Changing the way Giveth's core team does payments

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Giveth has a history of Radically Transparent salary payments. As part of our dedication to dogfooding transparent, traceable donations, for 5 years we have put forth countless hours of extra work to ensure that donors know exactly where their donations go and built trace.giveth.io so we can trace donors contributions to individual salary payments.

This was an epic undertaking and the effort should be applauded. I don’t know of any non-profit group that has ever been as transparent and innovative with payment structures.

So it is not without having done some major soul searching and advice process that I propose a change to this policy.

The biggest reason for this change is that it has already changed. To retain many members of our team, I started another org called General Magic which doesn’t have a transparent payment policy, and as the sole fund contributor to General Magic, no transparency was needed, this allowed me to retain and attract much of the talent that built the GIVeconomy (Marko, Mitch, Rodri, Mo, Catalina, Kristofer, Vyvy-Vi, Freshelle, Heather, Vitor, Fabio, Pedro)

The second biggest reason for this change is the fact that the funds we will be using to pay the Giveth Core Team’s salaries are not coming from Donors, they are actually coming from the nrGIV token allocation. We still collect donations and should maintain as much transparency over those donations as possible, but the funds coming from nrGIV didn’t come from the sacrifice of a donor, they come from the market value of the GIV token that the Giveth Core Team dutifully will maintain to the best of our abilities.

The third reason to change this policy is the global nature of our team, and the wide variety of individual circumstances that various team members are in. In Seattle, people at working in entry level fast food positions get about $17/hr, which in many places around the world is more than Senior Developers are paid. And things get really wild in the crypto bull market where Solidity developers market rate is hundred’s of dollars an hour not including signing bonuses. I don’t think we will have to pay that rate to get a good solidity dev, but if we want to attract a lead solidity developer, we will need to pay much more than we have been paying our team.

Over the last several years running various teams in the crypto space, I have found that transparent salaries cause people to be undervalued and create unnecessary conflict. IMO payments should individually negotiated and agreed upon based on the needs and resources of the org and the needs and the resources of the contributor, and the fewer people talking about individual salaries, the better.

We should still of course be as transparent and conservative as possible with our spending, and would like to propose monthly budget requests for the Giveth Core Team and for General Magic to nrGIV alongside monthly budget reports.

In the short term i think it makes more sense to just manage the payments with Freshelle via work agreements as that system is already built up, and if we grow to a larger size we can break into circles and working groups when/if it makes sense.

I already paid the Giveth Core Teams Salaries and it cost $44,750 in December.

I plan on giving raises to the long term members of the team that have been under paid for the last several months, but also will have fewer people working this next month so we are set to have an expense of $38,450 in January, assuming we hire don’t hire any one.

I would like to continue to manage the hiring and payments as I have for Giveth since it’s inception, I do this as an unpaid volunteer and hopefully I will be able to transition out of this role eventually, but if it ain’t broke don’t fix it.

Also I represent General Magic, and they have been contributing for free for most of the last year. Now that finances are less of a problem for Giveth, I would like to start requesting payments for them as well. General Magic is hoping to grow into a Service DAO, but has been operating at a loss to help launch the TEC and GIVeconomy. This will change and we will charge Giveth a 50% markup on the salaries. For December this would equate to $33,330 for 5.8 full time employees.

I would also like to request a back payment for the salaries I paid since March when Freshelle started keeping track. The payments before that were all donations to Giveth.

A lot of issues all at once… sorry for the brain dump but…

WDYT?

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We should still of course be as transparent and conservative as possible with our spending, and would like to propose monthly budget requests for the Giveth Core Team and for General Magic to nrGIV alongside monthly budget reports.

  • Agree.

Also I represent General Magic, and they have been contributing for free for most of the last year. Now that finances are less of a problem for Giveth, I would like to start requesting payments for them as well. General Magic is hoping to grow into a Service DAO, but has been operating at a loss to help launch the TEC and GIVeconomy. This will change and we will charge Giveth a 50% markup on the salaries. For December this would equate to $33,330 for 5.8 full time employees.

