RFC-000-025: Incentives for Community participation

[davoice321]

I generally like the idea of incentivizing participation, but in my experience with other DAOs, it generally is more effective to have certain sub-committees within the DAO filled with community members with expertise in certain areas.

For example, for RenVM, this could be committees focused on:

-Protocol communication and evangelism
-Developers who have expertise in helping other teams integrate RenVM seamlessly, kind of serving a “Sherpas” who help teams interested in integrating, but needing expertsie
-Business development, people responsible for making initial contact with protocols, answering questions
-External developers who help work in things like improved tooling for RenVM to aid integrations, etc.

These committees would be self-forming and begin to engage in ideation around specific initiatives.

Then, these committees put together well fleshed out proposals on the forum for voting and implementation.

Committees are allocated a certain amount of funds from the Treasury and then use a solution such as Coordinape to guide the reimbursement of members for their contributions. Budgets for specific implementations would be approved separately.

Spending time ideating, devloping proposals, engaging with other protocols, aiding integration, etc. require time, and making sure community members receive soime compensation for putting in that time will result in a better effort overall.

Finally, I’d like to share a post focusing on incentivizing community participation that might also spark some ideas around this effort: Governance Mining — liquidity mining for human capital — Mirror

[MaxRoszko]

@davoice321

These committees would be self-forming and begin to engage in ideation around specific initiatives.

Then, these committees put together well fleshed out proposals on the forum for voting and implementation.

Committees are allocated a certain amount of funds from the Treasury and then use a solution such as Coordinape to guide the reimbursement of members for their contributions. Budgets for specific implementations would be approved separately

I like the idea of smaller groups working together and keeping each other motivated and accountable, to get stuff done, but what would be the mechanism that brings these group together? Are they incentivized prior to forming, or only afterwards? Does the Ren Labs team need to do anything to help shape these groups or is this something that can natually evolve within the community?

[Arviee]

Love to see such activity, this is what it’s all about! Thank you guys!

I’ll try to address concerns that some of you have and kindly ask not to start too many new discussion threads, before previously mentioned ones have been discussed, otherwise it’ll all get mixed up an we’ll have hard time coming to any conclusions.

Now, about the spamming thing that @Maggie and @DavidPerkins mentioned. Let’s look at our current governance landscape:

Governance Landscape (<- click me)

Not that great, right? In essence, as far as governance community participation goes, we’ve got nothing. Do we really want to avoid even trying to get something?

DAOs are a new phenomenon with no established and time tested system for it’s development. There are supposedly working examples, but some of them have unfortunate treasury spending cases, some have lost their flexibility, swiftness and decisiveness in an extremely rapidly developing field…

What I’m trying to say is that we’re pioneers and we’re bound to make mistakes. And that’s OK. Taking some action and learning from it is better, than inaction. Babysteps.

…I see this RFC as a simple mechanism upon which more complex incentive and DAO structures (like grants, committees, etc) can be build upon. After we see some results from this RFC, we can adjust it with new rules or reverse it altogether if it doesn’t prove itself useful.

That was a little detour into my line of thinking, now let’s get back to the spam concern.

Is it for certain that we’ll get a lot of low quality RFCs? Maybe. Maybe not. Let’s find out.

If we get low quality RFCs, does it hurt that much? Are they incentivized? No, they’re not. Only RIPs are! Abovementioned fact will be the first deterrence to some people. They will not waste their time if they think their proposal is weak or isn’t important enough.

And if for some that won’t be enough, we can always hire a person that will go through accepting RFCs like Max is currently doing. Or form and incentivize a group of community members than might perform this function. After all community is only present in chats, I’m sure we can do more…

So yeah, personally I don’t see this as reason not to try and experiment. My hunch is that we’re going to see a small increase in RIPs and even if small % of them is useful than that’s a 100% win in my book.

[megaz0rd]

I like the idea.

There should be some easy tasks for start to do like :
-translate some article ( chinese, german, french, polish…) 25$?
-write some article 50$?

[DeFi_Whiskey]

I’m very much in favor of this, although the actual implementation will need to be thought through. Great work @Arviee to get this discussion going!

