Thanks for putting this proposal together @mitch
I like the phased approach and the timelines.
@santigs I too am interested in participating as a CA 
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This is a really great post @mitch I definitely agree that a lot of finer information gets missed and over spending happens when accounting is done as a whole DAO.
I’m excited to see how Coda will bring more transparency to accounting. I’m curious, how will salaries be hidden during the accounting process?
Just guessing here: Only contributor reported hours only be shown. Then the working group will discern if the output, hours, and budget correlate.
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salaries will continue to be hidden - hours entered into Coda will be used to make salary calculations: CAs will see salary cost at group level and not on an individual basis.
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Wow, okay this is awesome! It looks like we’re moving into very significant milestone for affecient and transparent treasury managment. Your posts are always so organized and clear. Thanks for your awesome job! @mitch
The only thing which is unclear to me, since I am an hourly contributor and I am working withing specified hourly range. But together with my growth within the organization, therefore more roles and/or responsibilies bring more time spent…For example I am already seeing that my hours are getting higher after my last buddy review (which happens once in 3 months)…so potentially I will be adjusting the scale of my hourly monthly contributions my next buddy call again and asking for the dao approval…with all that said, how much of a negative aspect it can play in this model? Should I just stick to what’s in my role proposal and cut the hours down or what’s the right approach without having any radical effect on thegroup budget? Any thoughts on this?
Or you think it would make sense to move into a fixed rate and move away from hourly contribution in cases like mine? Like after passing aome specific hours line?!
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Thanks for pointing this out @NikolaCreatrix! For now, I believe it’s good practice to update your RP reflecting actual/estimated hours worked. Then discussing with the CA the additional work commitment which leads to increasing the budget. If the budget is not enough, then maybe the circle will discuss on how to find additional revenue streams.
By the time you think your hours are stable for the next 3-6 months and beyond, then moving to a fixed contract would be nice.
To @freshelle 's point - I think overall we need to create more consent and boundaries for the way we spend DAO funds.
Rather than simply working more and in effect, increasing the amount you charge the DAO there is a negotiation process that will happen that is currently not happening. We should take into consideration when a contributor wants to contribute more a few things:
- Can we afford it? (as a DAO/Circle/WG)
- How much do we value the contributors work?
- How much do we value this contributor?
- Is the extra work the contributor wants to take on aligned with the DAO/Circle/WG’s mission?
Right now, I can see a trend emerging among contributors where they simply generate/find more work, or go off on tangental projects. Sometimes these tangental projects bear fruit but just as often they don’t. Without any consent or oversight of how contributors are spending their time and thus charging the DAO for the time, we end up creating costly inefficiencies.
To clarify, this is in no way a comment or slight towards the work you do @NikolaCreatrix but I’m just framing one of the problems we hope to solve in this process. Creating a process that establishes consent, boundaries and negotiation avenues regarding how we spend our money.
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@mitch thanks, I see this gap too…I do agree with you on all of those points 100%
nobody ever asks these questions… also, nobody knows how much everybody costs.
And I really don’t like the fact that very few core individuals get to decide on who will and who will not stay in the organization, of course it makes sense if one person is holding the treasury…which in fact is their own private pocket. So yes, I am glad that this model is changing, and this pressure will disperse amongst wg stewards who will be forced to ask these questions the whole group…it will mean that contributors will have to spend more time thinking about who’s work is worth what, and that’s great step towards decentralization. But also…how do we measure the value that one contributor brings.
However, I am still not sure how to go about my own case. I want for things to be fair…I kind of thought that the process of pushing the raised amount of hours through the dao vote should be the value measure metric. But maybe we want to say - hey no raising amount of hours during bear market.
Also, personally, I am getting to a point, after 1 year where I feel like I can confidently show up to more tasks. But how do I know I can actually do it and not overcharge the DAO. And am I actually bringing enough value in my work?! I guess so, people are giving me really great feedback. But still I have a feeling of uncertainty…
Anyways, I’m going little wild here with all my thoughts.
Basically, I just want to know what to do…
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The biggest challenge I see in phase 1 - and like @NikolaCreatrix’s concern, this comes from my personal perspective - is when a contributor contributes heavily accross mutiple circles.
- Will we be using the hourly reports in coda to basically take proportion’s of an individual’s salary and split it accross WGs?
