[Closed] Salaried Facilitator, Chief of Staff Position

The tangential grifting knows no bounds…

I see that this role is very important and provides value to the community.
What I don’t see is, why one of the CoE members can’t fulfill this position?

If the 7 members can’t setup a good communication flow, is adding one more going to help?

The whole CoE concept is a work-in-progress.
Maybe we should reelect a new CoE, with the clear expectations of 4-8 hours of weekly work and some salary as a compensation.
I understand that this additional work doesn’t fit into everyone’s life. But being a member of CoE comes with responsibility and work.

Now it’s clear, maybe it wasn’t when the first election happened.

This is why I’m thinking the best bet is to just select one of the CoE to do it. No adding of people when someone from the crew of 7 that has the extra time and wants to put in the work can do this job and get compensated for the extra work. It’s not a leadership role or anything. I think as for re-election it would only make sense if someone from the CoE does take on the role but the overall CoE group still fails to make sufficient progress in proposal adoption and community engagement. I think once we get this locked down the proposals and the communication will follow and we won’t keep hitting these little roadblocks. I for sure as the newsletter writer for the CoE will keep in close contact with whoever jumps in on this and keep all information as current as possible!

This is actually a really good point. In the very early stages of this, I suggested a temporary CoE that would knock out the initial structure and then hold an election for the first official CoE. This would allow people running to know precisely what was required, if there was a monetary incentive to do so, etc. A lot has been decided since the first group was elected and it’s not unthinkable there are a few who are thinking “this isn’t what I expected”. I don’t think there is anything wrong with opening the door for members to step down and holding replacement elections.

I also agree with others that this position, either officially or through a delegation of duties can be handled by a seven-member group. I think the key is, it has to be well defined so existing and future members know precisely what is expected of them.

In the current state we’re asking a lot of folks who had no idea of what was coming.

Think of the offset your volunteer hours will provide. The grifters will barely survive it. When can we expect your help with legal?

I am not a lawyer, but my neighbor is (he’s an IP/Patent lawyer). I ran this situation by him and he suggested a securities lawyer (which his firm has) and provided an estimate of 10 hours @ $500 an hour (could be more, could be less). This was considerably less than the ignorant comments made by some that the legal consultation would exhaust the entire CoE treasury. Again, this inquiry was to determine the token status as a security based on levels of the Numerai treasury since a very large concern exists to this tournament end state.

In order to generate a legal blueprint to follow, a clearly defined mission needs to exist. I do not see this posted anywhere, perhaps I am missing it? Legal separation from the mothership seems to be necessary in order to even discuss certain things sponsored by the CoE (? again the earlier referenced legal diligence on token status as a security would remedy this).

I ran, I wasn’t voted in. I would have had no problem allocating some time to follow through with these things. It seems unconscionable that these menial actions cannot be allocated among 7 individuals without compensation in order to provide a mechanism which ultimately benefits their substantial NMR holdings.

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I think honestly this should be calculated at a lower hourly rate than development. I think the $35 to 40 an hour is more in line with the position. Taking the top, estimating 8 hours a week, allowing two weeks off, we’d be targeting around 400 hours a year give or take. At 40 an hour, you’re at $16k a year. I do agree with others here. given the volatility of NMR, it should be calculated in a fiat rate vs a token rate. At current prices that will be around 380 NMR. This of course will change based on hours billed per week. Some weeks could be less and everything will be subject to performance reviews by the CoET.

These of course are just early ideas on a pay structure if the position is voted in. There are good points for and against it and this again may not be an appropriate final form for the salary. We’re just hashing it out, all input is welcome here.

There is a lot of really good information here to kick this off from. Let me dig through some research so we can hit the high points of your concerns and get them presented to both the CoE and community. I agree there needs to be some formal idea of what the short term and long term vision of the DAO is going to be. I can’t imagine legal help of $5k being a stumbling block here and I’d almost suspect that much would get dumped into the tax side etc. Unavoidable expenses if you want to keep regulators and tax authorities happy.