In addition to the ideas raised in the initial post, I really like @davoice321’s suggestion of groups or committees focused on a few areas: business development and marketing, treasury management, etc. Some of these can be more formal and paid committee roles (fixed number of members, general mandate, etc.), others can be self-forming and perhaps evolve, over time, into formal, paid committee roles, when the community sees real value. Compensation should not be excessive, but perhaps the community can vote in extra rewards in certain cases where committees or individuals really add a lot of value to Ren, above and beyond what was expected.

With the announcement of Ren Labs, I believe we are at an inflection point. It’s now critical for the Ren community to step up and take ownership in many areas, even where there can be overlap with the core team (e.g. marketing and business development). And as part of that, community contributors should be compensated when they bring value to Ren, as it benefits all of us.

[krkk]

I’m also very much in favour of this.

for those of you who don’t know me from telegram, I’m the designer for the core team.

as many of you already stated, with incentivization we can foster an environment that will create a consistent stream of quality content that will greatly affect Rens outward visibility.

but incentivization also holds incredible value for the existing and growing community.
incentivizing things like memes and stickers might sound stupid, but it’s seems more than worthwhile in terms of brand building and engagement. offering accessible projects for users who are new to the community or just not as technically inclined will be great for the overall quality of the community we are building.
engagement is one of the holy grails in building a community and I think there is no stronger engagement than receiving a monetary incentive for creating content that is then used by the community.

obviously I’m not suggesting 500$ payouts for emotes. I could rather see something like a 20$ raffle for users who created something.
somebody in this community will be more capable of figuring out the economics, but I do see great value in it.

[Mr_Noland]

@Arviee

But how are we going to evaluate person’s contribution? Should any integration be equal, ex. a protocol with 0 volume and 0 clients and a protocol with, let’s say $300 million TVL and a nice social following? Would there be any extra requirements to be eligible for this incentive, ex, not being part of the project’s team, being in Ren’s channels at least for some time? Something else?

To start - I highly recommend we don’t overcomplicate things. Let’s keep it short and simple until we see how things go. I highly suspect that 80%+ of these will fall in the RENasset adoption category (as opposed to RenJS category, since that’s much tougher). Since we are about to launch a slew of new RENassets, I think the timing here is perfect.

I would suggest something small at first: maybe $100 if you get to a voted proposal, and $500 if you get to an adoption?
Considering:

• It must be a project that isn’t already adopting RenAssets (e.g. this is a per/project award and not a per/asset)

• The project must meet certain requirements to prove relevance (e.g. Top 1000 market cap, 25+ community voters, active on mainnet, etc…)

• I really like the idea of a subcommittee, as I don’t think the entire Ren community is going to want to vet the validity of these proposals. We could have 5-10 people willing to pre-vet each claim and give their take to the larger community before a vote? I’d sign up for the committee.

Just making this up on the spot, so happy for suggestions. We would of course need to formalize all of this prior to making an RIP.

[Thomm]

@Liberty

However, my big concern is that such a system could be abused if 51% of voting power belonged to any one entity, which could then continually pass RIPs to siphon off the CF.

I don’t think this is a valid concern against this proposal. If one entity controls 51% of voting power we have bigger problems than someone passing useless RIP’s to get small incentives. Besides, the RFC process also needs to be sybill attacked to get to the RIP stage.

[Thomm]

Thanks for starting this initiative @Arviee!

In general I completely agree that rewarding Governance participation can be a great way to increase the value add of participants to the DAO, and it can be a starting point to get in to the process of rewarding valuable contributors on a full time basis.

A lot of great ideas have already been mentioned in this thread on ways in which we can reward governance participation, if my tally is correct (which it likely isn’t:)) we have:

• Incentivize improvmenet proposals by rewarding RIPs
• Reward educational/marketing material in the form of (info)graphics
• Community member of the month reward
• Reward voting on proposals
• Incentivize proposals made on other forums to further REN adoption
• Make funds available for specialized committees

All of these can be good ideas in their own right, but I think we would do good to start simple and keep the discussion focussed to be able to push each idea forward separately.
Since discussion and defining the peramaters of the RIP should generally happen in the RFC stage, each idea can be a separate RFC.

