January 2023 GMC Community Discussion of Submitted Applications

Tks for clarifying, we agree this is more of a grant than a bounty

Thanks, Tim. If you could do me two quick favors, that would be greatly appreciated! It looks like you posted your revised application in the Bounty page. If you could instead put it here in the grants thread, that would be awesome. Iā€™d move it myself but I donā€™t have the permissions, I donā€™t think. After you do that, if you could delete your two posts in the Bounty thread that would help clean it up a bit. If it wonā€™t let you, though, just let me know and Iā€™ll get a mod to do it.

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Done, appreciate for helping

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Thanks! That does not meet the minimum 20 characters, so Iā€™ll just say ā€œthanksā€ again!

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Hi @calurduran :slight_smile: No worries, rather thank you very much for the explanation: I appreciated the fifty-foot paper mache orange rocket example a lot :joy:

I have deleted my reply in the Bounty Applications thread and wrote a new application in the one dedicated to Grants.

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Thanks Fuliggine, both for re-posting and deleting the old one!

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I would like to expand what @peteris requested in https://dao2.rocketpool.net/t/january-2023-gmc-call-for-retrospective-award-applications-deadline-is-january-15th/1337/7?u=valdorff

My suggestion would be to 2x reimburse the ETH spent on gas by every address (2*2.1451 ETH ~= 215 RPL). These people selflessly spent their own money to help improve the user experience.

I would also suggest that @peteris should be given a small honorarium for doing the work and deploying the contract. Iā€™d suggest 25-50 RPL.

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Opinion on the Stereum grant: Validators are not the average users of ETH, they are infra providers, that need to be able to handle unexpected issues. I think making it ā€œone clickā€ is a negative, not a positive.

I'd like to read more

I agree creation and management should be easy and smooth - but! You must keep abreast of things. If an update in your Linux distro blows things up unexpectedly, if your execution client releases a critical update between smartnode releases, if your server is fried by a power surge, etc - you must be able to respond. You donā€™t need to know everything ahead of time, but you need to be willing to learn, spend time on it, and get things working well.

If web3 gets the same use as web2, thatā€™s about 5 billion people. If 50% of ETH is staked and every validator is a separate human (bad assumption), thatā€™s under 2 million NOs. If each one was a totally separate user, that would be 0.04% of ETH users. Realistically, itā€™s much lower than that as a handful of huge entities account for the vast majority of validators. This is a specialist role. For context, about 0.27% of car drivers are mechanics.

@jasperthegovghostā€™s work and application speak for themselves. That said, the magnitude of Jasperā€™s impact is hard to get oneā€™s head around. How valuable is such high-profile networking and high-impact marketing to a protocol like Rocket Pool? Companies routinely pay heavy-hitting executives obscene salaries to access their networks, without getting essays in the tens of thousands of words from them that are their own marketing campaigns.

I would caution this community against undervaluing marketing, which often happens in the Ethereum ecosystem. Read the stats in Jasperā€™s post, and think about how we got here (1M impressions in a month? :exploding_head:).

All of that is to say that I believe the real value of Jasperā€™s contributions to Rocket Pool far exceeds what the DAO can afford. Thank you, Jasper, for putting your heart and soul into Rocket Pool!

https://dao2.rocketpool.net/t/january-2023-gmc-call-for-retrospective-award-applications-deadline-is-january-15th/1337/9

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Hi @FeelingoodFeelingrt I just read through your retrospective award application here. Iā€™m struggling a bit with it because it seems to slightly be a retro. award application (for the educational material) but much more concretely is a grant application for future work, e.g. a donation to the future mininode campaign. As such, Iā€™d probably recommend instead filling out a grant application here. It has a slightly different set of application questions, but much of what youā€™ve already written will be applicable. After you do that, if you could delete your retro. award application (assuming you agree with my interpretation that the funding ask is for work that has yet to be done, e.g. spinning up a node) that would be great. Thanks!

https://dao2.rocketpool.net/t/january-2023-gmc-call-for-retrospective-award-applications-deadline-is-january-15th/1337/10?u=valdorff

Thing1: I think RP does too much public goods funding for its current growth stage, so Iā€™m against this.

Thing2: this seems a very convoluted way to do it. If we want to use treasury money to give to ultrasound, why not just give them treasury money?

If itā€™s for the benefit of creating a long term funding source, why have a 3rd party control it? Seems like we could simply set the withdrawal address to the GMC multisig, node wallet seed could be held by both a trusted NO to run the thing and the GMC to make the initial deposit in a FB bundle so that no trust is needed at all.

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I agree with Val. In addition, the GMC goals and scoring rubrics donā€™t seem to cover public goods funding currently. RPIP-15 certainly has room for it, but I think it would be hard for the GMC to evaluate grants that propose to produce something for Rocket Pool versus public goods funding with what has been established so far. I think a fourth category and scoring rubric, maybe as well a dedicated budget would be helpful here.

