FIP-XX: Moderation funding proposal

Proposals
1

Summary:

Fund moderators through the DAO with a dedicated moderator multi-sig with $120,000 per year as an operational budget.

Motivation:

In the spirit of decentralization, the moderators are seeking to be funded through the DAO, instead of being funded through Fei Labs.

This would allow the moderators to operate independently while managing their own budget to run the Discord.

This initiative is being led by meertitan and DioDionysos. Both of them have been active in the Discord every single day since the day they started pre-Genesis (over a year ago), helping the community and keeping it a safe space for discussion of the Tribe ecosystem.

Through this proposal, the DAO would maintain a spam- and bot-free Discord, where users can discuss and hangout as they have been.

Discord is currently the premier platform for communications regarding Fei Protocol with around 15,000 users and between 3,000 to 5,000 monthly messages.
Additionally, spam and bots are being handled through manual bans as well as a network of managed server bots, resulting in over 11,000 banned bots and scammers. This work is done every day without being publicly visible, but should still be rewarded as every Discord member profits from a clean and safe governance environment.

Furthermore, our primary governance forum, Discourse, is being protected from spam and scams through the moderators. This also includes whitelisting partners, so that they can write proposals without limitations on Tribe’s governance forum.

With currently around 40,000 monthly visits, Discourse represents one of the governance cornerstones of the Tribe.

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Specification:

Create a dedicated 2/2 moderator multi-sig to pay active moderators for their monthly work, which includes server maintenance, bot control and community support, as well as translations (Chinese, Japanese, German, Russian, French).

The requested budget is 120,000 $FEI for April 2022 to March 2023, with any unused funds sent back to the DAO at the end of this 12 month period.
meertitan and DioDionysos will be responsible for managing this moderation budget and use it to hire new moderators with it, if needed.

4 Likes
2

Didn’t followed much, but it would be great to give Fei Protocol (or OA) the ability to take back the funds. x/x multisig are always a bit risky as some keys can be lost or someone goes missing.

3 Likes
3

I think it may be better to assign this to a Growth Pod under the FIP-82 framework, just to ensure that 1. the funds are secure, and 2. All actions conform to the newer, more decentralized governance standard.

4 Likes
4

totally agree. this is a perfect fit for pods. using pods for each aspect of DAO budget management would create a standardized structure for governance/transparency/timelocks/veto’ing that significantly improves upon what can be done with (optimistic) multisigs

@DioDionysos + @Meertitan based on your experiences can you give a ballpark itemization of the budget like: how many moderators would be ideal, expected number of hours per week, that sort of thing

3 Likes
5

The moderation pod sounds like a good idea, thanks all. If this is the general consensus, we will wait for the implementation of the Triabl Council and revisit this topic ASAP.

Currently we have 3 active moderators covering about 18/24 hours. This has been sufficient for now, but we are considering hiring another moderator to cover the 2 PM to 10 PM PST timeslot. This would bring us to a total of 4 moderators with safety overlap.

As for hours, Dio is active on the server around 14 hours a day, while I fluctuate between 11 to 12 hours a day. As mentioned, we wouldn’t expect these kind of hours from our potential new hire. To stay comptetitive with compensation, we would have to have enough reserves in the pod funding to hire such a person.
This makes me think we should actually increase the budget to 12k/month to accomodate that.

2 Likes
6

I would advocate for the creation of an Operations Pod which would work/interface horizontally across all Pod structures for internal coordination, community management, work reporting, and eventually compensation. The moderators would fall under the scope of the Operations Pod under ‘Community Management’.

@Fishy just an aside I agree with you that a ‘Growth Pod’ should also be implemented, with a particular focus on PR, Marketing and Business Development for Tribe DAO. It should ideally work in parallel to (and should eventually supersede, in the ethos of decentralization) the marketing efforts that Fei Labs have been undertaking.

7 Likes
7

Thank you for posting this! I agree very much in principle of democratizing community compensation, and I concur with @Arcology that we can take this one step further by incorporating an operations pod, in the spirit of the earlier Tribal Force.

Pending the election of the Tribal Council, it would be reasonable to establish a larger operations pod. (5/5 potentially?) This new pod should fully include the responsibilities proposed by this FIP, and also include other responsibilities such as governance compliance, setting and reviewing KPIs, issuing compensation based on brackets to DAO members (including Tribal Council members themselves) and potentially other operational responsibilities that were not part of the Tribal Council’s mandate.

To @sebventures’ point, there should be some kind of claw back mechanism for funds escrowed at different pods.

To further that point, there hasn’t been a complete proposal for the incorporation of new PODs under Tribal Council yet. I believe we should use this opportunity to propose some provisional guidelines for the incorporation of new PODs; such a whether the incorporation should be done at the sole discretion of the TC, or should be put to a snapshot vote with the approval of the TC. etc

4 Likes