Tl;dr: Each Working Group needs a clear budget in VITA and USDC to empower decentralization. Goal of this proposal is to provide clarity and autonomy for WGs and Stewards to incentivize/pay their teams and grow the DAO.
Context: WG budgets were broadly defined in VDP3 pre-Genesis, but only in VITA. Pre-genesis, it was unclear what the global USD budget would look like. Fiat payments are currently handled by Stewards and VitaCore on a case-by-case basis requiring input multi-steward sign-off on small amounts. The DAO needs more autonomy for Working Groups to achieve their goals in an efficient and decentralised manner. Specifically, some WG Stewards and WG members need to receive regular fiat salaries and these decisions should be delegated to the Steward level authorized by the DAO.
Post-genesis Snapshot provided by each WG. Planned VITA distribution & Remaining.
VITA function (IP curation, in-kind payment, partnership)
2. Quarterly fiat expenses in USDC for each WG
For ongoing expenses, salaries, running costs.
Excludes all deal-based incentives / project funding.
3. Custody solution - where funds are managed
Multisigs for large budgets/WGs - signers
Metamask accounts for small WGs.
Or WG budget remains in DAO Multisig treasury
4. Decision-making frameworks
What budget spending needs to be approved - are VDP2 and VDP6 sufficient to cover all cases?
How budgets are tied into OKRs & KPIs.
Design thinking
As a philosophy, fiat expense budgets should be minimal favouring a small full-time team and a large community of open source contributors, projects and freelancers. USDC Budgets should be easily extendable for any projects/hires the DAO/WGs want to pursue as set out in VDP6. In turn, VITA budgets should be distributed generously to WG members and contributors, researchers and strategic partners with vesting to grow our network effects. This philosophy would disincentivize short-term profit-seeking and reward long-term contributors.
Next steps:
Decide whether this VDP requires an on-chain vote.
Each WG Steward to provide VITA snapshot.
Stewards to define expected Q4 fiat expenses, if any.
Gov WG to ensure alignment with VDP2 & VDP6.
Technical WG to provide chosen custody solution.
Open Questions:
Does the above require an on-chain decision? Maybe this gives Stewards and WGs the feeling of operating with autonomy and backing of VITA holders.
Individual WGs could also propose to swap parts of their VITA budgets into USDC. Thus not requiring a USDC specific budget.
Going forward: Who signs off monthly salaries? How are budgets reviewed internally? How are budgets updated and grown?
To move forward with this proposal, I suggest that we merge previous conversations in other channels into this proposal, especially the data from each working group as pictured in the table above including
a) VITA balance as of Sep 30, 2021,
b) VITA and USDC budgets for Q4 2021, and
c) name and URL of multisig.
Once that’s done, I’d ask @PaulHaas to append these information to the proposal and get the proposal ready for phase 3, i.e. deleting the sections “next steps” and “open questions”.
Also, I’d suggest to add this paragraph to the proposal: "Moving forward, working group stewards are responsible to provide information on their working group budgets towards the end of each quarter in the form of a spreadsheet, subject to a vote by VitaCore and published in a transparent, accessible manner (e.g. as a Google Sheet or on the “Treasury” page on the website). This should include a) a retrospective over the last quarter and highlight any significant deviations to the originally proposed budget, b) a snapshot of the working group’s VITA balance on the last day before the new quarter, and c) VITA and USDC budgets for the new quarter."
Once we’ve found consent here and have enough phase 2 votes, I think we’re all aligned that this proposal should then move on-chain.
@vincent@schmackofant Do you think we could integrate this into the treasury page on our new website? Or should we rather find a better, dedicated place for this kind of transparency report? It seems quite related to the treasury page to me, but I realise these transparency reports serve a somewhat different purpose and may visually not integrate well into a treasury page - so that would be an argument for keeping both separate, e.g. on an additional subpage.
Yeah we definitely could add recurring “transparency reports” about the working group budgets on there. We should revisit this as soon as we have the basic treasury page up!
Good point. At the time, I believe, it was shelved because of ongoing work on related proposal in the tokenomics and operations working groups, although I’m not sure what that led to. Let’s clarify that this week with @vincent and @Taliskermalt and then either continue with this proposal or leave a note why not.
@PaulHaas did mention to me that really the reason it never happened was just the primarily a lack of capacity for someone to coordinate OKRs and budgets in a timely manner. If decided to continue the proposal, I’ll be happy to help pick it up from where it left off with my bandwidth!
I see. OKRs (or just “goals”, as we call them now) were later reinstated by @Taliskermalt and are currently managed by the operations working group, although I believe it is still an open question how they tie into peformance-based rewards of contributors. That is certainly an important workstream that may benefit from someone putting more attention to it.