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Hihi @qz-clrfund! Saw your grant application and wanted to ask a few questions:

  • it looks like youā€™re asking for a GMC matching fund - are you also asking for payment for dev/maintenance? Either way, saying so explicitly would be great.
  • what do you think about timing?
    • This is our first GMC round, so Iā€™m a little worried people might be ā€œoverloadedā€. On the other hand, I could see the argument for trying different avenues early on to see what the community engages with.
    • for previous rounds, did the communities have parallel grant systems also? If so, were they new or longstanding?
  • whatā€™s the advantage of doing this standalone vs on gitcoin directly? Is it mainly that matching funds can be constrained to RP?
  • What trust assumptions are needed? Would the GMC be able to distribute directly to avoid an intermediate holding group?
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Thanks @ilk.eth for the grant application. I was a little unclear as to what the 7700-word document was that you were proposing to translate. Sorry if I missed that in the application - Iā€™m doing a quick first scan of them as they come in.

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hey @calurduran thanks for the prompt review, and your interest in clarification of the source content definition.
The response to your question is included under ā€˜Payment and Verificationā€™ - ā€˜What is the proposed payment schedule for the grant? How much RPL and over what period of time is the applicant requesting?ā€™.
And the response is as follows: The proposed work covers translation of the ā€˜Introductionā€™ part under ā€˜Overviewā€™ section of Rocket Pool documentation website.
Well, I see now that it definitely is not the perfect section to define the source content. And I am pretty sure about the answer but still want to ask this absurd question just in case (pls blame it on my inexperience): Are we allowed to edit our proposal for revising the content in question here?
Thank you so much!

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Thanks! I donā€™t think we can allow editing after the deadline, but thereā€™s certainly nothing stopping you from clarifying anything youā€™d like in this thread (which I assume most committee members will read).

Clrfund would not seek any direct compensation for facilitating the round, but there would be an expectation that CLRFund can participate in the round as a recipient. This way CLRFundā€™s compensation can be reflective of the utility clrfund provides as a public good for the Rocketpool community.

My take is that some folks here, from the Rocketpool community, probably have a much better feel for when would be the most opportune time. But Iā€™d personally lean towards early experimentation.

Itā€™s probably more about what flavour of QF the community wants to run. One nice quality of clrfund is that it can be entirely white-labeled; it can live at Rocketpoolā€™s domain, the contracts and matching pool can be owned by who/whatever the Rocketpool community entrusts with the responsibility, etc. Along with the collusion-resistance that we inherit from MACI.

Yes, no funds need to be transferred until the round is ready to be finalized. Whichever account is holding the matching funds sets an approval to FundingRoundFactory contract, which can be owned by who/whatever the Rocketpool community is comfortable with. Once the round is finalized, funds are withdraw from the matching pool and sent directly to the fundingRound contract, where it can only be withdrawn by the recipients.

A number of proposals seem to have used $100 per hour as a benchmark; Iā€™m not sure if this came from earlier in this thread or was independently arrived at. Other proposals seem to have simply made up rates for delivered products - Iā€™ll point at the very large price differences in translation grant proposals as an example.

In all cases, I think we need to stay grounded against market rates. Not all hours are created equal. A senior dev at $100 might represent a 50% friends and family discount. A translation at the same price point would represent a very large markup over market.

My suggestion would be to select a discount rate (eg, 50%), research the market price for the work, and then apply the discount. Expenses and extraordinary results should be considered as well, separately from the time spent.

This is ofc, not actually my decision - Iā€™ll happily leave that actual work to the GMC - just wanted to get my 2 cents in, as Iā€™ve had a huge variety of gut reactions to proposal prices from ā€œthatā€™s way too high!ā€ to ā€œthatā€™s way too low!ā€ and Iā€™d love to see some (inevitably loose) tie to objectivity and consistency.

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GM! Just wanted to state the obvious in the case of the grant proposal to translate all Rocket Pool documentation to Spanish.

Adjusting the proposed compensation to USD-denomination or reducing the requested RPL amounts, based on the ongoing market movements, would be totally OK for me. I realized after the weekend that the initially proposed RPL-based compensation became a bit unreasonable in FIAT terms (even for a technical/specialized translation work). Happy to discuss this further if this proposal would be relevant for the committee.