In order to incentivize pushing these ideas to fruition, we can structure the “incentivize RIPs” RIP in such a way to make sure that it rewards RIPs retroactively, including already running RFC/RIP proposals and the RIP itself

[Thomm]

Regarding the proposal to reward successful RIP creation, we might need to be careful how we structure this. As the adage goes, “what gets measured gets managed”; how we structure the heuristics along which we reward participants will influence the way in which individuals will behave and participate in the governance process.

More specifically, one thing that comes to mind (and there might be more) is that our governance rules currently allow to create an RIP without going through an RFC first if the idea has already previously been discussed and accepted through an RFC.
If we only reward the path RFC → RIP this might cause unnecessary RFC creation. We can of course reject these RFCs but the point is that the system does not incentivize the right behaviour.

Besides, if someone has a good idea to change an existing feature of the system which can be done by an RIP alone, I would be fine to reward this action if it is fruitful.

Putting this together, one way to approach this is as follows:

Let the base reward be X (for example $250).

1. Create RIP that is rejected → 0% of X
2. Create RIP that is accepted → 100% of X
3. Create RFC that does not make it to RIP → 0% of X
4. Create RFC followed by RIP that is rejected → 200% of X
5. Create RFC followed by RIP that is accepted → 400% of X

One argument against rewarding an RIP that is accepted (2) is that this could cause spam in RIP creation, for example with arbitrary changes to the fee structure every other day. However, this should not be much worse than the potential for RFC spam, and in my opinion would be outweighed by better incentive alignment.

As usual I might be overthinking things, so please let me know what you think.

[ep1110]

Incentives:
Absolute yes. First of all, we are all here because of the incentives offered to be validators of the network. Beyond (I include myself) the sense of belonging that each one has developed, nothing escapes the universal logic of investments.

Amounts:
a) I do not agree that they are symbolic (20-50 $). If there are, they should make some difference to whoever receives them.
b) in some way the limits must be tied to a percentage of the total of the fund (example no reward must exceed 0.5% of the CEF).

Method:
Total agreement in the subjectivity of what we face and therefore the probable failure with the establishment of hard rules, although it leads me to different conclusions than other loved members, I think step one is to give freedom to RCF presentations and see how it evolves.

High reward objectives:
Successful integration proposals, developments on top of renVM. I do not adhere to incentives by RFC.

[shiny]

Thanks for the thread. I like the idea and also agree that we should be able to try things out and leave room for adjustments.
I don’t think we will have too much spamming of RFC’s, it takes some time to properly construct one, and if someone desperate and perhaps unbalanced takes advantage of the opportunity with too much enthusiasm perhaps we can persuade them to pace themself.
So yeah, I’m in favor of small payment for successful RFC and larger payment for successful RIP. Of course the details will take some time to iron out.

[Arviee]

I see that majority is in support of the idea, so we should try to start moving forward with the discussion.

I would like to know your thoughts on what is the appropriate reward/incentive for each of these categories:

1. Competition/Grant for a discord emoji and/or sticker pack
2. Incentives for RIPs (partial and in total)

I need this to be able to make better choices for Darknode Operators to vote for in the upcoming RIP.

Also I’d like to hear more ideas about 1st category which is graphics and such. While emoji/stickers are probably a one time thing, maybe we want to also create an ongoing monthly meme contest (meme of the month) or something along those lines? Would be cool to keep up social engagement while having some fun… Please share your thoughts!

Other ideas like rewarding 3rd party integration proposals and developer grants (which I absolutely love and think should be done) are a lot more complex and will benefit from their own dedicated RFC that I will do after we’re finished with matter at hand (or any other community member when he deems appropriate).

[OneofTenThousand]

Incentives for RIPs RFCs and other aspects of governance is needed. since gov inception participation is minimal. As far as grants for emojis a few hundred dollars can get that done.

[Thomm]

@Arviee

I would like to know your thoughts on what is the appropriate reward/incentive for each of these categories:

1. Competition/Grant for a discord emoji and/or sticker pack
2. Incentives for RIPs (partial and in total)

For (2) I think something in the range of $1000 to $2500 for an accepted RFC + RIP, and see this post for what I would think to be a sensible ballpark for the other paths.

