Tribal Force Proposal: Long-term Contributor Program

Proposals
1

Authors:

@Bruno, @cozeno , @DioDionysos , @Meertitan , @Spiral , @countvidal , @fei.saver , @pavel, @arcology

Summary

Proposal to create a 3-month pilot program for long-term contributors, called Tribal Force, to attract and retain talent within the community and foster decentralization.

Motivation

Many community members have voluntarily contributed to the protocol since the early days and are deeply enthusiastic about the future of FEI. Unfortunately, Fei Protocol’s compensation is not competitive with other DeFi protocols, and it is becoming increasingly difficult to recruit and keep talent. Fei DAO does not yet have a compensation plan.

We think that it is time to increase the decentralization of Fei Protocol by creating a group of long-term contributors focused on the growth of Fei. Currently, Optimistic Approval is one of the only community driven groups that is active in the protocol. We wish to expand upon that success, and introduce reforms to the OA by electing new members, and more community elected bodies to contribute to the growth of Fei.

With the Tribal Force we are looking for community members that will be continuously working for DAO in multiple tasks. By long-term contributors we mean not single isolated contributions or proposals. We mean a continuous presence in the community bringing value. In the future, a DAO grants program could be operated by Tribal Force.

A fair compensation plan for active contributors will encourage even more value-adding contributions, promote further growth and foster community engagement. This is an important step for a decentralized and resilient project.

Many community members have made core contributions to the DAO and it is time to structure a pilot for a compensation plan using other protocols and their respective frameworks as a benchmark.

For context, Maker DAO is paying 15,000 DAI per contributor per month plus 240 MKR with 3 years vesting and 12 months cliff vest. At current prices, total annual compensation is $180,000 in DAI and $240,000 in MKR with vesting. Balancer community contributors are paid between 250 to 500 BAL per month ( $ 6250 to $12500 given current prices) for activities including LM allocation, discord support, newsletter production, and translation.

Some projects like Index Coop are discussing community ownership, Compound supports a long-term contributor and others are testing Coordinape as a tool to decentralize the decision of how much each contributor will receive. This just confirms that the core aspect of Web3 is about community empowerment.

Specification

An elected “Tribal Force Leads" group, of four members, will be directly responsible to the DAO for the administration of Tribal Force. The Tribal Force members operate in a decentralized way, with Tribal Force Leads being responsible and accountable for the wise application of the requested funding, as well as managing Tribal Force member positions. At the end of the month, contributors will be compensated according to their level of engagement during that period (10%, 25%, 50%, 75% or 100%).

If 100%, the member receives the full reward, if not the respective percentage in relation to the base remuneration. The level of engagement and value creation can vary for each month. Contributions should be evaluated considering the effort and value created. The Tribal Force payments are meant to incorporate and supersede existing community payments such as OA, Grants committee, and mod payments. Pending imminent reform of those committees, newly elected members of those committees would be automatically included in Tribal Force, and paid accordingly as outlined by their charters.

Accountability is key to the success of this initiative. Each Tribal Force member including the leads will be responsible to write a post in the forum at the end of the quarter sharing their contributions (including KPIs and links when applicable).

TF Leads will examine these reports and request additional follow up as needed. TF Leads will be responsible for publishing reports detailing and justifying their decisions, such as the admission of new members, assessment of a member’s work level, and censure members for misconduct or consistently misrepresenting their workload. Upon the second censure, that member is irrevocably removed from the Tribal Force.

Tribal Force Leads will create a notion page with a summary of all contributors and the records from the payment transactions. This will be called Tribal Force Tracker and will be updated monthly with the contributions of each member.

Tribal Force will coordinate its efforts with at least bi-weekly working meetings.

The process to approve members should be open and transparent to all. The focus of this program is on contributors that already have shown high commitment with Fei and value creation. The pilot would welcome for now only community members who have demonstrated at least three month of continuous and effective contributions to the protocol to self nominate for Tribal Force under this forum post. Members who would like to also run for Tribal Force Leads should include an additional section detailing their intention and credentials.

