So… I’m gonna mostly opine against stipends.
Right now everyone’s a volunteer, and that’s nice
If anyone puts in 20 minutes, I’m appreciative.
If they put in an hour, I’m more appreciative.
If they put in ten hours, I’m overjoyed.
Right now, we’re community members
We have a community task we’ve taken on for the community, but at heart we’re no different.
We’re certainly not employed by the pDAO or the team.
My concerns
I’m concerned that I’ll have thoughts like:
- Am I supposed to be getting paid for my work? What’s my hourly rate for contract work? How many hours am I putting into RP each month?
- Spoiler - you aren’t going to pay me enough. I routinely have days that would blow through Wander’s proposed per-period payment, let alone 4 weeks.
- Why is insert-name-here getting paid (the same/almost as much/whatever) when they do (whatever I perceive them to do) and I do (whatever I perceive myself to do)?? That doesn’t seem fair.
- To Wander’s point (“Pay peanuts, get monkeys”), we can only afford peanuts. Thus, I think we’re better off not structuring this as payment.
My suggestion
I think we should be looking to recognize people and thank them, rather than pay them.
I would suggest:
- Thank yous and celebration primarily
- Honorariums after the fact to emphasize and add weight to some thank yous
- An easy way for folks to gracefully turn down personal payment and instead send it to a non-profit’s address or to the pDAO treasury
Stream of consciousness (would need an rpip if we wanted something like this)
- Maybe we could have a small pool (200 RPL) for thank yous per period managed by the GMC
- Have an appreciation thread in forum for folks to thank people
- GMC picks people from the thread to receive 5-25 RPL; no specific rubric, but valuing (A) outlier contributions to recognize them, and (B) new contributors to encourage them
- I wonder if we could do a poap for honorees or something (once a quarter or year)
Funding is a tough question. My instinct is to take it from the GMC budget (effectively adding a 4th category to Grants, Bounties, and Retroactive). I worry that it’s very easy to take from the reserve, but the reserve is important. Among other possible uses, it’s what will give us a credible path to not being wholly dependent on the current dev team. That war chest will take too long to build up even with the current budget, and I want to protect that flow aggressively.