As for (1), a grant for emoji/sticker pack, I think this would be a good candidate to apply for a grant using the regular Gitcoin style funding rounds to get funds from the CF. As you say, this sounds more like a one off thing. If you think this should be a more permanent program, I’d have to see some more structure around it before I can put a good estimate on the appropriate reward. Regarding a recurring meme contest, this is yet another idea that I think should be discussed separately.

Actually, talking about the funding rounds of the CF. Another thing I’m wondering about is the budgeting for community incentives as discussed in this thread, and how this plays with the Gitcoin like funding rounds which we decided upon as a mechanism to distribute funds from the CF.

We could probably go ahead as is, because the amounts will be small to start with, but if anybody already has some more thoughts around this I’d be interested to hear them.

[ep1110]

I see 1) more catalyzing on the token price side and 2) (obviously) on the renVM volume side. I lean towards a proportion in the funds approx. from:

1. 1/5
2. 4/5 (example: between usd 1.000 and 2% of the CEF)

In 2) even on the same platform we can find achievements that deserve very different rewards. Example in Aave:

1. That renBTC be accepted only for lending and borrowing.
2. That renBTC be accepted as collateral.
3. That there is a direct integration and native BTC can be deposited directly.

I would definitely put the focus on integrations and developments on top of REN Chain.

[Arviee]

Another question I want to raise is what do you think about:

financial incentives (known beforehand) VS post-factum grants (undefined financial “thank you”/“acknowledgement”)

There are conflicting studies on each approach.

[fthebanks]

I definitely agree there is need for more community participation. We have very low community engagement on twitter compared to other projects (Shoutout defifrog,shilliam for holding shit down). With that said though I think we as a community need to follow the path of Loong & Tai when it comes to spending the community fund. We need to be cautious and calculated. Rushing into proposals by incentivizing them worries me. Like the Ren team says they don’t rush updates like H2H because Millions/Billions are at stake, I feel like it’s important to keep that attitude with the community fund. I do think we could utilize a small portion to incentive retail into using RenVM.

So I am fine to use the community fund for these purposes but I think it should be spent very frugally and just for social media reach out. Look what happened when Daniel from SPELL found out about RenVM on twitter, so this is obviously successful. I’d say its pretty frustrating as a DNO to see DOGE grow to stupid highs in user wallets/activity, being an entry into crypto for many and we do nothing, literally 0 to capture that audience. We should be marketing how to earn yield on DOGE by using RenVM…

So now the question comes… Because it isn’t happening naturally how do we incentivize this engagement? If anyone can come up with a solution besides spending $ that would obviously be ideal… The only idea I’ve come up with is a gifted NFT to the community member who brings the most engagement. In terms of spending $ I’m not sure how we’d calculate it, but say $100 for 1st, $75 for 2nd and $50 for 3rd? Or $250 for 1st, 0 for rest? Idk? Also can someone smarter than me say if there’s a way to gauge the amount of social media traffic one is able to generate? If not we could always do a community vote at the end of the month.

[Zeta_Tauri]

I very much agree with this proposal Arviee, but have my concerns like others have mentioned regarding spam.

I do take your point however around our current governance not being great… / non-existent.

My thoughts are that this should fit in with a Framework that we decide upon for incentivisation of a number of different things, e.g. (numbers pulled out of thin air):

• Meme of the month - $500
• Succesful RFC / RIP - $1000
• Most monthly REN social engagement on Twitter - $2000
• Accepted proposal for renASSETS as collateral on XYZ platform - $3000
• Accepted proposal for RenJS implementation for protocol - $5000

I believe if we build a framework along these lines, this could help incentive community members to be more engaged with Ren, which will be critical when rolling out RenVM as its own dedicated chain.

Finally, what seems ever more important to project/s success is a specific Theme / Narrative. Think Danielle with his ‘Frog Nation’, Alchemix with their ‘Wizards’, Synthetix with ‘Spartans’ or Avalanche with their ‘Snow’ theme. It would be if we want to go down a Theme / Narrative route if we will be actively promoting/marketing Ren more on social media.

[davoice321]

Many times I see that the framework for the groups is developed, and people volunteer to join the groups. After that, a compensation scheme can be developed and implemented.