All members who have indicated their intentions to run for Tribal Force Leads will have their names listed on a Snapshot where voters may vote for up to four candidates. Tribal Force Leads require dedication of approximately 40 hours a week, seeing that they are expected to administer the program on top of their other routine responsibilities at FEI Protocol. The four members with the highest final count, and who have cleared a 10M vote quorum will be elected as the pilot Tribal Force Leads.

At the end of this three month period, a meeting will be called to pass the next Tribal Force budget, assess the performance of the pilot program, and to assess the efficacy of the administration of TF Leads. A separate snapshot for a new election of Tribal Force Leads will also be conducted at this juncture. All DAO members are welcome to participate in this meeting; this is meant to establish a precedent for a permanent accountability mechanism conducted quarterly to the DAO should this charter be renewed.

In future renewals of this charter, new members who wish to join the Tribal Force should indicate their intention and scope of participation and start contributing on a trial basis. At these quarterly meetings, those who have been recognized by the Tribal Force Leads for their effective contribution in the last three months trial period can be formally admitted to the Tribal Force. At this proceeding, the DAO may vote to officially condemn members of the Tribal Force Leads for abuse of power or poor administration, which will render them ineligible for future election as TF Leads.

After the pilot, TF Leads will present a brief report listing the lessons learned and potential improvements, and seek the DAO’s approval for an extended charter. The future program can be funded in increments seen appropriate by the DAO.

We propose a maximum rate per person of 8,000 FEI and 8,000 TRIBE; roughly in line with other protocols such as MakerDao, GRO, Balancer, and Aave. It is important to note that the rate will be revisited after the pilot and implement measures to provide some measures of job security to Tribal Force members who might quit their current jobs and engagements.

This proposal and the associated vote will approve the charter and elect four Tribal Force Leads, who will then promptly select eligible members to the pilot Tribal Force. After the final list of Tribal Force members is established, Tribal Force Leads will officially request funding of TRIBE for 3 months funded by the DAO Treasury for the initial trial in a separate snapshot. Note that the requested amount is only the maximum amount and will not be used in its entirety unless all members uniformly contribute at the maximum possible level. Any unused funds will be returned to the DAO treasury at the end of the pilot period.

Participating in the Tribal Force

The Tribal Force is composed of long-term community contributors that are highly engaged with Fei. If you feel like you fit in this profile and are interested in being a Member of the Tribal Force or would like to nominate someone to be, please reply to this thread with basic info, including:

  • Are you applying for a Tribal Force member position or Tribal Force Leads?
  • Describe your/the expert’s involvement with Fei Protocol, especially past contributions to the Fei ecosystem?
  • What skills/experience do you/they bring?
  • What are your expected contributions?
  • Bonus question: What are some of the long-term goals with your contribution to the Fei ecosystem?

Feel free to post here if you have any general questions or comments about the Tribal Force as well!

10 Likes
2

gm Tribe,
I am Dio and I am applying for a Tribal Force Lead position. I have been helping out since pre-Genesis. I think everybody in the Discord is familiar with me as I am one of the most active mods and community members.
As for my involvement with Fei Protocol, I have been the first mod and active every single day since I joined the Fei Protocol Discord and will be the last one to leave (if ever). :smiley:
My major contributions have been on-boarding and education/transparency. The first larger project I worked on was the Fei Academy in collaboration with meertitan. The results of that can be seen here. It is a valuable resource that the mods can use to give newcomers a high-level overview of Fei Protocol.
After that, arcology, meertitan and I also worked on the Fei Grants Program. This enabled us to help fund community-driven projects and get more TRIBE into the hands of the community. Through the Fei Grants Program, meertitan and I were able to create the Fei Newsletter in collaboration with Brianna from the core team.
Additionally, I am a member of OA and believe that this task was assigned to me, because of the level of trust the DAO and the core team has in me.
When naming my skills, I try to focus on DeFi, because that is what really matters for the Tribal Force.

