Aragon Cooperative Vote #23 & #24: request for compensation

EDIT

Upon further reflection, it was a mistake to request funds ad-hoc before a process to approve, verify, and compensate work in the Aragon Cooperative was established. I am retracting this proposal and have voted NO on all these votes.

Moving forward, I have created a temporary workflow proposal that the Aragon Cooperative could use to approve, verify, and fund work. You can find details on that in the link below.




The Aragon Cooperative received funds via AGP-40 almost a month ago. Since then work has been done and time has been spent. We’re at a point now where we need to reimburse work done in the past and determine work to do in the future. I have many thoughts on how we should move forward, but first we need to wrap up the past. That is what this post is about.

AGP-40 outlines the following deliverables for the Aragon Cooperative to fulfill:

  • Cooperative DAO bylaws
  • Membership on-boarding and off-boarding process
  • Token(s) (definition and) allocation.
  • Governance procedures
  • Formulating Coop Projects and Grants Proposals
  • Management of Community Fund DAO applications
  • Further Coop AGP application construction
  • Documentation of practice (education & knowledge sharing)
  • Dogfooding and documentation of Aragon tooling and workflow
  • Further suitable community-led, signalled and proposed opportunities

In the last 3 weeks I’ve contributed to the following deliverables:

Note: I worked on a lot of this with @lkngtn and other members of the Cooperative so this work was not done by me alone. I did contribute significantly though, and it took quite a bit of my time, so I’d like to be compensated for that time.

I’ll be the first to admit that I did not strictly track my hours while I did this work. Frankly I just did it for fun. That being said, money is how humans share and exchange value. If the work I’ve done has provided value to the Cooperative and moved us towards delivering on the scope of AGP-40, I’d like to be compensated for that.

I’m asking for 3 working days of compensation for the work I’ve done. This roughly breaks down to the following:

  • 4hrs initial Cooperative meeting and follow-up discussions
  • 4hrs token/doc discussions
  • 8hrs building Coop DAO Docs
  • 4hrs debugging Coop DAO Docs
  • 4hrs governance discussions

At 300 DAI per day (the rate specified in AGP-40) that’s 900 DAI total.

I have created vote #23 to transfer this amount from the Cooperative vault to my account. If you would like to support this work please visit the Aragon Cooperative DAO and vote:


Looking at other recent requests for funding, it looks like we’re not all on the same page as to what qualifies as “work.” If we include things like “human relationship building”, exploration of Aragon tools, and general conversations (not aiming to solve a specific problem) in the definition of “work”, then I could easily add 3, 4, or even 5 extra days of compensation to my request. Frankly I don’t know how I feel about that. Time has been spent that will never be returned, but I don’t think wasted time is something we should encourage and reward.

With this in mind I’m reluctantly requesting 1 additional day of compensation for time spent that has mysteriously disappeared into the void without a tangible trace of productivity. I could make up fancy yet meaningless descriptions for this and pretend that it’s productive, but we all know it’s not. It’s the result of poor communication and an unorganized organization. As such I am calling it such. It has taken time from me that I will never get back. For this, I am requesting compensation for 1 working day @ 300 DIA via vote #24 in the Aragon Cooperative DAO. As per the example set by @sepu85, this is separated from time spent working on tangible deliverables.


Moving forward I don’t want to waste any more time. I want to make decisions and get stuff done. I want to build, not debate. To make this possible for the Cooperative I have created and presented a proposal that will help us get focused. This proposal has 1 goal: to create a way for us to approve, execute, and compensate work. We can build from there.

Hello!

I have just read the following quote from your other post:

you are totally right there I have to say, but I have the perception that it’s not aligned with what is requested here, I mean, I see how this work you are presenting is verifiable (although there is a repo where it would be very important for possible future tracing purpose to have it uploaded, and which funds demanded are obvoiusly relesable (it’s what you are looking to do here :smiley:. But I’m wondering what you mean by approved, because as per the way I see, approving means the community giving you an ok on your intentions to deliver that work so you can start it and I think this never happened in your case. Let me explain…

AGP-40 was accepted three times:

  • one from the ANV-2
  • one from AragonCoop pre-signalling ANV-2 (See vote #15 in the DAO
  • one ratification of its purpose with ACGP-1 (yeah, it was Rinkeby, but it still means something, isn’t it)

With this AGP, it was clearly stated the expectations of having only to persons to start with the scoped work. This is the reason why I consider the other request for funding legit, while this one just isn’t.

This doesn’t mean I don’t appreciate your efforts! I mean, you clearly engaged with the Coop, and of course I’d like to see you compensated for it, but, we need to be consistent with what we defend (and we shall remind what the “O” in a DAO means :smiley_cat: ). I think there were no manifestaion from your side till yesterday about your expectations of being compensated, and I’m sure there was no request for approving it, so for me this is a NO as regards vote #23!

On the other side, and since the scope of the ANT in vault were never clear either, I think you have really add value to the community and made really good points about the flaws in our being born organization, so I’ll vote YES in #24.

you are totally right there!!! this is why I personally considered that the idea about having full-time-employees like resources in the first place (when AGP-40 was proposed)… Not sure about what are your work experiences, but those kind of activities are necessary, and add (non tangible) value in the mid term… The thing is that you need the same persons (at least for few key roles) to remain in that job to see those efforts flourish for the good of the organization.

In the future I would support a more optimal solution, but we’re not in a position to spend more time on R&D until we can make basic decisions. We need something we can implement now.

There’s more details on that here. It was agreed that I was a part of many working groups who’s tasks were to do work that fulfilled things outlined in AGP-40. I did that work. I want to be compensated accordingly.

Furthermore, in your reports you listed:

My work was agreed to in an Aragon Cooperative Meeting. In that meeting I joined several working groups. I have followed through on the goals and intents of those working groups. To make that clear I have presented my work directly juxtaposed against the deliverables outlined in AGP-40. If that is not valid work, then I cannot fathom how you have the nerve to bill the Cooperative for meetups and general conversations. This is not ok.

Frankly, almost every community member in the Cooperative has pushed back on this in the last few weeks stating that they do not want to move forward with this model. To make things explicitly clear I’ve created vote #25 in the Aragon Cooperative DAO to settle this. Details on the vote and what that entails can be found below.