining the points below on responsibilities.
Basic Committee duties:
- Reviewing applications
- Interviewing applicants (when applicable)
- Voting for initial funding a grant (i.e. approving an application)
- Voting for final funding of a grant (i.e. approving the work as ācompletedā)
This list is non-exhaustive, however. I am open to Committee members going beyond these basic responsibilities ā in any way they see fit ā and being autonomous in their effort to ideate, recruit talent, automate processes, or anything else that helps improve the process and output of the grants program. Again, any work committee members log will be 100% public and must be logged as PRs at the end of each month.
On the note of compensation, I donāt think Iām seeing any explanation of why the committee members are compensated in RAD in the first place.
The aim is to have committee members who have skin in the game and are invested in the long-term interest of Radicle. There is no guarantee that committee members already own RAD (personally, I do), so the best thing to do is compensate in RAD.
If volatility and prices are a concern, why not just say $270,000 in USDC is the compensation, and whatever amount of RAD that is upon snapshot completion is what gets transferred?
This was brought up on Discord, so dropping a point @cloudhead made there in Governance#discussion on November 23:
"
ā¦it doesnāt make sense to me to send USDC to the wallet and then convert to RAD to pay the grant committee, when we have $600M worth of RAD in the treasury, so itās a matter of deciding the amount while provisioning for volatility
"
It comes down to not having to deal with the conversion (overhead) and any unused funds being sent back at the end of the 6 months.
Again, a big goal of mine for the 2nd round of grants is to not even have committee compensation handled by the grants program. We should have a separate DAO (e.g. Compensation Committee) that more objectively handles wages.
It was also mentioned that RFPs can be written by core members, could you clarify:
- If core members can apply for grants? ā asking for a friend
I donāt see why not.
If there is something on the backlog that the Core Dev team cannot collectively put effort behind, but you find perhaps 20% more time to work on it, Iād be happy to see a grant application.
I cannot tell the future, but the way I envision this playing out is that we will be living in a world where labor (and I mean anyone doing work) might be part of multiple DAOs; could be 2, 3, or 10 for all I care.
My job as the grants lead will be to make sure we have high quality grants work completed. I will not make a point to care about an individualās other obligations. If they can commit to doing 2 jobs at once, I will be happy to accept their work.
I see a future where we have separate, but cooperative DAOs competing for, but also sharing labor amongst themselves. I do not want to fight against that vision of the future. I would like to experiment towards it.
Just as a thought experiment, I see a spectrum of possibilities:
- I can see a Core Developer wanting to exclusively work with the Radicle Foundation
- I could see someone who has extra time on their hand - and so wants to work extra hours to apply for and do grant work
- I could also see someone who would actually prefer not to work with the Foundation at all. They could quit and exclusively work on grant work across several DAOs at once to make ends meet.
I see all of those possibilities as an individual choice. And I donāt want to be in a place to say what anyone can or should do with their relationship with work. My M.O. will be to find good contributions to my DAO (the grants program) from anyone willing and able.
I hope that gives you some idea of where my head is at.
- Or if the idea is for grantees to pick up the (non-)technical work of those RFPs?
This is not the idea.
I am up for technical or non-technical work being done by grantees.
I just wanted a basic idea of what was envisioned.
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