If I were to be elected as a member of the Tribal Force, the DAO can expect me to keep delivering on these duties. I know that I am in this for the long-run and want to be able to prove that to you. My long-term goals would be to keep educating the Tribe and assist with moderation. All of the current positions I occupy help with on-boarding and education. Even in the OA, Bruno Rodrigues, meertitan and I are working on making the OA and its actions more transparent to the community.

With all of this being said, I would be happy to be one of the leads of the Tribal Force alongside @Bruno , @cozeno and @Meertitan.

TL;DR

  • Moderation
  • Translation (Japanese, German)
  • Fei Academy
  • Fei Grants Program
  • Fei Newsletter
  • OA + OA transparency/education

(Thank you to all the authors. Also special thanks to @Bruno for drafting this proposal and @cozeno for starting this entire conversation. :heart: )

6 Likes
3

What would these people be doing exactly?

For this much money, they better be doing a job worth the amount they’re getting. 8000 FEI and 8000 tribe a month per person? Seems a little ridiculous for such little that is being described here.

Even if this is split among the 4 people, that is still 2000 FEI 2000 tribe a month. Are they doing 40 hours of work a week? Is there even… 4 hours of work per week to be done?

I assume these are non-coding roles. What is the point in this… Giving away money?

Being 100% truthful, it looks like this is just a way to get the few people on Discord that are admins, to be paid for it, at a ridiculously high rate.

2 Likes
4

Hey guys, meer here! Excited for this porposal and I would like to throw my hat into the ring.

Are you applying for a Tribal Force member position or Tribal Force Leads?

I’m applying for a Tribal Force Lead role.

Describe your/the expert’s involvement in the Fei ecosystem and in the DeFi space more generally?

I have been continuously active in the Fei community and ecosystem literally every single day since Genesis. My roots in crypto are in the early BTC and later on ETH days. After a longer break I reentered the game in late 2020, taking great interest in the evolvements during my absence and the state of DeFi. Fei Protocol was a perfect fit for me, as a young and promising protocol, which is why I was instantly hooked and started to get serious with Fei and its community.

What skills/experience do you/they bring?

My core skills lie in the ability to help, manage and excite people.
I’m able to quickly pick up new concepts or deal with new situations, which is critical in the fast-evolving space that is DeFi.
My professional experience in the DeFi space comes mostly from working as a moderator and Admin in different projects.
During my time at Fei I also created multiple websites for the protocol, such as Fei Academy and the Fei Grants website. Other than that, I also gained experience in working with proposals and official publications, for example through my work on the newsletter.
Additionally, I gained some experience in administrative tasks through my work in the Fei Grants committee.
Lastly, I’m a member of the Optimistic Approval squad, meaning I have already proven myself to deserve and being able to handle a high level of trust as part of that multisig.

What are your expected contributions?

Currently my contributions potentially falling under the Tribal Force framework include:

o Fei Discord Admin
o Fei Discourse Admin
o Fei Grants Committee member (Website creation and upkeep, handling applications)
o Writing the monthly newsletter (Content and light graphics work)
o Founder and upkeep of Fei Academy
o Member of the OA squad, also working on the OA transparancy developement team

Recently I have been offered to take a larger role in the announcements process, to take an Admin position on Telegram and to help out with snapshot proposals over on the Fei Snapshot account.

Bonus question: What are some of the long-term goals with your contribution to the Fei ecosystem?

Long term I want to see the protocol grow and prosper of course. To help with that I will do my very best to create and maintain a healthy, friendly and productive community. As you can see most of my tasks are focused on education, on-boarding and moderation, as well as finding and retaining high quality community members. This Tribal Force Leads role would just be an extension of what I’m already doing and give me the opportunity to help the protocol the best way I know how.

4 Likes
5

Hey @Sandypaper ,
Good question. First of all, it is important to note that not all TF members will get 100%, see:

Also, the value created has to be transparently displayed to the DAO. You can see some of the examples in my post. (Check out the TL;DR for example)
Another example of this is Bruno’s Substack:

There is a lot of talent in our DAO and it needs to incentivised.