At the risk of being self absorbed, I assume this comment is in reference to my questions on #trading, and if so I apologize that I gave the impression that Knoshua deserves 25$ an hour for his time. Iā€™ll chalk it up to trying to type while chasing after my 20 month old. Iā€™m agnostic on whether he deserves 50, 100, 200, or 500 per hour.
My intended point was that the pDAO treasury literally cannot pay people what they deserve for their work.

the thought experiment is as follows, skip for TLDR:

Waq requests 1860 RPL. Butta requests 2000 RPL.
Rocket scientists: Jasper spends a lot of time working on RP; probably spent 200 hours on his paper which created a lot of beneficial buzz, and has a strong twitter following, iā€™ll say give 600 hours total in the last two years. Val spends more time answering questions from noobs than I spend awake, Iā€™ll say 1200 hours. Object 700/patches 1200 (i confirmed, patches has 74k posts on discord, most in #support, so thatā€™d be like a post per minute). Yorick mostly shitposts but based on pure volume and iā€™ll give him 250 hours. ken- 500 hours, to include his work on LEB.
These 8 people (6 rocket scientists and 2 strongly aligned and influential community members) I mentioned are all technical, and fill a needed niche; they have all also been critically important for rocket poolā€™s success. At 100 dollars per hour, here is 4450 hours- or 14,833 RPL (30$/RPL); add on the beaconchain and rocket fuel and this is ~18633.
The total amount that can be given retroactively if we expend the treasury is ~19k.
But then all the other players working hours for RP on support: Mig is constantly in support- 300. Lilac; fornax- 200 and 800. deetoo- 300. Ramana- most recently people floated 22ETH (1200 RPL), but thatā€™s just for rocket arb; heā€™s a frequent support contributor- maybe another 200 hours. Then all the theses: Xer0.eth, marceau- 80 hours each- and Iā€™m sure marceauā€™s time is worth a lot. Then add some of the thought leaders: uisce, dondo, uisce, knoshua, a35, kevster, vvander, pieter, invis, calurduran, hodja, hertzen, enkriptix and many many many more- those who have shaped protocol policy in a major way- thousands of hours. Major Marceau achievements like the whale marriages; those who put forward liquidity early before funding was secured.
Then all the individuals contributing to the various governance debates, in governance discord and Reddit. Hundreds who had to process the various arguments for and against different snapshot vote allocations, or weigh the arguments for different amounts of RPL collateral; those that spoke and those that voted have been critical to how functional our governance is compared to other protocols, which is a major selling point for Rocket Pool.
Then the personalities: bankless, sassal, superphiz, iā€™ll add marceau again- these people have been critical to raising awareness of the protocol.
Then the projects that have integrated with rocket pool and given the unique flavor and visibility: POAP, ethstaker, rocket pool dashboard (in early days), rocketscan, etc

Essentially, the point is that hundreds of people have been involved in this process and in making rocket pool great, and the pool of funds is not big enough for everyone to be even close to compensated.

Problems with paying our contributors what they deserve in hourly wages retroactively:
  1. There are not enough funds to pay all worthy individuals even at a heavy discount.
  2. Paying some people and denying others for their time risks creating conflict (specifically conflict between GMC members and community members). Same with choosing to pay some an hourly wage less than others for similar work.
  3. What oneā€™s time is worth differs greatly by where they live (can be by a factor of 10), and rocket pool probably shouldnā€™t be in the business of reinforcing those inequalities.
  4. Setting high hourly rates for retroactive pay will set unsustainable expectations of future work.
  5. Selecting a few people ignores the many many contributions of other community members that have helped elevate these few (answering questions, retweeting, giving insights, reviewing code, just consuming the content etc).
  6. Hourly rates ignore the benefits of efficiency (ie, should a person who works 10 hours and reaches 1000 people get paid more than someone who works 1 hour and has the same impact?)
  7. Giving large payouts now has the paradoxical effect of de-incentivizing future public goods because the treasury will be extinguished for future rounds.

My recs (which fortunately I donā€™t much of a reputation or relationships to protect :sweat_smile:)

  1. Donā€™t bankrupt the fund on this grant round. Maybe restrict payouts to 2 reward cycles.
    There are a lot of worthy individuals that did not apply, and because the GMC is just starting the protocols for distributing funds are in their infancy.
  2. Those projects that have an obvious path to sustainability/profitability should try to make money rather than relying on RP for grants. Projects that have an income source or have received donations for their work should declare these so RP is not double paying. Be very cautious about giving grants to for-profit companies (outside our community), as you are unlikely to get the same value as community members can provide.
  3. Grants should focus on seeding projects, not provide ongoing salaries.
  4. Awards should focus on attempting to quantify the measurable good that contributions have for the rocketpool community; hourly rates are somewhat immaterial to this.
  5. A member of the 7 person GMC requesting ~9% of all future funding is a conflict of interest whether they recuse themselves on that particular vote or not; it will affect every single other vote in a resource constrained environment.
  6. I hope that in the future more grants will be written where the writer is not the sole beneficiary.
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