Rapid Research Reviewer Compensation
Who is the proposed retrospective award recipient?
The five reviewers that volunteered and were assigned to the Rapid Research Incubator project.
Ken, Kane, Langers, knoshua, and LongForWisdom.
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 reviewers read, analyzed and reviewed 21 submissions over the course of two weeks. They also attended a highly valuable discussion call to share their opinions with one another.
Here is the results of their work.
I surveyed each reviewer to ask the amount of time they spent on the review process.
Here are the survey findings from four individuals of estimated hours / time spent:
- 8 hours reviewing
- 7 hours not including meetings
- 14 hours total ( ~10 hours reading all the submissions, asking questions, thinking about them, taking notes, 2 hours for meeting plus prep for meeting, 2 hours for scoring and making sure my scores were consistent across all submissions)
- 8.5 hours (5.5 hours summarizing, 3 hours grading)
(I have anonymized the reviewers because I don’t believe sharing their identities has any value.)
The five individuals selected demonstrate an exceptional understanding of the protocol. Considering their expertise, it’s likely that involving different reviewers would have significantly increased the time investment.
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Planning For The Future
The survey feedback collected so far from reviewers about the research process has been overwhelmingly positive. There’s still a few reviewers that are composing suggestions that we will attempt to integrate into future review processes. The community has shown a heavy interest in replicating this process into other initiatives. One example would be to collect ideas to expand the vision and goals for the GMC. Discord Link
For this, I would recommend making Epi’s research bounty something that reoccurs every few months with different focuses each time. I think in general it’s been really successful in getting ideas written up, and it wasn’t terribly costly. Could do another round in a few months time with the brief being ‘how to better set DAO strategy’ or something. - Long For Wisdom
I really like this idea! Also happy the the research bounty has been successful - Dondo
Having a solid incentive in place for future reviewers is ABSOLUTELY ESSENTIAL. The Rapid Research Incubator process would not have achieved such amazing results if these five reviewers did not step up to the task. This retro not only awards previous work but sets the precedent and expectation moving forward.
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 reviews and feedback were published to the entire community.
Benefit
| Group | Benefits |
|---|---|
| Potential rETH holders | Various tactical ideas were generated that could potentially improve protocol tokenomics |
| rETH holders | Various tactical ideas were generated that could potentially improve protocol tokenomics |
| Potential NOs | Various tactical ideas were generated that detail how to improve NO incentives |
| NOs | Various tactical ideas were generated that detail how to improve NO incentives |
| Community | The project itself is a great example of how strong are decentralized community is and how much we all build together. There were several new GMC awardees who contributed their ideas. |
| RPL holders | Based on the various ideas of creating stronger incentives geared towards NOs, RPL demand should increase. |
Costs
How much USD $ is the applicant requesting be awarded to the recipient?
$5,000 ($1,000 for each reviewer).
This breaks down to about $100/hr if we put the average amount of time spent reviewing at 10 hours per reviewer.
Is the applicant requesting RPL or LUSD?
RPL
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 am the administrator for the GMC. Ken is a GMC member. Kane and Langers are on the official Rocket Pool core team. The GMC is welcome to use their discretion if they feel any of the awardees should be excluded from compensation.
Epineph has voiced several times he does not wish to be compensated for his invaluable work that built the framework for the Rapid Research Incubator program. For this reason, I will not be submitting a separate retro for his work, but I’m acknowledging how absolutely essential and valuable it was.