Bounty Revamp
Who is the proposed retrospective award recipient?
GovAlpha.
Please note that ShfRyn contributed expertise, time, and a small amount of direct styling work to this project as well. Having discussed this with him, he considers it to have been covered under his funding as GMC administrator and asked not to be included in this retro.
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.
Primarily, this retro covers two main areas of work. Firstly, work on the bounty board site, currently hosted at https://rpbountyboard.com/. Secondly, various items of process work, recommendations, and advice provided with the aim of improving the bounty process.
Bounty Board
A summary of the board’s features and functionality:
- A listing of all current and past bounties that draw from a GitHub repository controlled and maintained by the GMC.
- Filter, sort, and search functionality of the bounty listings. Including the ability to easily share a specific filter and sort via URL.
- Countdowns that show roughly when the GMC is expected to take major actions, including adding bounties, posting round results, and making payouts.
- Basic resources pulled from the GMC controlled GitHub repository, currently consisting of an FAQ and a list of commonly used resources.
- A bounty feed page that aggregates links to basic bounty-related events, sorted by latest date. Currently, this includes relevant forum posts pulled via RSS and highlighting new bounties.
- Passably attractive (though I’m not sure I can claim it as professional) display, styling, and presentation of the items described above. I relied on ShfRyn for advice and recommendations for this item.
- Faux backend work to manage updates of prices and source data via periodic Github actions.
- Limited documentation of the bounty portal, including how data is managed, the assumptions made of the source data, and instructions to set up a local development environment.
The board repository has been forked to the GMC’s GitHub organization and is located here: https://github.com/rocketpoolgmc/rp-bounty. I’m maintaining write permissions here for maintenance and development purposes for the time being, but ultimately, the front end is also controlled by the GMC.
The board is fully open source, and anyone is free to fork it or contribute improvements. There are several ideas I have for further functionality that I’d like to add, but these will be the subject of a future retro. Bugfixing and resolution of existing issues will be done without the expectation of future funding.
Bounty Process, Recommendations, and Advice
This section is a little more scattered, as I ended up picking up a number of smaller work items more generally applicable to the GMC in addition to the ‘big-ticket’ items.
Bounty Process Changes
I’ve laid the groundwork to improve how bounties are presented to bounty hunters after they have been proposed by the community. In practical terms, this involved:
- Communicating and discussing the suggested change on the forum, and in discord.
- Discussing the change with the GMC administrator, explaining the potential benefits, and attempting to identify likely pitfalls.
- Authoring new templates and guidelines for Bounty Proposals, Bounty Definitions, and Bounty Data and submitting them to the GMC’s repository. These have since been adopted by the GMC Administrator.
- Authoring an update checklist for the GMC Administrator, this checklist describes what the administrator should be checking, reviewing, and updating in order to keep the canonical bounty data up to date.
Bounty Redrafts
Given bounties already existed when I started pushing for these process changes, it was necessary to convert existing bounties to match the new templates. This included:
- Taking existing bounties - which existed only as proposal forum posts - and writing up rough definitions that could be more easily engaged with by a bounty hunter.
- Continuing to convert new bounties that were produced during this process.
- Re-drafting these rough definitions once the portal work was complete, and the templates were in a close-to-final state. This included actively communicating with stakeholders that may be affected by any changes, and ensuring they were reviewed and approved by the GMC administrator.
Bounty Incentives RPIP
RPIP-39 is currently in draft form, pending finalization. This RPIP (if passed) will empower the GMC to provide incentives for common bounty activities. I will attempt to push this RPIP to a vote after taking suggested changes from the community, see the discussion thread here.
Miscellaneous GMC Support Work
Beyond these items, there were several minor items that I worked on as well. In some cases where utility was not solely limited to bounties. This includes:
- Writing a bounty FAQ and Resources section that is currently being used on the bounty portal. They were reviewed and approved by the GMC Administrator and merged into the GMC’s repository.
- Making a written recommendation on conflicts of interest within the GMC, at the request of the GMC administrator.
- Breaking down the various statuses possible across grants, retros and bounties. This was not anyone’s direct request, but its importance becomes obvious as soon as you try to effectively communicate what’s going on with grants, retros, and bounties to audiences with different priorities.
- Informal advice to the GMC administrator relating to working within a DAO, regarding workload, communications, and managing expectations.
- Informal advice to the GMC administrator relating to organizing and managing GMC status and record spreadsheets.
- Informal advice to the GMC administrator relating to a communication code of conduct for the GMC.
Duration
This work took place over several months, starting in the second week of November 2023, and largely finalized at the end of February 2024, with a few outstanding loose ends, such as the RPIP work, and general maintenance support of the bounty portal. This was a part-time commitment over this time period.
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?
Yes
Benefit
| Group | Benefits |
|---|---|
| Potential rETH holders | No direct benefit. |
| rETH holders | No direct benefit. |
| Potential NOs | No direct benefit. |
| NOs | Better uptake of bounties should help improve the NO experience and contribute to the overall value of the Rocket Pool protocol. |
| Community | Improvement of the bounty experience makes it easier for community members to find and contribute to bounty work. Potentially, this could bring new individuals or groups to the community. |
| RPL holders | Better uptake of bounties should help improve the NO experience and contribute to the overall value of the Rocket Pool protocol, which may be reflected in the RPL price. |
Costs
How much USD $ is the applicant requesting be awarded to the recipient?
$45,000
Broken down to an hourly rate, this comes out high, especially given the part-time nature of the work. My justifications for this boil down to:
- This is a high-leverage area of work. The GMC currently has funds but is bottlenecked on the number of quality proposals. Simultaneously, the GMC has bounties that have been active for months that have not been picked up. Work done to improve process and participation here can help to unlock a lot of value.
- While others could likely have done parts of this work for less cost in a traditional working environment, DAOs are both harder to engage with and have a smaller pool of workers available. I think there are very few people who have the desire, ability, and available time to do this work at Rocket Pool at the moment.
- There have been notably positive responses to the bounty board and the clarity I’ve attempted to bring to the existing bounties. People have been sharing the link around since the start of the project and generally commenting positively.
Is the applicant requesting RPL or LUSD?
LUSD
Conflict of Interest
Does the person or persons requesting the retrospective award have any conflicts of interest to disclose? (Please disclose here if you are a member of the GMC or if you have nominated a member of the GMC for this retrospective award).
I’m not a member of the GMC, and no member of the GMC is included as part of this retro.
I have indicated that I will be working on the committee stipends proposal here. That work will proceed regardless of the outcome of this retro.