As mentioned in the proposal, it is not only to incentivise admins, but it is a way of rewarding long-term contributors in the DAO. The rates are supposed to be competitive, so we compared them to the funding that Maker, Balancer, GRO and AAVE provide.

4 Likes
6

Hey Tribe, glad to be here!

Are you applying for a Tribal Force member position or Tribal Force Leads?

I’m applying for a Tribal Force Lead position.

Describe your/the expert’s involvement in the Fei ecosystem and in the DeFi space more generally?

I’ve started contributing with Fei Protocol since pre-Genesis by voluntarily writing articles about Fei and helping with the onboarding of new members. Since that time, I have visited Fei discord and forum everyday. It is my second home.

I coordinated the first community initiative towards decentralization, the formation of the PCV Diversification working group with @Eswak, @countvidal and @Matthew_Graham.

I’ve authored several successful proposals over the last months and provided my analysis in almost every post in the forum.

Examples of successful proposals are:

Supported by the Fei Grants Program, I’ve been writing articles about Fei and DeFi, such as History and Future of Fei Protocol , A Guide to Decentralized Stablecoins and DeFi Guide.

I helped @Brianna to reach some potential first users of Liquidity-as-a-Service ( LaaS), including GRO and Gelato. I am also helping to further integrate the Fei and Balancer community.

Additionally, I am a member of OA multisig and I am working on the OA transparency development team.

What skills/experience do you/they bring?

My background is business administration, finance and communication. In more than 10 years working in the financial sector, I have a remarkable track record of successful projects.I love to work together to create new things.

I also have experience in teaching, including some crypto courses. I have the ability to explain complex subjects in a simple way.

What are your expected contributions?

Besides helping in the coordination of Tribal Force members and related administrative tasks, I see three major lines for my contributions:

→ Communication & Education & Transparency:

  • Writing Articles
  • Developing webpages, such as OA tracker, to increase the transparency of Fei DAO
  • For future exploration: developing Fei / DeFi courses, managing video production, etc

→ Integrations

  • Helping to bring new DAOs to use Fei services
  • Integrate with other communities and exchange experiences

→ PCV & Economics analysis and proposals

  • Articulate and create new proposals to better deploy PCV and minted FEI
  • Provide analysis to help in the community decision making

In summary, I want to help Fei to grow, by increasing its user base and its assets.

Bonus question: What are some of the long-term goals with your contribution to the Fei ecosystem?

I really liked this question. I am here for the DeFi revolution. Fei, PCV and all the services we can provide to DAOs will help these new organizations to thrive. In the future, I want to say to my son that I helped the emergence and growth of many DAOs and DeFi Protocols. I believe these new structures can create a much better system than we have today.

During my Fei journey, I could contribute and learn a lot with my Tribe friends. I am so grateful that I had this opportunity. If I get elected to this role, I promise, I will give all my energy to unlock all the Fei potential.

4 Likes
7

Bruno et. al,

Thank you very much for putting together this proposal. Before I can comment on the details, we must take a step back and define what the quantifiable goals for this initiative are, as well as outline what a 40-hour work week would look like for each lead/member. Can you clarify a little more about what defines value-added contributions and growth, so that we can monitor what a successful implementation of this program might look like? Once this is explained more clearly, and we can determine if it is in line with the DAO’s strategic goals, we can move onto the structure and compensation request. As we are in the midst of a potential merger of the DAO, it might be appropriate to wait until a decision is made before we move forward with the Tribal Force initiative.

Quantifiable Examples:

  • We aim to grow the discord by x% quarterly
  • All medium posts / announcements / documentation will be translated to x# of languages
  • Twitter mentions will increase by x% quarterly
  • Twitter likes and comments about Fei will increase by x%
  • Discord participation will increase by x%
  • Each Tribal Force member will aim to recruit x# new delegates to our ecosystem
  • Each Tribal Force member will aim to recruit x# Fei grants recipients
  • Each Tribal Force member will vote on 90% of all Snapshot and On-chain votes

A few other questions/Asks:

  • Can you please breakdown the 40 hrs of contribution each week on various activities (Create a Job Description).

