The CoE will be further defined as the CoE matures and grows.
Proposals
A proposal is the formal vehicle for kickstarting the approval process for an action that resolves in enacting an on-chain transaction from the CoE treasury.
Template
Title: “[Proposal] Name of Proposal”
Contents:
Proposal // A summary of the project you’re proposing and who is going to be working on it
Timeline // When could you start working on the project, if approved; And how long would it take?
Best case outcome // What does success look like?
Worst case outcome // What could go wrong? The more thought that goes into this, the better.
Success criteria // How can the success of this project be objectively measured and evaluated?
Funding // Amount of funds requested/required
Include anonymous poll to gauge community temperature (non-binding):
“Should this be funded?”
Yes
No
Other/Results (see comments)
Community Veto
If the community temperature check indicates > 67% “against”, then CoE cannot move forward with a proposal.
We’ll also have to think how the community would have any recourse if they voted “no” on something, but then the CoE went ahead with it anyway.
CoE “Elder” Membership
Multisig (4/7)
Changes to and transactions from the councilofelders.eth multisig wallet must be signed by 4 out of the 7 wallet signers (elders) in order to be implemented on-chain.
Elections
Voting
Every 6 months, 9 months, 1 year?
Numerai forum participants
Future plans
Stake-weighted (and quadratic) NMR voting
Organizational structure
Different positions elected from within the CoE (e.g. president, proposal portfolio manager, etc.) or all members equal?
Expectations for member contributions? Engagement?
- Include anonymous poll to gauge community temperature (non-binding):
I think this is important and would like to see current open proposals updated with the option.
- If the community temperature check indicates > 67% “against”, then CoE cannot move forward with a proposal.
This will save $$ on lost time if the reimbursement is passed.
- We’ll also have to think how the community would have any recourse if they voted “no” on something, but then the CoE went ahead with it anyway.
Make CoE votes public. If a person votes for a project the community doesn’t want, there will be a record of it that can be considered when a member is up for re-election.
- Precedent for at least reimbursing gas
absolutely
- Reimbursing time investments at some rate?
Yes but:
We need to see some type of budgeting. How much NMR is the CoE receiving each month? What percentages are you proposing for reimbursement and how does that stack up against projects? When I looked at Arb’s proposal, my initial thought was, how is that sustainable, and what fraction of the total budget does that represent?
With regards to time reimbursement, how do you prevent this from becoming an NMR farm of sorts? There needs to be accountability, tracking, SITG, or some performance metric. Something to keep incentives and contributions aligned with compensation.
I think the proposal format suggested should remain a suggested format, and that it should be made clear that simpler proposals are ok. I believe if the proposal format is required to fit that form, many potential good opportunities will decline to submit a proposal.
“Maintain, deploy, and grow a treasury of NMR and other crypto assets to improve meta model efficacy and bolster the Numerai community.” - maybe this could make sense for the long term but I believe Richard has stated he wants you to disburse your alotment, after which you’ll receive much more, and continue giving it away. Is there a reason the CoE will take a different tack than requested by Richard?
Community vetos aren’t non-binding if the temperature check indicates the CoE can’t move forward. Also, the current format of forum polls isn’t necessarily representative of numerai modeler community (could include random forum registrants, may be missing people who don’t use the forum, non-English community also)
Compensation. No one should work for free. The CoE should be compensated.
Elections. See above comments on issues with using the forum as the basis for votership. Also, I believe CoE members should not be anonymous or pseudonymous.
Regarding growing the treasury. It’s awesome that we are funded by numerai, however in the long term it would be great to not depend on numerai’s funding completely. The goal is to decentralize numerai and for the CoE to ensure the participants’ interests are served, not just those of numerai the company. I agree this isn’t going to happen soon
Some ideas how the CoE could make money (we haven’t discussed this yet, because there are higher priority topics)
sponsors
fees from users using projects we funded, like the predctions marketplace
@uuazed I love the idea of the CoE becoming independent and I can see the second bullet point being a good way to grow the treasury. I also think those projects have the most potential for the community as well.
As an aside, is there anything stopping the CoE from creating a model and participating in the main tournament, and making returns on some portion of the holdings?
All of this is fine, but I think way too much time is being spent creating a perfect structure before starting. I think it would be more than enough to list goals and be transparent as possible in your decisions and actions. IMO, this thread in itself is not time well spent on anyone’s part.
Let the NMR flow and let the community be productive and build stuff.
I think CoE needs to communicate a clear design filter. I propose:
the role of the CoE is to trailblaze, to generate original and even crazy ideas, and guide them to a minimal pilot;
the method is by running many small, inexpensive, easily cancellable experiments;
following an abundance mentality. There are sufficient funds to cover reasonable out of pocket costs for 100+ projects, but long-term salary like disbursements are an invitation for hunger-games like fights.
The key then is if some of these pilots generate interest and benefit, it becomes Numerai’s job to expand, resource, scale it and overcome bottlenecks.
Making decisions become easier following the above filter:
hell yeah for the initial incarnations of aventurine newsletter, Signals R with Liz, home5com marketplace minimal product;
grown-past-CoE, we love it, now-let-Numerai-resource-it for ohwa
All “votes” are on-chain in the gnosis multisig UI (Safe — Ethereum Smart Accounts). We can do a better job publicizing that and explaining it.
I wouldn’t say a ton of time has been spent on creating a perfect structure, we need something though anyway–it’s probably good to have anything written down on it and discussed periodically. Many proposals have already been funded. Many more are in the pipeline. There are a lot of calls to spend a lot faster and I agree with that. Interestingly enough, I’m pretty sure everyone does.
It might depend on the context of how the decision or what the decision is being made? Luckily, Numerai and the participants are already highly aligned–it’s why I like the project in the first place. As @uuazed has said in rocketchat, “the goal is to decentralize numerai and for the CoE to ensure the participants’ interests are served, not just those of Numerai the company.” That said, I think it’s safe to say CoE represents the participants and the meta-model.
What is your opinion on it? It kind of seems like the self-driving trolley problem, an interesting and important question to discuss, but in reality it is not a concern to actually code for.