Imma skip most of the polisci/psych stuff, but I will touch on one thing: I don’t think it’s necessarily the case that a wider funnel gets us many more contributors. Incredibly, I’d guess we have a couple hundred people at the “Advocacy” stage where RP is meaningful to them and they will bring it up to others (at least opportunistically). I think we have a chasm going from “like RP a lot” and “put personal time/energy into moving RP forward”, and I think effort might be more efficient on bridging the chasm rather than getting more people into the funnel to see if we get a few more that can do the leap over the chasm.
Will hit your items in your Cost-benefit order:
Response to all items
- Encourage and Reward Mentorship
- Honestly… mentoring an interested person is incredibly rewarding in and of itself. I don’t think there’s RP tasks I like more than helping someone else write a proposal, work on forum posts, etc. I get to lighten the load on the current few folks working hard. I get to teach. I get pride and a sense of accomplishment by proxy. (I’ll note this applies to “peer” relationships as much as “mentor-mentee”)
- I think we’re quite good at being available as a community. I know I never had trouble getting my questions answered when spinning up. This does imply a modest amount of proactively reaching out, but… folks will need much more self-starting in other stages anyhow, so I don’t see this as a bottleneck.
- Governance Onboarding Experience
- I’m a little unclear what stage this is meant to address. Voting? Writing an RPIP?
- LFG Support
- What’s the purpose? Is this for bounties? We definitely have “who wants to work with me on X” happen (though response is hit or miss). Is this for RPIP writing etc? It’s tough to get attention there.
- What’s this look like concretely, and how is it significantly different than asking for ppl in
#tradingor#governanceand making a thread?
- Vote stickers
- This is purely awesome. If we can figure out a way to do this in discord, that sounds great.
- Bounty Sytem
- Bounty board: I think this would help. I point people to RPIP-29 regularly, and that’s great, but it requires bouncing around to forum etc to find things.
- Scale up via incentives: currently we have 3 RPL for bounty proposers that hit the first 2 bullets. This is a nice thank you, but I don’t think it steers behavior a huge amount. Increasing rewards over time is interesting, but has weird perverse incentives when competition is thin.
- Marketing: We don’t really do much marketing. It could get some play on RF or twitter spaces I guess?
- Community-Led Documentation Revamp
- There was a bounty for this, and essentially zero community uptake despite a forum post and several discord posts (from harpocryptes and shfryn)
- See BA032303 Bounty Submission (Updating RP docs / website)
- Decentralise powers over communications venues
- I think this is important and an easy win
- Discord and forum miniadmins?
- For RPIP editors specifically, I’ll note that the difficulty has been getting people to want the role more than getting the role provided
- Informal voice chat
- We do have chit chat, and it has gotten some ad hoc usage. Worth a shot to try to get socialization? Would this compete with twitter spaces? Someone that does synchronous stuff should opine
- We do have chit chat, and it has gotten some ad hoc usage. Worth a shot to try to get socialization? Would this compete with twitter spaces? Someone that does synchronous stuff should opine
- Hall of fame
- We have the poaps, so seems quite doable
- Objective setting
- We did a little of this for one roadmap discussion. I think it’s a decent initial brainstorm. I think we’re not great at converging and planning clearly from there.
- Low Friction Quantitative Recognition System
- I submitted a grant for a variation of this, which was rejected: July 2023 GMC Call for Grant Applications - Deadline is July 15th - #6 by Valdorff
- Semi-Competitive Debates
- I honestly hate this :P. Well thought out responses, modeling, etc is my preference; I think that’s super hard to do fast. This sounds like prioritizing “sounding right” or “assertion”.
- As an example, I can bring up the RPL staking research thread. There we saw opinions change over weeks. We saw models get refined over weeks. We saw models get discarded because they had issues. We saw models get discarded because they were too hard to explain. Etc.
- I also worry about polarizing, which debates tend to feed effectively.
- Regular and Predictable Voting Periods
- “They can just check the voting portal once a week and know they aren’t missing anything.”
- Per RPIP-4, the fastest allowed voting period is 7 days, with 14 days being recommended (and I believe the only thing we’ve used). I think checking weekly should do the trick plenty well.
- Needing to delay votes we think are important to line up with a period seems an unneeded annoyance (to proposers and authors and editors) and a possible danger (as folks try to “get it in for this round”)
- “They can just check the voting portal once a week and know they aren’t missing anything.”
- Narrative Governance Activity / History
- Weird… I’m here for it.
TL; DR:
- Love: Vote stickers, Bounty board, Decentralise powers over communications venues
- Lean positive: Bounty incentives, Hall of fame, Low Friction Quantitative Recognition System, Narrative Governance Activity / History
- Shrug: Encourage and Reward Mentorship, Bounty marketing, Informal voice chat, Objective setting
- Lean negative: Regular and Predictable Voting Periods, Community-Led Documentation Revamp
- Pls no: Semi-Competitive Debates
- Need more info: Governance Onboarding Experience, LFG Support