  • Who determines compensation level % for Leads?

  • How many participants are we looking to have included in the Tribal Force outside of the 4 leads

Worth noting:

I did some digging on the numbers used as a comparison for Maker, and the compensations shared are for former FTE of the Maker Foundation, who were the 2 members of the Real world assets team (has since grown but started as 2), with years of investment banking experience, working full time on a core initiative for Maker (which is comparable to our Fei Labs Protocol dev team) with a vesting schedule. In my opinion, this data is not relevant to this initiative.

It’s important to ensure that the biggest contributors of the Fei ecosystem are compensated for their time and effort. If current rates are too low, then they should be raised. Especially as the grants program moves to full DAO control. If we determine the timing and structure for the Tribal Force is not right, I suggest that the individual contributors transparently post on current compensation to date (including on-going compensation and one-off payments) and ask the community for a pay increase.

5 Likes
8

While I echo @Brianna’s sentiments in part - specifically on the need for more fleshed-out details of role responsibilities - I think these are details that can easily be worked out and I am very in favor of this proposal.

Even if the rates are high (and I’m not saying they are), our DAO has the capital, and as long as we are not being wasteful, we should lean on the side of overcompensating! More engagement is always good and I love the proposal itself.

One caveat: the leaders of the Tribal Force should probably not decide their own compensation levels (among the 10%, 25%, 50%, 75%, 100%, etc). I would suggest some static compensation amount for the leaders of the TribalForce as to make sure incentivizes are aligned correctly and reduce friction. Open to ideas here though.

I think this proposal (or some form of it) is a great way to continue down the path of decentralization, and I don’t think it should wait for the merger. Both can happen in parallel.

3 Likes
9

I hope to get a more thorough breakdown of what the 40 hour week would look like. What value does this initiative bring to the table?

I personally have all the time in the world after retiring and for this amount of money would put anything else aside to do it (based on how little would be required) but I 100% also think it should not be a position paid this highly for how little is done.

Make goals and be as transparent as possible if we’re going down this route.

2 Likes
10

@Sandypaper

I’m confused as to what you mean by “this highly” when the proposal doesn’t specify one, but rather a variable set of possible payment options. It seems like you’re assuming that people will be paid the 100% option, full stop.

While that’s definitely a concern, I think if the system and incentive structure is designed properly, that concern can probably be assuaged.

2 Likes
11

It seems like the spirit of this proposal is exactly in line with the long term goals, and the idea of self-managing growth incentives is definitely alluring.

The big “if”, in my mind, is if a mechanism or quantification can be established to accurately suss out value added, so that it can be tracked and rewarded efficiently, fairly, and sustainably.

Basically just echoing what others said above… Good idea, let’s explore more details, and also set expectations that earning the top comp tiers would require a significant contribution and commitment.

3 Likes
12

We need a clear job description for each leader / member, with tasks and responsibilities completed with quantifiable goals for each payment level. However, this seems difficult to implement, and the alternative (not measuring quantifiable goals) is extremely subjective. Perhaps the applicants who have previously contributed to the DAO can give some clarity on how they would rank themselves in the last three months, so that we can get a better idea of how they would score historically. We also need more clarity about who ranks the leaders, as already mentioned.

6 Likes
13

That is a very thoughtful point Brianna!

I think a great starting point would be for folks who are currently working for the DAO to outline what they did specifically in the last three months, and how many hours did that amount to; why they should entitled to x% if they were to continue our past workload; before laying out what else they might do, and how much might that be worth/KPI etc.

a major initiative of this proposal is to consolidate and make transparent the current payments that are being given for work done for the protocol, and to bring them inline with Defi standards.

2 Likes
14

Hi,

I’m really interested in joining our long-term Contributor Program and applying for a Tribal Force member position. But before that, I want to understand how it works and What are the requirements for the member position?