  • Don’t Agree with the 50% since this means someone else is paying and as you mentioned “finances are less of a problem for Giveth”. In my opinion, it should be 100% or the 50% gap should be compensated in a different way. But you would still get my support if you still suggest 50%.
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By 50% I meant that Giveth will actually pay 150% of the cost of Salaries… as there is a lot of invisible labor that isn’t accounted for and General Magic is going to become a for-profit Service DAO, so it needs to charge extra.

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I want to parse out your brain dump a bit, it’s not clear to me the “exact change” being proposed.

Starting from the bottom.

Absolutely yes on this one. You made a clear delineation at that point that payments going forward were “out of pocket expenses” being advanced, and we do have a culture of paying for things up front sometimes then being reimbursed if/when possible.

I’m sure there’s more to it, but this statement does not really seem to match what you said above:

This gives me some pause, as almost everyone ever working on Giveth worked for fractions of their value, and are all Donors to Giveth just as much as anyone who donated money. While I’m no longer an official governance steward, I’m still a long term member of the team and take the responsibility to uphold our values seriously… transparency and accountability being the top two, so I’m taking the time to seek any conscientious concern within myself on this… pardon my usually agreeable self for digging into a more challenge-focused approach!! :slight_smile:

I do think the DAO, having voted on work agreements in the past, has an obligation to continue having oversight on salaries, and while it doesn’t need to be as transparent as on TRACE, I’m not comfortable agreeing to keep it obscured from the nrGIV DAO at minimum.

In the future, the GIV DAO will be responsible for making these decisions, and needs to have insight on how team members have been paid in the past.

Where the funds come from seems irrelevant in the big picture of motivation for paying people commensurate to their work experience, skills, location, tenure, etc. Managing donor funds increases the demand for transparency, but the fact that it’s now coming from market value should not diminish the duty, IMHO.

The responsibility for the treasury, expenses and investments requires informed consent, so I guess knowing what a circles overall budget is can serve that purpose without revealing to one another who receives exactly what.

So Giveth the not-for-profit will be subsidizing the launch of a for-profit business by paying more now, because we paid less before? How long is the 50% surcharge on this teams services to last?

It is seductively easy to unintentionally value some types of “invisible labor” over others due to our cultural, educational, and lived experience. Again I’m sure there’s a lot unsaid in this post - because of that… it could be read, that:

The people who came in and worked for a secret salary that nobody knows, also did it for basically free, and should get paid an extra 50%… because they … are going to spin a for-profit business out of their work here… is one way this could be interpreted… which I know isn’t it, but … it could be, and we have no way… to know?

Again please forgive me for being a little punchy - I just don’t want to be a rubber stamp, and I do want to help maintain transparency to the most beneficial degree possible.

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So I agree with individual payments no longer be transparent… but then rather having the “budget to fund our team” be transparent. Transparent individual salaries creates a lot of contention, frustration, etc. etc. It leads to some team members being undervalued, etc… I think that if each individual is satisfied with their individual situation, and that the collective is satisfied with the funds required for the collective… that should be fine… it also makes things more efficient.

I think we you 100% reimburse you for the expenses and salaries you paid for out-of-pocket in the past, i.e. for GM people who are really Giveth people like Mitch & Mitch. We got a lot of support from them and others.

The only thing I don’t understand/agree with is really this 50% markup for general magic payments… Where is that money supposed to go, explicitly? Assuming we are already refunding you for the out-of-pocket payments made in recent months… this should cover the “operating at a loss”, no? And then having the nrGIV DAO fund General Magic salaries so they can continue to support Giveth & other DAOs in the galaxy… that already sounds like Giveth generously funding a team that is supporting the ecosystem, no? What exactly is a “for-profit Service DAO”?

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I think I was unclear.

Yes, I was very unclear

For past hours that General Magic did, we will just request to be reimbursed at cost, but for December and going forward, GM will charge a very fair rate, I’m just being transparent that General Magic is a consultant/service provider and the billable hours for Giveth will be charged at a 50% mark up above the salary cost for the person doing the work, and honestly we will likely charge other groups more, as market rates Blockchain Development is much more than what we would charge Giveth.