- Who will be giving the salary data to the CA’s? Will this be @freshelle on a 1st layer accounting of accounting before that info is passed of circles?
Also, I’m concerned with the process for electing CAs. We need to consider both the person’s willingness and also their abilty to perform effective accounting. We may also need to have @freshelle play the role of like “lead accountant” who coordinates with the CAs and make everyone is following the same processes… eventually perhaps creating clear documentation aorund these processes so that after 6 months the role can be passed off effectively.
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Also, talking about this with @griff - not sure that even breaking this up into circles is the best idea. The cirlces are so fluid… the scope of work under each so broad and unclear.
If a major function of this proposals is so that individual groups can request funds from the DAO for work, instead of budget just being decided in a centralized way… we should have budget request coming from individual product teams… not circles.
It’s a lot easier to say “I want funds to build QF” than it is to say “I want funds because we’re developing a bunch of unrelated things.”
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I agree we have to break costs deeper than just circles or the data will not offer us enough information to monitor what we intend to see.
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Very good points @karmaticacid - I’m starting to come around to the product team idea…
@MoeNick I know has been very keen on this for well over a year now
I think it will help us keep better track of contributors making them beholden to specific product team and leave less room for floaters to sort of wander about - I think it will help also developers and designers have clarity on who to ask for coordination and who is in charge of things like copy changes or UX suggestions.
I’m inclined to stick to my guns on phase 1 - meaning at least we can get into the habit of budgeting and provide some more public info to the DAO about how we spend our funds on a monthly basis.
I would envision in the meantime we can kick start a product team formation process, which tbh will take some time do it right. I also want to research into how Gitcoin did their transition process and maybe we can take some tips out of their playbook.
I’ll add this to come back to on our next gov call (March 13) with some ideas and from there we can maybe find a more agreeable process for the subsequent phases.
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Yes I agree we have to start from somewhere. subDAO based on products is the goal I guess but with the current working structure we have, I doubt we could make it until we practice for 6 months. I mean every interaction and goal should change if we want to be product-based, from defining working groups, methods of managing, HR and resources management and their policy and also salaries. It’s late but possible.
I suggest we adopt “cost center” accounting policies in Giveth, the goal is to know how much income/cost we have for a specific product.
Then if we have data, for managing the funds and accounting we can delegate to teams, but without the data, I can’t see any benefit.
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Yes, I agree @MoeNick - we have to start working with the data to first understand what the drivers are.
Product-based ‘cost centres’ make sense here as our DAO does not have profit as a measure of success. Our measures are based on value that brings traffic to our platform, increased donations and product adoption ie which products and which supporting activities contribute to this?
We will need some time to understand how to apportion costs that currently ‘sit’ in Community and Governance Circles. If we define ‘products’ at the start of this new accounting process, each circle accountant can begin to identify costs that fit easily into a product ‘box’ and those that don’t, which can be brought forward for discussion at the end of each month.
We can then decide whether we should group practical activities and functions together and organise our working groups in a different way. However, I can see a model that maintains the operational separation of devs and support activities with an overlay of cost allocations to products.
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Giving consideration to our support functions - there are operational activities that cannot be easily incorporated into a purely product costing model, for example, how do we allocate costs of governance & DAO to a product? Do we then create an ‘ops/support’ cost center?
Okay folks! Time for a mighty 
update based on the conversations we’ve been having over the last 10 days.
I would like to suggest we dramatically pivot this proposal and aim ourselves towards a near total reconfiguration of our current Circle/Working Group system. One of the main goals of the following is to reform many of our current working groups around product teams and provide a system of financial accountability more granular and more expedient than the proposed Circles Accounting transition proposed above.
I’ve taken the time to consult with many people who have helped me draft this first step forward - Thank you to @clara_gr @freshelle @Griff @karmaticacid @MoeNick for your valuable inputs. I’ve also taken the time to research how others are DAOing it including Aragon, Bankless, Gitcoin and Shapeshift to understand good practices. 
Where would we start?
The first and critical piece of this puzzle is finding out what the new Working Groups are and what existing Working Groups we should keep. I hope to lead a session sometime next week or the week after with many of you to collectively work through this.
These decisions should eventually coalesce into a Working Group Proposal (WGP) which will be the public facing document for reference on WG info and budgeting. These WGPs should include:
- Who is the WG lead?
- Who is in the Working Group, who are your teammates?