Currently, I have a full-time engineer job in the US. I can spend around 2 hours per day including weekends on our program. Is that fine? Or do we have to work 40 hours per week?

The next question is about the payment level. Clearly, I wouldn’t aim for 100%, maybe 15% or 20% is a good point. For me, joining the program is more important. But how to determine the level for each month? Based the working hours?

3 Likes
15

I fully disagree with this statement. The FeiRari merger is about merging our two DAOs together, and it makes no sense to make full-time hiring decisions for one DAO, not the other, while potentially merging. It would be advantageous to wait until the merger is finalized (or rejected), so that both DAOs can participate in this process if appropriate. It is also in the DAO’s best interest to open applications to the wider DeFi community if we move forward with this initiative to attract the best applicants.

Reiterating my previous comment:

2 Likes
16

Are you applying for a Tribal Force member position or Tribal Force Leads?

I don’t mind doing TF Lead job in the part of tracking activity and approving new candidates, especially since for the first cohort I’m the only one with technical expertise for now. However, I cannot commit to a 40h/week job as a lead on top of my dev contribution. Therefore, for now I’m applying for the member position.

Describe your/the expert’s involvement in the Fei ecosystem and in the DeFi space more generally?

Since the early days of Fei I’ve been arguing here and in Discord discussions that multimillion decisions made in DeFi should be based on deeper understanding and prediction of underlying dynamics of protocols involved, both that of Fei and of its partners:

Implementing this vision I’ve been working lately on the tool for protocol exploration and comprehension.

It’s gonna be a tool for protocol analysis in the vein of what Gauntlet is doing, but based on a set of DeFi-native premises:

  1. Gauntlet is running their simulations with agent-based models representing users interacting with a protocol. A model of a user is based on a set of theoretical assumptions about user behaviour patterns. This approach was developed for TradFi, where the bulk of real life data is either not digitised at all (much of the b2c interaction happens offline) or isn’t available (much of market data is private). Hence, agent-based modelling with theoretical assumptions about incomplete data is justifiable. However, for DeFi agent-based modelling is a suboptimal legacy framework. Since all data about transactions and user interactions with the protocol is open and available for modelling, we can learn from real life data a model of a living protocol, or parts of it, and models of user interactions with it. Moreover, this model will be continuously fine-tuned with new data emerging.
  2. Transactions model is only half of the story. The other half is community sentiment manifested on twitter, discord and discourse. In the offline economy inflation expectations and consumer sentiment influence consumer behaviour and central banks of the world gauge it with polls, when modelling national economies. In DeFi we have the luxury to model community sentiment not with approximating polls, but again with real life data, while constantly fine-tuning the model.

We can learn from real life data models of onchain activity & that of community sentiment and then merge them to get a true-to-life DeFi-native model of a protocol, which can be constantly fine-tuned. Then it can be used to build tools for explorable + explainable DeFi: running stress tests and alternative scenarios, classifying protocols and tokens, detecting user behaviour patterns, making forecasts about certain protocol KPIs like TVL and that of partnering protocols.

9ialwcnA8076wnd3boibbX3GDjmIdve-FBb0TlflhjY6HGU8SURDUC53rc8H-RuqSyzCNUEhS5swOo04IDHCpyk6WI1ZfuekjSZgbEgq6HWSnE_lJ3Byx1DuMgNc
9ialwcnA8076wnd3boibbX3GDjmIdve-FBb0TlflhjY6HGU8SURDUC53rc8H-RuqSyzCNUEhS5swOo04IDHCpyk6WI1ZfuekjSZgbEgq6HWSnE_lJ3Byx1DuMgNc954×558 42.1 KB

I already made the first iteration of the model for gauging Twitter sentiment evolution towards some key DeFi protocols, including Fei. Under the hood is an autoencoding BERT-derivative language model trained on the corpus of tweets, then fine-tuned on a different corpus of tweets with sentiment labeled by human annotators. Then I scrapped Twitter feed with inclusion/exclusion @ # $ and some others for a particular protocol. Then I ran scrapped and preprocessed Twitter feed data through the language model and for each data point in the time series calculated rolling mean with a heuristic window (a sweet spot: less – too much noise, more – too few details):

I’ll be publishing more here: learn.klimchitsky.com

I’ve been doing this in my spare time with no funding. I’m also paying from my pocket for Google Cloud Services to run DL experiments, you can check out rates here: Preise  |  Vertex AI  |  Google Cloud

I’ve also been on the OA committee.