For example,

If a Magician gets paid $20 per hour from General Magic and they work 10 hours for Giveth and 50 hours for other groups. They will get paid for 60 hours of work at $20 per hour ($1200) and Giveth will pay General Magic $30 an hour for the hours they worked for Giveth, so $300, and we will charge the other group for their hours.

If a Magician gets paid $20 per hour from General Magic and they work 60 hours for Giveth and 0 hours for other groups. They will get paid for 60 hours of work at $20 per hour ($1200) and Giveth will pay General Magic $30 an hour for the hours they worked for Giveth, so $1800.

The extra $600 will go to General Magic to cover the costs of doing business as well as of course trying to turn a profit.

General Magic wants to be a for-profit service DAO is like Raid Guild, but instead of being Mercenaries, General Magic will focus on supporting the Blockchain4good community.

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I think what’s missing from this proposal in regards to paying General Magic, retroactively and beyond, is a negotiation process between the service provider and the client.

If 50% markup seems a bit egregious then what is a comfortable solution for Giveth? What room is their for negotiation? How much has Griff been paying out of pocket for both General Magic and Giveth salaries?

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This GM markup thing is all just honestly a bit convoluted. There hasn’t been a huge practical difference between GM people and Giveth people up to this point… and it sounds like the proposal is “now that Giveth has a token and funds, we should funnel some of this money into making GM a clearly defined for-profit serivce DAO”… but intending to be disguised as some “GM has always been this separate entity who has been doing us this huge favour by letting us use their resrouce, and eating the cost.”

When seriously… general magic is Griff & Marko branching off of Giveth & slowing building a new thing. Griff has been funding GM and most of Giveth out of pocket and eating the cost… it makes sense to refund Griff for the out-of-pocket payments he’s been making that have been supporting Giveth… and if we want to create some kind of proposal to support the growth of GM and fund it with Giveth… this is better framing, and to me, seems more accurate than this sort of gross creation of separation where now half our team become the “service provider” and the other half “the client”.

opps sorry, but yeah, “the client” in this case also consists of reputation DAO token holders who are part of the “service provider”. :roll_eyes:

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BrightID, DAppNode, Commons Stack and GM all spun out of Giveth and all have their own business strategies.

When seriously… general magic is Griff & Marko branching off of Giveth & slowing building a new thing.

This was out of necessity, Giveth had a very restrictive cultural payment structure that prevented me from paying contributors more than 19 DAI/hr… Marko would have likely had to leave if I couldn’t reward him fairly. I also never would have been able to hire and retain, Vitor, Fabio, Pedro, Kristofer, Vyvy-vi etc etc without the freedom to pay people under a normal for-profit structure.

Work in the past will be repaid at cost, no profit taken.

Work post token launch has to be done at a profit. That’s just the reality of the situation. The transparency might be annoying but if you want to work with a for profit DAO, you have to let them take profit.

Honestly, 50% mark up will be cheaper than what Giveth can find on the Open Market for these services from what I can find. But I will work with Freshelle to make forum posts that discuss each of these costs.

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None of this changes the basic facts that much of our “core team” at Giveth is actually paid (or a lead of) by general magic… Marko, Mitch, Freshelle, Griff, not sure about others but I think it wouldn’t be unreasonable for us to mint nrGIV tokens to contributors like Pedro, Fabio, Vitor, Ann, or Ahmad if they contribute actively in the next months.

So now (and likely moreso later) a large part of “giveth governance power” over this decision belongs to people with a clear conflict of interest.

Where the real conflict arises from the notion of trying to create benefits and profits for one part of a team, at the expense of the other part… when we are all really just the same family.

I really don’t like the framing. I really don’t like the proposal, and in the case of “giveth supporting general magic” I strongly believe it makes more sense to support the growth of GM as a separate proposal… and not embed this as an awkward and contentious part of “contributor payments”.

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