Founding Member Grant Program

[blrhc]

Background

We have had a number of community members concerned that Incentives 3.0 offers nothing for those participants interested in making "off-chain" contributions which are not part of the scope of a working group's tasks. I share these frustrations, and have therefore devised a scheme which rewards those making off-chain or ex-working group contributions, or perhaps also those in working groups who are doing a better job than can be reflected in their salary due to budgetary constraints.

The rewards are to be determined by the Founding Members, who represent our most trusted core of community members. For a variety of reasons, this team have some unique insights into which people are doing the most valuable work on the platform (and off it), so it seems fair to give them this responsibility for allocating these extra-curricular rewards.

How it will work

Budget

Every week, a JOY budget for the scheme will be allocated by Jsgenesis.
The budget will start at 5000 usd in JOY for the week beginning Monday 9th May.

Nomination

Every week (on Monday and Tuesday), each Founding Member will be able to optionally nominate a maximum of three community members using a typeform survey here:

https://4m7n05q7xlr.typeform.com/to/sF5SxLgZ

Nominees will have to be proposed by at least three separate Founding Members in order to proceed to the next stage.
Jsgenesis staff can also propose candidate, and in this case, three nominations will not be required.

Note: any community member explicitly asking for rewards under this program will be disqualified

A new survey will then be generated with a list of all of the participants who have been nominated by more than three Founding Members/Jsgenesis. All Founding Members will get a budget of 100% which they will allocate, using a second form, to each of the candidates listed. At least five FMs will need to vote in this second round for the reward pool to be unlocked.

For example:
member1 | 20%
member2 | 75%
member3 | 5%
member4 | 0%
member5 | 0%

Once this stage has ended, the weightings for each candidate will be multiplied by the total reward pool for the week, and they will receive this bonus amount.

Note

There is no rule which prevents an inducted Founding Member for being nominated for bonus rewards.

Next steps.

This is all ready to go, so if it's OK with you @bwhm, I'd like to launch it this week.
The CRM now supports this as a RewardedActivity type.

[katerina510]

Great improvement!

[bedeho]

1. How do you authenticate submissions to nominate?
2. Where does the nomination data go?
3. How do you authenticate votes?
4. How are people voting, also a typeform?
5. Where does the voting data go?
6. Its not actually clear what the relationship between the voting of candidates and the weighting numbers are. You are saying FMs vote with %? and so that means the weight is a sum of % ? which then obviously could be > 100%? If so that is ok, I guess I would just not call them %, just call them voting points or whatever, but I am not sure I understand this scheme.
7. Does the CRM support earning points this way?

[blrhc]

1. How do you authenticate submissions to nominate?

Each qualified elector (Founding Member) is given a voting key, like AmK6HdgaEVqD which is used every round and is unique to them. Then we as Jsgenesis act as scrutineers of the nomination process and check the voting keys match the nominator's ID.

I was also considering making the nominations public (i.e. who made them), for maximum transparency.
What do you think? @bedeho

2. Where does the nomination data go?

Three places:

• A private spreadsheet (which contains voting keys for us to verify)

• A dedicated airtable, to faciliate further integration of this scheme with the CRM in future, if deemed necessary, both in terms of read (dashboards to display voting data) and write (developing in-house tools for the voting).

• Optionally, a public spreadsheet is automatically generated for each nomination round, to include everything except voting keys.

Typeform already facilitates all of these integrations.

3. How do you authenticate votes?

In exactly the same manner as nominations, using a unique voting key which is inputted into the voting typeform.

4. How are people voting, also a typeform?

Correct, based on a template, but the specific candidates to be voted for are of course changed every round.

5. Where does the voting data go?

• A private spreadsheet (which contains voting keys for us to verify)

• A dedicated airtable, to faciliate further integration of this scheme with the CRM in future, if deemed necessary, both in terms of read (dashboards to display voting data) and write (developing in-house tools for the voting).

• Optionally, a public spreadsheet is automatically generated for each voting round, to include everything except voting keys.

6. Its not actually clear what the relationship between the voting of candidates and the weighting numbers are. You are saying FMs vote with %? and so that means the weight is a sum of % ? which then obviously could be > 100%? If so that is ok, I guess I would just not call them %, just call them voting points or whatever, but I am not sure I understand this scheme.

Sorry if this was poorly explained.
Perhaps it would be better to describe them as points. Each Founding Member has a voting point budget of 100 every round, which they can allocate to each candidate as they want. If they make a mistake and give out 140 points or whatever, we would just normalise/scale the proportion of the 140 that each candidate received as a proportion of 100.

e.g. if they gave 70 to one candidate and 70 to another, the "effective" voting power would be 50 for each.

In any case, I'd hope that Founding Members are able to follow the reasonably simple survey rules :)

7. Does the CRM support earning points this way?

Yes, it's a RewardedActivity at the moment, though if it seems more sensible to you, so as not to confuse it with regular Council Round activities I can manage it through a SudoAllocationUpdate instead. Honestly I don't think it will make a big difference either way.