# team circles in coordinape | epoch 14

> this doc provides an overview of the current state of compensation at yearn finance and proposed experimentation and discovery plans during the first half of 2022 to increase contributor satisfaction and engagement.

## :anchor: current state
Yearn contributors use Coordinape to distribute the DAO community grants budget. Each Coordinape member has a set quantity of “allocation points” or GIVE which they can distribute to other members who they worked with during a given month. Members with the most interactions and allocations receive weighted portions of the grants budget.

Coordinape allows each contributor to allocate tokens to those they think bring value, in turn moving decision-making powers away from any centralized unit and onto a network of autonomous and self-managed teams. For most contributors, DAO work is a part-time gig and Coordinape is an effective means of decentralizing grants payments for work completed.

**Today at yearn, we have one Coordinape circle for contributors.** As the number of contributors continues to grow, it has become more difficult to:
1- understand what contributors have been working on
2- ensure fair distribution of tokens across all contributors based on their work during the epoch.

> Dunbar’s number (the theory that most humans struggle to maintain relationships with more than 150 individuals at once) is slowly coming into play.

Coordinape relies on contributors knowing what others have done. With a group of 30 contributors, it is easy to know who has done what and reward them accordingly. With bigger groups however, this method runs the risk of breaking down.

When group size increases, a single circle could turn into a popularity contest or be influenced by familiarity bias. Contributors may allocate GIVE because they recognize certain contributors from the chats, **rather than allocating GIVE based on their output**.

### Epoch 13
* 126 participants
* 41 full-timers who opted out of receiving GIVE
* 24 people were inactive (did not allocate and/or receive GIVE)
* 61 contributors eligible for GIVE
* Average GIVE received 140

### Epoch 12

We increased the total budget from 75k to 90K. 64 contributors recieved GIVE during epoch 12. GIVE allocation ranged from 547 to 3 GIVE. The average GIVE received was 63.6 and the median was 34 GIVE.


### Pain points

Compensation at yearn is not perfect. As yearn continues to evolve and grow, new opportunities surface to refine our compensation model. In the past few weeks, many contributors have shared feedback regarding current pain points within the current Coordinape compensation model. Some of these pain points center around structural and process gaps, others around a lack of transparency and effective tooling and information, and some center around flaws that exist within coordinape.

Key Themes and Observations:

- Some contributors have roles that are more visibile than others and in turn receive more GIVE. *Having a visibile role does not inherently mean you create more value than those who work on one small team/repo*
- Some contributors who have not worked during an epoch will still receive GIVE because they are part of the circle.
- Some contributors will give out tokens to people even if they have not worked closely with them. *In the last epoch over 5 people received GIVE that did not work at all during that month.*
- There is ambiguity regarding the amount a contributor will receive at the end of the month. some people have reported working roughly the same amount of hours on the same projects and receiving different amounts of GIVE
- Paying in YFI or crypto can be an issue for some participants.
- There is a lack of clarity regarding different roles at yearn.

### :boy: Overheard...direct feedback from contributors

I've compiled some examples of feedback we have received in the last 3 months that are representative of the pain points described above.

"*i received the second highest amount of GIVE in an epoch and it was still not commesurate with what i would be getting paid in the market*"

"*the contributor circle is too big and it has a ton of different roles making it hard to compare contributions. For example, you can't compare the contribution of a developer to that a community manager*"

"*a week is too much time for allocations*"

" *a week is not enough time, why not open it the entire month*"

"" *Coordinape should only be for part-timers or people that are just starting and are showing their work. Once we realize their value we switch them to consistent grants*"

"*..i found it hard to know how much i would be getting from Coordinape.* "

"*there is no incentive to work more with the way GIVES are distributed right now. Its not the work that you do that determines the GIVE you get but the people you know or the people that know your work. Some people contribute more and get less and vice versa*"

"*some of our repos are low profile meaning if I work on them i wont see as much GIVE as I would working on a repo that gets a lot of eyeballs* "

"*Coordinape works great for people that are part-time and contribute a few hours a week. its a good way of saying thank you to people we work with and acknowledging their work*"

"*there is no way for me to capture accurate feedback on my work. some people dont fill out the feedback section in coordinape so i dont have a way to improve*"

## :microscope: experimentation plans
Contributing at a DAO can be a rewarding and fulfilling experience, and at times a frustrating one bespeckled with imperfections.

Working through these challenges together, however, is what makes our community resilient and allows us to continuously usher in improvements. The yearn community does not win if contributors receive less than the value they each create. And contributors at yearn ultimately don’t win if they receive more than the value they create.

To improve the contributor experience, we will be launching a few experiments in the coming months to modify coordinape to test if these changes resolves the pain points experienced by contributors.

Ultimately,through these experiements and dialogue, we will answer the following questions:

1. Who should be added to Coordinape?
2. Should we have one big circle or several?
3. How many GIVE should we start with?
4. How should tokens be allocated across the circles should we choose to implement more than one?
5. How do contributors know who has done what?
6. Does Coordinape promote cronyism?
7. Can DAOs pay full-time contributors using Coordinape?