What skills/experience do you/they bring?

Deep learning for Natural Language Processing, deep learning on graphs: both community (members — vertices, communication — edges) and onchain (wallets — vertices, txns — edges) activities can be modelled as graphs.

Plus some industry connections to scale these efforts.

What are your expected contributions?

This work can go forward in a number of ways.

Trained models will be deployed to an endpoint such that apps like a (most basic) dashboard showing community sentiment real-time evolution or for certain dates/parameters can be built.

Advanced sentiment model

In the first iteration the most basic BERT_small-derivative (with some alterations) was used. A different architecture like ERNIE (demonstrates superior results in other natural language processing tasks) or an ensemble of architectures can replace underlying basic BERT-small model.

Resulting language model can be trained on a bigger corpus or a corpus of DeFi-specific vs general topic tweets.

E.g.: 175-billion-parameter GPT-3 was trained on a corpus of 570GB filtered texts from Common Crawl.

A classification task with 3 labels (positive, neutral, negative) is a good first step. A more advanced model can gauge community sentiment in a bigger/more complicated space of states or produce sentiment prediction in the form of coherent narrative. Custom data labelling could be required in this case.

In the first iteration Twitter feed is used as a source of data on community sentiment. Data from Discord, Discourse can augment the picture.

Enriched sentiment model (community social graph + sentiment)

Pure language models presume that all social interactions influence equally the state of community sentiment, which is clearly not the case. A message from a protocol founder vs average troll clearly should have different weights in the resulting picture.

One way to fix this is to use temporal graph network to represent an evolving community graph. It generates a temporal embedding (a real-valued vector) for each user (graph node) i. This embedding is a learnable function of their history of interactions and that of their n-hop neighbours (social ties akin to that measured by PageRank).

Thus a language model of community sentiment can be enriched with information about relative social weight of each community member.

Onchain txns model (transaction graph)

Temporal graph network can also be used to represent an evolving txns graph. Here, say for a given protocol, it generates a temporal embedding (a real-valued vector) for each wallet (graph node) i. This embedding is a learnable function of their history of transactions and that of their n-hop neighbours.

An ETH-wide representation graph can also be built.

Onchain txns model can be used to run predictions: running test scenarios for different assets/platforms/DAO decision parameter sets; classification: asset/protocol risk-benefit profiling; finding optimal monetary policy parameter set. Txns patterns forecasting. Fraudulent activity detection. Detecting other patterns/clusters providing certain insights and serving as a decision support tool for all stakeholders: DAOs, investors, community members, users. I invite everybody to brainstorm further possible applications.

Protocol supermodel

The most important and complicated part: a protocol supermodel integrating enriched sentiment and onchain txns models comes next.

Both models can be regarded as functions, each in their respective function spaces. Then temporal evolution of these models can be interpreted as operators on these function spaces and a protocol supermodel as morphisms between these operator spaces.

Also one of the key challenges here is to design a way to communicate this representation in a coherent and deep way such that a user could easily and productively explore and interact with the model. The appropriate UI/UX is in the pipeline.

Bonus question: What are some of the long-term goals with your contribution to the Fei ecosystem?

I think native tools for explorable + explainable DeFi as opposed to borrowed TradFi methods as done by Gauntlet or Aave are crucial for the future of Fei and DeFi at large.

3 Likes
18

This sounds better suited for the Fei Grants Program, and I am curious if you have talked to @storm about this initiative.