- What is the mission or high level goal of the Working Group as it relates to Giveth?
- What is your estimated budget and over what time period will this budget be for? (Recommend working in 3-6 month epochs, but no longer than 9 months)
- What are you going to deliver or what are your concrete goals within that time period?
I would say once we feel good about this proposal, or a later iteration after advice, we set a deadline of 3 months for us to reorganize WGs, identify leaders, goals, teammates and budget, and finally to approve first WGPs.
What else?
Consider how far reaching this re-organization is we would need to adjust the following things to match:
- Contributor role proposals
- Weekly WG calls
- Forum categories
- Time reporting categories (Coda)
- Discord channels
Not a small feat for a DAO, but I think if we can get behind this in principal, we can all come together and get 'er done!
We’ll also need to sort out our recurring subscription and services and figure out how and where to account for those costs. Ideally they are attributed under a WG and incorporated into their budgets.
Intended Outcomes
Some short points on what I hope are the outcomes of this intense exercise:
- Most contributors are still doing the work they were doing before, however contributors know who to coordinate with for certain skill roles (i.e. developers, designers, writers) relating to the product team they are on.
- The DAO has a bird’s eye view on where money is being spent, and can analyze and make decisions to fund (or not fund) WGs.
- WGs can analyze and make decisions on allocating (or not allocating) their budget to contributors.
- WGs have clear goals that underpin the funding they are asking for.
- Have a clear process for the community/contributors to propose new products/WGs.
I want to lead a Working Group! How would this work?
We can imagine firing up a WG would roughly follow this thought process:
-
What’s your working group? Where does it provide value for Giveth? What’s the high-level mission/goal?
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Got that part figured out? Great. Start building your team - what skills do you need to live up to your mission or meet your goal?
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Okay, so you have some people who you want to be on your team. The next part is understanding your budget. You’ll need to identify what their monthly time commitment will be and get salary data from the Governance team, probably @freshelle will be the one. Yes, WG leads will get salary data for contributors to budget effectively.
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Team looks stronk. Budget looks reasonable. Now work with your team to unwind the rest - what are your deliverables? What will be your measurable goals and how long will it take to achieve them?
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Write it all down concretely and submit it via the forum for advice.
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Ratify via Snapshot vote.
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BUIDL
I’m a Giveth contributor already! How do I plug in?
This probably applies to most of you. I can imagine this is how it would play out in practice:
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Find a working group that you can apply your skills to, discuss with the lead and negotiate your tasks and your monthly time commitment.
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Allow the lead time to consider what you bring to the table and their budget restrictions.
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If approved, work with the lead on building the deliverables or goals for their budgeted epoch.
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Update your role proposal.
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BUIDL
Some example scenarios in Giveth
WG as a product team
WG as a product team
Let’s say we’re building something like GIVfi. I know I want to lead this WG already and I’ll need a couple things to kick it off the research phase, a solidity developer, a DeFi researcher and the lead (myself).
So I talk to Kurt and Griff. Kurt commits 40 hours monthly and Griff commits 30 hours monthly.
Based on their wage info provided from Governance I can estimate those two plus myself we’ll spend $18k monthly - This initial research phase will take 3 months - so I need $54k as my budget.
Okay, what are my goals for GIVfi? Deliver a revenue stream for Giveth, and projects using the power of DeFi.
What I’m going to deliver in 3 months? We’ll have an MVP spec to begin building GIVfi - ready for design and development.
If that passes and we meet our goals then we move to phase 2 - BUILD, which I will draft another budget proposal for.
This one I know I’ll need a designer, a front-end developer , a back-end developer, a solidity developer and maybe a writer for doing copy - maybe we shoot for 6 months to build and from here the process moves along with budgeting, deliverables, advice and approval.
If it all goes well then the last phase might be - LAUNCH - I might need all the people above plus some extras like comms and community support for just 1 month to get it out the door. Perhaps instead of a UX designer I need a graphics guy so I swap out a Tosin for a Rodri to get comms banners and graphics done for launch.
Once GIVfi is launched, the product team can dissolve and we can move onto the next thing. Ownership and maintenance is transitioned to a core operation like the platform team, which can coordinate the release plan.
WG as a core operation
WG as a core operation
A core operation could be defined as something essential to the DAOs functioning and has no completion date, it goes on as long as Giveth does. This could be things like community support, platform maintenance or security.
