RPIP-41: Committee Stipends (forum vote active)

Governance
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This is the official discussion thread for RPIP-41: Committee Stipends. Some prior discussion of this has taken place on the initial discussion thread here: [Discussion] Compensation for Committee Members.

Here’s a brief summary of the RPIP:

  • There’s a global stipend rate for committees, proposed at $30 / hr.
  • Each committee has a ‘Target Hours per member’ parameter.
  • Committees receive a stipend budget based on their number of members, their target hours, and the global stipend rate.
  • Committees can determine via internal vote how to split the stipend budget.
  • Stipend budgets are paid out by the GMC, from the GMC budget, for lack of better options right now.

There are a number of differences between this initial draft RPIP and the previously discussed proposal in the pre-RPIP discussion thread. These changes are mostly to prioritize simplicity or consistency with existing policies. Here’s a summary of the changes:

  • There’s no escrow of the initial month of membership payout as there was in the initial discussion.
  • This was unclear in the initial discussion, but no fixed methodology is required to be used by committees.
  • Stipend payment currency is no longer fixed to RPL, the recipient may select from the GMC’s token payout options. Stipend is denominated in USD, and RPL is priced at time of payment transaction creation to reduce market risk as much as is feasibly possible.

The initial numbers for the GMC and IMC were based on either discussions or materials generated by Val and ShfRyn. I want to emphasize these are initial starting points, and I can easily adjust them to feedback. As it was, they both came out around the same level, and I rounded them to 13.

Grants Management Committee

Date Target Member Count Target Member Hours Target Monthly Stipend Budget
2024-03-04 (RPIP Authored) 9 13 $3,510.00

Incentives Management Committee

Date Target Member Count Target Member Hours Target Monthly Stipend Budget
2024-03-04 (RPIP Authored) 9 13 $3,510.00

Thanks for reading. I’d love to get useful feedback from you all here. I know this topic has been debated hotly a few times in the past, if you feel this is going to cause problems in its current form please tell me and I’ll try to add safeguards or fallbacks to cover issues raised.

2 Likes
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The split of the committee stipend budget SHOULD be determined by the voting members of the committee in question.

Each committee SHOULD be consistent in the method used to determine the payout split.

I appreciate the flexibility, especially since the GMC and IMC operate very differently.

I believe the framework proposed provides sufficient structure to ensure our implementation is low-risk while also allowing us the flexibility to enhance efficiency as needed.

1 Like
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Should we include the pDAO treasurer role to this proposal?

Right now it would be the only elected position being left out and creating an entire funding framework for a single position seems like overkill IMO. I could also approach the GMC with grant/retro requests but I started as a volunteer and don’t feel right asking for compensation myself and this proposed framework sounds more appropriate for recurring work.

1 Like
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That sounds fine to me. Only oddball bit is that there’s no other “committee members”. Maybe the gmc/imc treasurers could act as members for internal votes to change target hours? Or pDAO could control it if the group has less than three members?

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Thanks for engaging @vacalaranja. I spent a little time thinking about this, I’ll give a TL;DR of my current thoughts, and then go into more detail (probably more than anyone really wants lol.)

TL;DR
I agree with your concerns, however, I don’t think including the treasurer position in this RPIP is the right way to resolve them.

  • I don’t want to create an entire separate funding framework for a single position, however, I fear that is essentially what I’d need to do in order to include this in the RPIP.
  • In the long term, I would like to see the remaining volunteer positions (pDAO treasurer and RPIP editors) become committees under RPIP-10 (though potentially as a ‘committee of one’ in your case).
  • I think a retro or grant is appropriate in the meantime. If this RPIP is approved by the pDAO, I’m happy to write one up on your behalf, based on what you estimate the hours to be, and the global stipend rate.

Details

On the first point, I think Val’s comment is a good illustration of the problems. In order to make this work, I would have to either:

  1. Make the RPIP much more general: ‘elected contributor stipends’ if you will.

I could do this, but I think the RPIP and the DAO would be the worse for it. As a general rule, I would prefer to nudge the DAO towards consistent and widely applicable structures for contributors (ie committees) rather than leave each RPIP to define its own inconsistent structures.

The main advantages to this are:

  • Less complexity. Voters only need to understand a general structure.
  • More safety. Fallbacks like pDAO challenges and forcing committee re-election can be ‘inherited’ by any new committees.
  1. Add a number of additional rules and exceptions that apply only to the pDAO treasurer.

I could do this as well, but I really don’t want to. It will add further complexity to this RPIP that I fully intend to try to make obsolete in the future. I think it would make the RPIP harder to engage with.