The trick here is to not get so bogged down in the red tape of the thing that no actual production takes place. Those wheels need to keep moving as well.

Appreciate all that input, will prob ping you privately with questions etc.

I think members of the CoE should make specific proposals (e.g. hire someone to research tax / securities issues) rather than appointing a new role with vague responsibilities – or complete the work, or some milestone, before making a proposal with the knowledge that they’ll almost certainly be retroactively paid if they want to, similar to the recent Power BI dashboard or OpenSignals

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@_liamhz I hope it is clear to everyone here and at numerai that I don’t want to get paid (retroactively) for the work I put into the Power Bi reporting up until now. That one was like a thank you to the community and numerai for the tournament :slight_smile:

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Yah the tax situation thing seems like it should be it’s own animal to deal with. All the other responsibilities in this proposal do seem to be in line though with what a facilitator would do.

That’s awesome work you did for the community. If at any point you want to expand at all through a proposal I’m sure the CoE would fund the work!

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The self-nomination and polling post makes sense to me, similar to what was done with the original CoE process. I also think anyone should be able to throw their hat in the ring, including current CoE members. That’s just my opinion though, we’ll keep track of all the input and pass it on to the CoE after this stage closes. Then the position, if it passes in this initial form, can be firmed up. Once the final details are in place, they can be dropped in front of the community and folks can decide to run for the position based on a solid description from the CoE.

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Adding @uuazed original rocket-chat comment here. I’d like to have these centralized so all opinions are available for review.

"I am not fully convinced by this facilitator idea. Sounds like turning this into a one man show, with the rest only doing the final voting. So, here is another one:

  1. every proposal gets a CoE member (or two) assigned that “owns” this proposal. The role of this proposal owner is to a) help the proposer to get the proposal into shape b) collect feedback from the rest of the CoE c) update the proposal status d) initiate voting (soft or hard)
  2. Proposals have a state (for example, new - under review - community vote - approved - in progress - rejected - done). The state of each proposal is updated by the proposal owner and clearly visible somewhere (and the forum might not be the best place for that)
    This way we divide the work among all the CoE members and it’s clear who is the contact point for each proposal."

This could be the right way. Every CoE member should be a facilitator of assigned proposals.
This role description is actualy a fits the role of a CoE member as well.

I might not have been expected at the beginning, but the whole concept is a work-in-progress.

So I think we’ve actually accomplished some good stuff with this. @uuazed has offered up a structure that makes sense for them to work from and also pinged us with the project management tool they can use to track proposals etc. I feel like that answers a lot of the concerns we had with communication and things potentially slipping through the cracks. The job now is for us, the community to get cracking on proposals that they can review and act on. The facilitator proposal may have been a huge fail, but I think it sparked the right response.

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It looks like the salaried facilitator proposal is very unpopular: social consensus in action! To that end, @uuazed set up a kanban board on github so the CoE can start trialing out this way of organizing things. As with everything else, this should be completely open/transparent to the public. Someone from the CoE will voluntarily take “lead” on a proposal to make sure it gets dealt with and passes through various decision “gates” in a timely fashion.

Still a few things to sort out. What if an elder never picks up a proposal to lead? What should the final “gates” be and for how long should a proposal sit in each gate before a decision needs to be made to move the proposal closer to approval or archival? I’m sure some might think of this as adding bureaucracy, but I see it as adding much needed process.

This proposal is a good test. I’ve decided to take lead and put my name as the CoE member assigned to the proposal on the kanban board. Given that this has gone through voting and has clearly failed, I will move it for archival shortly.

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I will close the voting on this end as well so everything is in sync.

A proposal that’s never picked up after a month or so dies a natural death. What if some elders don’t pick up any proposal? Tie it to a KPI. Minimum 1 proposal every 3 months for each elder?

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Moving in the right direction now IMO. Thank you for your service @uuazed , @jrai , and @objectscience.

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