MoeNick for example recognizes the need to hold down the fort on the dapp and believes he is the best person to lead the effort. He’ll need commitments from developers, designers, QA testers and copywriters. So he gets Amin, Cherik, Mateo, Alireza, Ramin, Carlos, Mohammad, MaryJaf, Mo, Lauren and Mitch and a rough time commitment from them. He estimates we’ll spend $50k monthly on salaries for dapp maintenance
He also knows we have lots of services to account for - maybe segment, the graph, autopilot and probably many others - but it comes out to $5k for monthly services.
The high-level goal of the platform is of course be the place where the action happens, where donations are made, projects are created and people interact with the GIVeconomy products that Lauren and her team delivered last year.
He is planning for a 6 month epoch, bringing the total epoch budget to $330k.
He discusses with his team and proposes to deliver the following in 6 months:
- resolve technical debt of the impact-graph
- notification center improvements
- redesign of the GIVfarm page
- release plan for GIVfi once Mitch is ready to hand it off
- sub-graph migration
- maintain the dapp and fix bugs
The proposal passes, MoeNick and his team know their goals for the month, they never really stopped working in the meantime but they have the backing of the DAO to know what they need to get done and by when.
At the beginning of month 5 MoeNick should prepare his next budget proposal, reflect on what’s been accomplished or what hasn’t been, and draft an update for the DAO and his next budget estimation, team changes and deliverables.
Oh also, after getting team feedback, MoeNick concludes that Mitch was a total laggard and didn’t really provide a justifiable value to the platform team. So after a conversation with Mitch, maybe facilitated by Gravity, he is not included in the next WG proposal. Alternatively maybe MoeNick could decide to keep him on, but at a reduced monthly time commitment.
Conclude
This is a lot of new things to process and I tried my best to provide a clear way forward and some practical examples for us to imagine. As mentioned, following positive advice on this proposal I would like to facilitate a call with as many of you as possible to work out the next steps on reforming Working Groups.
Looking forward to your valuable advice and feedback! 
Temp Check! 
- Yes! Let’s try it out
- Sort of… I have comments or concerns
- No, we should do something else.
- No, we should stick to the original plan above.
- Abstain
0 voters
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Hey @mitch,
I think this is a great initiative and I look forward to the meeting!
A few things I would like to discuss are:
- The overall “budget” of Giveth across the different working groups including our burn rate.
- Incorporating “revenue streams” into Giveth as a whole and then drilling down into working groups where applicable, which could be partnerships, liquidity programs, grants, hackathons, fundraising, NFT sales, services or products we offer etc. The point of this is for working groups to not just think about the costs they would incur, but also how they can support sustainability.
If we have 1 and 2 , we can essentially make a P&L sheet for Giveth (not a traditional business P&L but a web3 DAO version)
- So from what I understand, you’re thinking that there would be permanent core working groups (maybe like Comms or HR for shared services) and then temporary or project based working groups for one off initiatives (like the GIVfi example you gave)? So there maybe several product or project based working groups working side by side simultaneously and then they would dissolve when a project is completed?
I guess for that point we should make it clear what the criteria is for when a project should spin off into a WG versus when it is something done within a core WG.
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Thanks @mitch for putting this very detailed proposal! It’s a yes from me, looking forward to discuss further in the meeting.
Thanks for jumping in Ahmad! I’ll respond to your points in order:
- Yes, the overall budget will be important - we know already how much we’re spending right now, but how much should we spending is an important question. We’ll know a better idea of how much working groups are spending once we know what the working groups are and if they can propose a budget.
That being said, setting a max budget we can agree upon will be important for working group leaders to move forward.
- Revenue streams I think is a big topic and I would like to leave it out of at least this first session since I think its out of scope of Working Group formation and budgeting, It’s too much to cover in just 90 mins. I will point to these articles where I’ve tried to push forward on revenue streams in the past:
Revenue Streams, Platform Fees, and GIVfi v0.1
DAO Treasury Management for Giveth Multisigs
Maybe this can help us brainstorm for the future and prioritize!
- Yes, exactly. Some things in Giveth don’t have a specific end goal, but run perpetually and should have goals, budgeting etc… that reflect that.
Good point on having clear criteria, I think it’s something the WG will have to be clear about when it commences, what the terms are and what they consider their “completion metrics”. Whatever we decide for criteria it will be a balancing act of accountability vs. efficiency.
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