1 Like
19

It is great to see so many of the OG community members making this proposal together! Here are the things that I like about it:

Community-driven compensation: there are so many initiatives and work being done in Fei Protocol these days that its hard to keep up. Having community members mutually establishing their compensation levels is something I’ve been interested in for a long time.
High compensation: overpaying full-time contributors compensates for the risk of working for a DAO vs a more traditional company or startup. It also allows Fei to attract many more expert contributors than in the past.
Transparency and accountability: the information about compensation will be out in the open (great for recruiting) and there will be a way to vote out members that are performing poorly or otherwise abusing their position.
Reduced dependency on Fei Labs: with the elevated compensation levels will come elevated expectations for community contributors, including relying less on support from Fei Labs, which is always stretched thin.
Timing: It would have been hard to get something like this out the door sooner as our community was forming. The crew that has formed around this proposal has for the most part been engaged since the launch early this year and are now pretty ramped up on Fei.

Seeing some of the feedback on this thread, it seems like the sticking point for many is the overall compensation level. It does seem very high to me ($200k+/yr for full-time contributors, plus the upside on TRIBE). Its more than I was making as an engineer last year (incl. equity) after working full time in DeFi for 3+ yrs since before it was even called DeFi.

I don’t think I should be suggesting specific compensation numbers or % changes to the levels proposed. We should establish those in an open and transparent way. Here is how I suggest we drive this conversation about compensation levels:

  • More accurate comparisons to other protocols: putting aside the fact that Balancer and Maker have the most mature DeFi protocols and communities out there, it does seem like the comparables posted don’t translate well to our community. For example, there is definitely no equivalent to the Real-World Finance core unit (or any core unit) in our community (in terms of experience needed and responsibility taken). Fei launched in April and they have been working on this for 4 years. Its ok for Fei not to have caught up yet. How much does Maker pay for moderation in their channels? What do they pay their equivalent of the grants committee (as far as I know it was run by the foundation) ? Full time engineers with years of crypto experience at DeFi bluechips like Aave and Compound get paid less than the 75% bracket proposed here.
  • Someone suggested above that the authors show the level of compensation that some members would have gotten over the past 3 months if this program had already started. I think this is a great idea that will assuage many of the detractors of the high compensation levels. A lot of people are incorrectly assuming that a $150-200k/yr will be given to members with medium value contributions, so it should be fairly easy to show that this will not be the case.
  • The proposal suggest compensation brackets (10-100%) based on level of engagement rather than value of the work. This is super wrong on multiple levels and the exact opposite of how labor markets work. I think its very important for the authors to amend the proposal to make it such that the protocol somehow pays based on the value of the work being provided. This is the hard work of managing an organization, made even harder by the management-by-committee nature of the decentralized projects. Still needs to be addressed though.

To reiterate my position: I’m excited about this proposal and hope we can adddress feedback on it quickly to get it out the door. I agree that we should find comparables and overcompensate for these roles. I don’t think that the posted comparables are very accurate.

10 Likes
20

Excited to hear your interest @ykkkk ! Perhaps a good place to start is to drop some more details about yourself in discord and find a good starter task for contribution. The Tribal Force in its current form would likely onboard primarily long-time community contributors (3mo +)

3 Likes
21

I am extremely in favor of a community led group like the TribalForce and I think this proposal has some strong positives:

  • autonomy
  • incentive alignment
  • growth

The key sticking points appear to be around quantifying the work done and compensation.

Quantifying work is difficult but not impossible, and we should make efforts to do so where we can.

Ideally compensation is not so rigid, because it is a bit subjective to self-report percentages of effort and even harder to benchmark the relative value of a contributor. All else equal, a solidity dev and a non-technical contributor should not be paid similarly even if both work 100 hour weeks.

I think like MakerDAO we can add multipliers for certain skillsets. We can also investigate tools like Coordinape to allow for even more emergent funding where the most active contributors tend to receive the most compensation.

I am in favor of piloting something and not letting the sticking points prevent this proposal which I consider net positive for the DAO.

I’d like to hear from those who wish to be part of the TribalForce where they consider themselves to land over the last 3 months and where they expect to be after the first 3 months of the pilot.

6 Likes