Name of Retrospective Award
Work in #support
Who is the proposed retrospective award recipient?
haloooloolo.eth
What specific project or work is the retrospective award in recognition of? Please detail what the project or work entailed and the duration over which it took place.
The requested grant relates to my work in #support on the Rocket Pool Discord server, primarily over the last 6 months. To quantify the effort, I wrote a Python script that allows me to process the server’s entire message history. As this script may be useful to the DAO as well, I will be requesting a separate retro grant to release its source code.
The primary metric I will be using to justify the grant value is an approximation of time spent in the support channel. This approximation calculates time by grouping messages of each contributor into sessions. A session is assigned a base time of five minutes and is kept alive by further messages within 15 minutes of the previous. These parameters seemed reasonable for support work. The first message to address a problem is usually preceded by some time to look into the issue and figure out the right questions to ask. There may also be some small amount of time spent at the end waiting for potential further messages by the person being helped. The 5 minute base time accounts for these. The 15 minute session timeout also seemed like a decent tradeoff as some significant time may pass between messages when reading through documentation / generally looking things up. 15 minutes should also be short enough for actual breaks and time spent afk to be properly accounted for.
Given this metric, here are the top 10 contributors to the support channel over all time:
- Patches: 1076h 28m
- [object Object]: 560h 31m
- jcrtp: 437h 32m
- dΞΞtoo (hΞ/him): 326h 43m
- poupas: 274h 54m
- yorickdowne: 264h 33m
- faucetbot: 246h 18m
- 0xFornax: 229h 53m
- haloooloolo: 202h 39m
- lilac: 163h 14m
Based on this, I am requesting $18,000 for 200 hours of work. I believe that $90/h is a reasonable rate for support on a somewhat technical level. To put this into some context, here are the statistics for previous support grant recipients. Time spent is evaluated at the time of the respective grant application.
Patches: 606h - $70,000 - $115/h
[object Object]: 241h - $18,500 - $77/h
0xFornax: 183h - $15,000 - $82/h
Furthermore, these only account for activity that has strictly taken place in the support channel. However, some amount of support work also happens in the general channel and most messages by long-term server members in the general channel answer questions / address issues. If we assume this is slightly less valuable / worthy of remuneration, we reach the following numbers by discounting time spent in general by 50% and adding it to the full support time listed above.
Patches: 666h - $105/h
[object Object]: 303h - $68/h
haloooloolo: 281h - $75/h
0xFornax: 206h - $77/h
I therefore believe my ask is, in addition to being a fair rate for the kind of work done, in line with support grants awarded prevously.
Are the subjects of this award entirely open source (MIT, GPL, Apache, CC BY license or similar)? If not, which parts will not be, why, and under what license will they be published?
The messages are publicly accessible to everyone.
Benefit
| Group | Benefits |
|---|---|
| Potential rETH holders | Prospective rETH holders visit the support / general channel for help with navigating the website or ask questions about the reward distribution mechanism. |
| rETH holders | rETH holders benefit from the higher effectiveness of node operators that have been helped in support. |
| Potential NOs | Potential NOs go to support to ask for hardware suggestions, ask about the Smartnode stack or ask other miscellaneous setup questions. |
| NOs | This is the core group for support activity. Most requests involve node maintenance or actively ongoing issues that caused an operator’s node to go offline. |
| Community | Having a strong support channel to rely on is one of the main reasons a potential node operator would join the Rocket Pool community. |
| RPL holders | Mostly NA - indirectly by helping other members of the community and therefore the protocol. Some support requests are about the migration of RPL v1. |
Costs
How much USD $ is the applicant requesting be awarded to the recipient?
$18,000
Is the applicant requesting RPL or LUSD?
RPL
Conflict of Interest
None