I agree that my proposal would incompatible with HIP-3 which would need to be overturned for it to work.
My plan:
If the signaling poll is positive (“Yes, we are ready”) I will move to a different thread and ask for a signal ing poll for the preferred candidate (and runner-ups). That candidate will then prepare a full budget with financing and the specific incoming hires as a new HIP-X (repealing HIP-3) and an accept/reject vote.
If the signaling poll is negative (“No, we are not ready”) I will in stead make a new proposal for a specific recruitment procedure for the management of the DAO and see if I can get it through.
My two cents on the situation up to this point, I just voted “No - we are not ready” on @Mads snapshot proposal as the truth is we are just beginning. I like to bring us all together to remind us that we are a bunch of strangers trying to coordinate a super-complex maneuver for a Decentralized Autonomous Organization - we are bound to stumble a lot at first.
@Mads I really appreciate your proactive stance and would encourage this from anyone reading this post to follow, but we barely have started with the vetting and I am sure whoever gets hired will be what the community wants. So please, have a little more patience with the process.
On the other hand, I have to address the original post of this thread as it was too broad if not downright misleading. If the ideal candidate has to be 100% of his working time committed to the cause and there are 50,000$USD allocated to him to work on that cause, why not be straightforward and make that explicit. Since I can only speak to my experience, when I first saw it I did my proposal based on the suggestion (65% of my time for 35K$) from @clesaege but in my mind, I knew that it was going to be a full-on war-time position. We could have avoided a couple of posts in this thread by being more specific.
With that said, I agree with @pmerugu about being focused on delivering productive outcomes and also being realistic about time utilization as a team of 1 PM and 1 dev, there will be times where it seems that the PM is carrying more of the load and other times where the dev will shine, but the commitment has to be there 100% on both positions.
I would like to be considered again for the position as a PM with 100% of my time allocated for the 50K a year that is allocated to the position with the assumption that the founders/kleros team-members would give me a fair shot to interview and state my case personally.
Lastly, I am sad to see @paulaberman leave so suddenly as I thought she and @SofiaCossar fitted so well into the position, coming with such a deep background at Democracy Earth and self-sovereign identity research, but that is my opinion, it is their right to do that.
There isn’t any specific number, maybe the DAO could spend 50k$ the first year on each of the 2 position and the remaining of the money on other stuff. UBI can be part of the compensation thus not limited to current DAO ETH holdings (~180k$ worth of ETH).
I’m walking in off the street, but here’s what I observe:
Paula & Sofía (@paulaberman) seem to bring a founder mentality, strong sense of community ethos, and an understanding of what needs to be done in order to integrate PoH into the wider ecosystem and bring about its general acceptance and build its network effects. If that’s the case, it’s an incredibly rare and valuable thing.
If Paula & Sofia were funded, there would not be enough money left over for a strong engineer, who would also be necessary for brining the ultimate vision about.
Therefore, it seems that the project is underfunded and may be stunted/unable to reach its full potential.
Is there a way to raise more funding for the project?
Thank you @RoboTeddy and to all that have been supportive of our candidacy, it means a lot to us. We decided to reapply to the position. Our sincere apologies to @iafhurtado for this back and forth. We will update our proposed budget allocation shortly, in order to accommodate a larger compensation to a software engineer.
This may be a bit off topic, but it strikes me that there are three important roles right now:
Community & “active research”: community-building, evangelization, encouraging engagement in governance, encouraging other projects to integrate, bringing about experiments based on PoH, etc. This looks like what Paula and Sofia have suggested here: Proposal for the Proof of Humanity DAO | by Paula Berman | May, 2021 | Medium
Based solely on the information in the thread (which isn’t much!), @paulaberman and co could be good at (1). The project would then need someone who can handle both (2) and (3) — or one person for each of those. A single person would probably be better while the project is still so small.
In my opinion, @paulaberman and @HBesso31 both show leadership by telling us what they need to do the job, rather than how we have defined it. It doesn’t make sense to ask someone to take the helm and then tie their hands.
We’ve edited our application post with a new budget, that accommodates a higher salary for the DAO to hire a competent founder developer alongside our team.
Again if it was just an application of Paula alone I could have supported it but would not support bundled applications. I think a strong dev is a way more important at this stage then getting a strategist, an operation manager a full-time multimedia artist.
Moreover initial workers are likely to be very important for the future of the DAO and delegating hiring to individuals (either with bundles or rights to hire at a later stage) may reduce the say of the community in those important decisions.
If the DAO gets more funding, there could be more funding for more positions, but currently the consensus is to hire a product manager and a developer.
I am very excited @paulaberman & @SofiaCossar are still applying. Over the past two weeks, I have had several in-depth conversations with Paula. I support their candidacy.
I believe what PoH needs is much broader than a PM. The reference products themselves are important, but they are not the core of PoH. We should be cautious about getting tunnel vision and focusing only on the webapp development. This DAO is about the PoH protocol.
To succeed in our vision, we must attract participation from the larger ecosystem. Imagine the Ethereum Foundation trying to build everything; wallets, dapps, Opensea, Uniswap, exchanges, Kleros, etc. Instead, they successfully focus on the soul.
The groundwork for PoH was laid by pioneers. Some like @santisiri started even before Bitcoin launched. Paula and Sofia are part of this group. They have volunteered for years and become thought leaders in this space. My conversations with them show not only commitment but deep understanding.
What we are hiring are basically founders. Embodying the spirit of the project is the top priority. Hard skills come second. Analyze any successful project, startup, or company, and this always proves true.
PoH is paradigm-shifting. Finding candidates capable of carrying this will be arduous. Here we have a team already serving PoH. I don’t believe we will find anyone that is a better match for vision, enthusiasm, and culture. I know they will put PoH first; they have proven this for years, and prove it again by proposing below-market salaries to fit three people.
@Justin is right that founder-level commitment, ethos, and understanding of the sort that could be brought by Paula and Sofia is critical.
@clesaege is right that PoH is critically dependent on its initial user interface and implementation, and dedicated product/engineering talent are necessary to improve them.
We need all of those things to make this really work.
@RoboTeddy and @clesaege the budget was already adjusted in order to accommodate a developer. I don’t understand why this point is still being brought up.
Ah! I did see that you updated your budget, which is very generous of you. I hope long-term that you can all earn closer to your market salaries. If your proposal were accepted, do you happen to know how much would be left over for an engineer?
Great! I think it would be fantastic for the DAO to accept your generous offer.
To help further support your candidacy — I’d be up for volunteering a minimum of 5 hrs / month (similar to @Justin) in support of any product/engineering work. I have deep experience in both, am a Y Combinator alum, have raised millions of dollars of non-profit funding in the past, and recently contributed a small code change that made a lot of people in the PoH telegram chat happy (it prevents people from losing their deposits due to a wrong video size)
P.S. would love to meet you! The calendly link in your post doesn’t seem to be working, though.
In order to legally (according to our rules) hire @HBesso31 or @paulaberman and give them the flexibility they request, I believe we need to adopt another management onboarding procedure. The procedure suggested also has actual deadlines:)
Let me know what you think (preferably in the proposal thread).
If we get a positive vote there, we can simply move forward with the process here. The alternative (what @Mads is proposing) would take a lot of precious time, which in my view could be better spent.
I’m not against team applications. But to me it makes more sense that applying teams also come with a technical expert.
So the DAO “hires” a full team and then this team will have the responsibility of managing all things related to PoH/UBI (marketing, community management, technical, etc.) until the next “election”.
