How can we improve our Compensation Model?

I think we should first agree on the main goals of our compensation model:

  1. Opportunities to newcomers: all members of the DAO, old or new, should be able to join the system, begin work and qualify for compensation.
  2. Meritocracy: all participants’ positions and compensation should be earned from substantial contributions to the organization and not other factors.
  3. Decentralization: arbitrary concentrations of power should be avoided, such as specific members or committees unilaterally deciding others’ compensation. Decision power should be distributed and earned through continued valuable contribution to the DAO.
  4. Talent retention: talented and dedicated members should want to remain working with RAW, having their long-term incentives aligned with the DAO’s, and earning more influence and recognition as they continue being valuable for Fingerprints.
  5. Stability: participants should have a reasonable degree of stability and visibility in what they can expect to earn when working for Fingerprints.
  6. Attachment to performance: members should be compensated for achievement and not effort, and more achievement should imply better compensation. We don’t want to compensate members for grueling displays of effort, we want them to achieve what needs to be done properly with the least suffering possible.
  7. Scalability: the system should be able to ajust and properly accomodate new contributors as the DAO grows.
3 Likes
  1. Opportunities to newcomers

One of the common things I hear from newcomers is uncertainty about where they fit in, not knowing what tasks or work specifically needs to be done. I think having a more organized and unified structure to our work, and how we work together could help resolve the need for people to scroll through various discord channels. Thinking about re-vamping Notion in relation to this. This could include tasks not being done, the status of what is being done and what remains.

We could also have something posted to give members a better understanding of what each area focuses on in our introduction channel. It may seem redundant but I genuinely think summarizing what each area tends to in the DAO can help folks figure out what interests them/areas they feel inclined to work in.

Here are 2 examples from 2 other DAOs I’m in that make it clear about how members can get involved if they want to contribute:


For RAW it could be in our :wave:t2: start-here channel
Welcome to RAW… (doesn’t have to be word for word)
Interested in getting involved?
Easy Hop over to :coffee: members area and introduce yourself. Are you an artist? Collector? Do you have an interest in contributing and if so tell us about your experience or areas of interest.

This can help guide members into getting in touch with active members that can help direct them to areas they could contribute to

Medium Join our overview calls every Tuesday at 1pm EDT in the :telephone_receiver: members-call

Hard Join our Clarity workspace and reach out to active members about the monthly goals we are working on

3 Likes

3 Decentralization : arbitrary concentrations of power should be avoided, such as specific members or committees unilaterally deciding others’ compensation. Decision power should be distributed and earned through continued valuable contribution to the DAO.

Agree! 100%.

4 Talent Retention

Coordinape makes a difficult case for talent retention. The decentralized model dictates compensation by what people think should be rewarded to others but that does not necessarily translate into the people that deliver work. We saw this in March compensation where our brand asset gigabrain Sam did not qualify for Coordinape at first but had provided value to the DAO when others qualified for Coordinape but had not necessarily delivered or worked on anything.

In many ways, it is also a performance/popularity contest.
No one wants to start conflicts with others, because we all want others to pay us. But is this a healthy environment for confronting or resolving conflicts? What can arise from people that create a strong presence in the Discord but are just hanging out vs working?

The incentive is conflicting. It’s gamefied in a way because the more work you do, the more you get paid. That can stir up healthy competition and fun. But it can also be really emotionally difficult for an individual to reflect at the end of the month about how many days they worked and all the goals they did and see others being compensated comparatively. Talent retention is a big concern because if money is not guaranteed, it is a time-cost for people to decide if they want to bet on what they can get out of RAW.

2 Likes

Thanks for these goals @lucaspon! I don’t see any goals that I don’t agree with, seems like a good starting point to me.

1 I would definitely echo @brileigh’s comments re: newcomers feeling bewildered and unsure of where they fit in. This isn’t unique to RAW but we can definitely put more effort into onboarding, docs, and resources so that contributors can “find their lane” more easily.

4/5 I would also echo @brileigh’s comments about Coordinape in terms of retention and stability. It will be hard to retain top contributors when compensation is always up in the air and I think this will be a barrier for members to deliver outstanding contributions that require significant time requirements. It’s a tough ask for members to work for an entire month with no idea of what they might earn.

2/6 To me, the bigger issue with Coordinape is the relationship between work completed and compensation. It has been very interesting to think through Coordinape as an experiment in decentralized compensation systems but the results are mixed. Though we arrive at some sort of consensus re: who worked the most in which area, this remains a visibility/popularity contest to some extent. The # of contributors receiving comp for each area is 15-20+, which is basically impossible for an organization of this size. So, it seems to me that we need a centralized body that defines who belongs to which team for a given month and compensation can be voted on from there. Right now, members are receiving Coordinape votes in areas in which they are not involved in any way, mostly as a result of the system being based entirely on trust and good faith.

And of course we still haven’t addressed the elephant in the room which is collusion, something that is already happening and visible if you’re looking closely.

I don’t think that the above concerns re: Coordinape mean that it should be abandoned entirely, but rather that some mix of fixed compensation and decentralized vote-based compensation would make sense. Basically a core team of full-time contributors (who do not participate in decentralized comp) and then a decentralized vote-based system for part-time/casual contributors with enhanced guardrails in place to avoid collusion.

2 Likes

Totally agree with your comments! We’ll work on some alternative models to address these issues without giving up on some of the pros that we’ve managed to achieve in the current model.

1 Like

I think this is the greatest issue that our compensation system has to retain talent. However, this could be reduced by having different areas self-organize their budget. Maybe part of each area’s comp is reserved and fixed for recurring contributors with recurring tasks. These can be revised quarterly and then the rest of the compensation distribution is decided via coordinape?

As a voter, I must say it feels uncomfortable sometimes to vote for others because I fear not being able to accurately distribute my votes to other members in a way that represents reality and not just only my perception of it.

I guess this is where writing the Epoch is helpful and perhaps this should be a requirement in order to qualify for compensation. It’s almost like a self-assessment tool to honestly sum up how you contributed to the organization.

1 Like

Coordinape is really difficult. At first @brileigh and I thought it would take 15min but if you sit down and do it properly, it takes several hours, maybe a half day. You need to go through each channel to gauge activity, review the monthly Compensation Goals, get a sense of who is working on what, determine which deliverable(s) each person has contributed to (if any), etc. And ultimately, it is difficult to value one goal vs. another, so it becomes subjective. Ideally you should also be framing all of this within the context of the Quarterly Goals, so that is another layer of complexity when evaluating member contributions.

The idea of areas (e.g. Marketing) self-organizing to propose their own budgets makes a lot of sense to me, though it would likely lead to higher monthly payrolls between fixed + decentralized compensation. I think it would also be beneficial to the general health of RAW governance since right now there are very few proposals being drafted and voted on, other than those drafted by @lucaspon. This is not necessarily a bad thing, but I think it would be good for RAW to “grow up” and have members actively drafting proposals and voting on them. RAW is technically a DAO but imo the governance process could be a lot more engaged and structured. There is also room for automation in this process to keep it efficient and not become too bureaucratic and slow.

1 Like

I agree, with everything you’ve said. Either you are taking a long time reviewing contributions or you are taking a best guess on how much people have put toward goals. In any case it’s still hard to gauge.
Another fault of the comp system is that there aren’t any clear dates on when does the comp/voting period starts. Also when are payments rolled out.
Governance needs to grow too. In order to do so we should be thinking about the way this area could be optimized by borrowing ideas from other DAOs with more structured governance.

2 Likes