Either of these options would also require a fairly substantial re-write of the RPIP. Selfishly, I don’t really want to spend a bunch of time on - in my opinion - making this a worse RPIP.

On the second point, I think both RPIP editors and the pDAO treasurer deserve to be treated in the same way as the GMC and IMC, and receive stipends. I would also extend this further and say that they should be governed by similar rules for elections.

Essentially, we currently have several structures that achieve more or less the same thing, but they all have different rules.

Unfortunately, RPIP-10 commands: ‘Thou Shalt Not Make a Reserve Treasury Management Committee’ which means that there is some delicacy around how this should be implemented. As a direction, I think this is still fine, because what RPIP-10 is talking about isn’t what you’re currently doing as pDAO treasurer, but it makes the issue more complex to resolve.

My rough plan on ‘general pDAO structural fixes’ is thus:

  • Replace RPIP-10 with two RPIPs with roughly the same content. One focused on Committees, and one focused on treasury management. As it stands, RPIP-10 is doing two separate things, and it makes it harder to find information about how committees work. Further, there are a number of formatting and structural improvements that I think could make it much easier to engage with.
  • As part of this replacement, further standardize committees. Primarily to:
    • Better define the pDAO right to challenge a decision made by any committee.
    • Better define the right for the pDAO to force committee re-election if desired.
  • As part of this replacement, I could also define @vacalaranja’s current role as a new committee. Potentially with additional responsibilities. (I would like to move the stipend payout role off of the GMC, for example.) I would avoid adding ‘treasury management’ responsibility, as the intent of RPIP-10 was to avoid this.
  • At some point in the future, make RPIP editors a committee, probably in parallel to rewriting RPIP-1.

On point three, it sucks that this excludes you @vacalaranja. I wish I’d spent more time thinking about it before you commented, and reached out to you to discuss. Given the delays so far, I wanted to get it done as soon as possible.

As I said above, I think you deserve the same consideration as other volunteers. If the pDAO adopts this, I’ll try to make sure you’re covered via retros until we can get something more official passed.

2 Likes
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There might also be a place for a committee that is pDAO administrative (or probably a better word for it). This would include treasurer and RPIP editors under one banner. I would not be surprised in the future to have more positions in the pDAO that fall under this designation.

pDAO --> Administrators (those who do work directly for pDAO operations: Treasurer, editors etc.)
     --> GMC
     --> IMC

Startings of an organizational chart :grimacing:

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As context, this is there to avoid giving control of the entire reserve treasury to a broad committee. The pDAO treasurer doesn’t need that budget, so I think there’s essentially no issue. There would be challenges as written with the “committee of 1” thing tho.

RPIP editors can easily be a committee.

Doofus’ method is interesting…

2 Likes
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I think as the DAO evolves it would benefit from regularizing most/all of its positions with monetary stipend. I think this includes RPIP editors, treasurers, etc. Currently those are not organized in a committee; currently the RPIP editors are not elected.
I think this is a bigger discussion than needs to happen for this RPIP; I would recommend application by vacalaranja to GMC for now, and an ongoing discussion about the organization structure; if an administrative committee forms it can easily be added to this RPIP later through amendment.

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I have mixed feelings about this idea, but I think I’m leaning positive. On the plus side, it would be easier to implement, and it would provide some redundancy for the treasury reporting done by Vacalaranja. It would also avoid any committee-of-one issues.

The downsides with a general-purpose committee are that it might be harder to find members? The existing committees are quite focused, whereas reporting and RPIP review are fairly different in terms of skillset? Not sure, probably easy enough to overcome if you have 3-5 members total.

Definitely a problem for another day, though.

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I’ve made some minor changes to the RPIP based on feedback and discussion here. In summary:

  • Explicitly note that future committees should be paid a stipend and be added to this RPIP without a separate pDAO vote (with the assumption that there will be a pDAO vote to confirm any new committees.)
  • Allow the GMC Administrator to change the payout period from a month if they feel it necessary. This is a fallback in the event of the payouts becoming a large administrative burden.
  • Recognize the omission of the pDAO treasurer and RPIP editors, and the reasons for this.

PR with the above, and some minor formatting fixes:

Further comments and feedback are still appreciated and can make it into the RPIP before its finalized, but I want to trigger the poll now so we can keep this moving.

RPIP-41: Committee Stipends
  • Support moving to vote; this is great
  • Support moving to vote; this is good enough
  • Oppose moving to vote
  • Abstain
0 voters

Thank you for reading.

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Vote text here if anyone would like to review.