### [PROPOSAL] experimentation plans in epoch 14

1. Add team-specific tags in coordinape. Each contributor will select the team (s) they contributed to.
2. Inactive coordinape members will be purged. If you have not received or given GIVE for 2 epochs you will be removed.
3. Vouching guidelines will be established and shared.
4. Best practices around Coordinape allocation will be developed and shared.
5. Individuals interested in FT roles should submit a proposal to yPeople/yRecruiting.
6. Solicit feedback from the yearn community of contributors on how to improve the contributor experience. Rapidly implement changes to address feedback.

We will run a survey after GIVE distribution in epoch 14 to assess contributor satisfaction with comp post-implementing changes above.

FAQ:
-
- **What's next?** For yearn to continue to grow and thrive, we need sustainable frameworks and systems that support contributors. This will not take place overnight, but requires experimenation, continous learning, proactive knowledge sharing to lead to better processes. Outside of compensation we have identified other pain points that get in the way of contibutor fulfillment, activations, engagement and contribution. We are working through these separately. The yPeople team is driving this effort. Additional pain points include: 1- ideas get proposed but there is minimal execution 2- lack of clarity regarding DAO projects, priorities, roadmap 3- lack of consistency in onboarding among others.
Coordinape team is working on releasing a feature that will allow for 'salaries' or pre-determined grant payments. We plan to test this feature at yearn once it is ready for prod
- **Why do doers and core contributors have different comp plans?** Doers have a different set of responsibilities, role, and expectations which warrants an adjusted comp plan.

- **What alternative solutions were discussed?**
- Provide team leads with the ability to send extra GIVE to address discrepancies. We disliked this approach bc it create a pseudo-managerial role instead of decentralizing decision-making.
- Create a team tag instead of net-new circles. Each team would get a percentage of the overall budget after a voting process. If someone has more than one tag, they will get an averaged modifier over their multiple teams. This solution would allow us to keep one community circle but still pursue a domain/hub approach. You would still be able to give to anyone but admins would need to make sure that each individauls selects the right tags. Example: (https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1qMVgCX2GQYLLgh30WChKma4-GIXbezmVEDr4EXBgLV8/edit?usp=sharing) . Cons of this approach include a lot of admin overhead and still having everyone in one circle.

- **What if I contribute to more than one hub?** You will sign up for the hubs you actually worked on and your GIVE will be weighted accordingly.

- **How will you validate that the people in a hub actually belong there?** Each hub will have a 'hub lead' that will approve people that request to join the hub. They will verify that the person actually contributed to that hub during that epoch.

- **Why not give everyone a grant?** Coordinape allows for decentralized payroll that allows one's peers to

- **How is the budget for each hub decided?** We will use a Coordinape circle to vote on the amount of GIVE each hub should get. We will average the results to determine the % of budget each team should get.

- **How is this different from the current way where we select who is on our team?** Today, people select everyone they've worked with or interacted with as part of their team and give GIVE accordingly. This dilutes the GIVE allocated.

- **How will we know if the experiment was a success?** We will create a survey following the end of the experiment and assess the distribution of GIVE pre and post the experiment.

### Appendix: Experiment A

> This experiment has been moved to the appendix following contributor feedback.
Experiment A: Adding team/domain circles in Coordinape

Most teams at yearn have formed organically to support a product, build new toolsets, advance the DAO, or address key opportunities. Some teams are highly multi-disciplinary in nature, while others are laser-focused on a set capability. With that being said, yearn teams to fall in one of four domains or hubs-- 1) engineering and development, 2) marketing and growth, 3) people and governance, and lastly 4) the strategists.


### Engineering and Development Hub
> Includes the following YFI teams and working groups:
- Yearn Watch
- Infra
- Mechs
- Web
- Support
- Protocol
- Web Design
- Data
- Product
- Yearn Vision
- Exporter
- B2B Integrations

#### People
- Onboarding
- Contributor Evangelism

#### Governance
- yBudget
- yTreasury
- Stewards
- yTransparency

#### Marketing and Growth
- R&D
- Marketing
- partnerships
- YFI Story
- Branding
- Docs
- Events
- Translations

*Strategists have their own distinct compensation model. We have excluded them from this experiement but will re-visit how to incorporate strategists after we complete this first experiment. *

| Steps | Workstream | Owner | Timeline |
| ----- | ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- | -------------------------------------------------------------- | --- |
| 1 | Add circles to coordinape for each yearn capability/hubs. | Coordinape Admin | Pre-Epoch 14 |
| 2 | Vote to determine the % of the total budget each hub will receive. | All contributors. Will take place through a Coordinape circle. | Pre-Epoch 14 |
| 3 | Each contributor will opt-in to the hub circle where they contributed. *You can opt-in to more than one circle but your GIVE will be adjusted/weighted.* | Contributors | During epoch allocation period |
| 4 | Gather quantiative and qualitative feedback to assess if this adjustment resulted in a more 'fair' and 'accurate' GIVE allocation. | Contributor comp working group leads |After the end of epoch 14 |

***The total grant amount will also be adjusted based on the total number of contributors at the start of epoch 14***.

####
:::info
:pushpin: For those contributing full-time we will continue to support one-off and/or recrurring grants outside of coordinape.
:::