Proposal 11 - Retroactive Contributor Compensation

Overview

This proposal would compensate people who created value for the DAO from November 16th, 2023 to February 16th, 2024. The total amount would be $x USD, which translates into approximately y META. The main benefit of this proposal is signaling that the DAO rewards value-creation, which is what causes people to create value for the DAO.

Methodology

Retroactive compensation is all about signaling. Just as prices of goods signal to manufacturers what goods they should produce and salaries signal to college students what kind of career they should pursue, how much the Meta-DAO pays for different activities signals to current and prospective contributors what kind of things they should be doing for the DAO.

So before we decide on amounts, we must first ask ourselves: what do we want to signal? For example, do we want more people working on internal tooling or revenue-generating products? How valuable is 'spreading the virus'? What are the key metrics that we're optimizing for?

As discussed in An update on the first proposal, I view the core growth loop of the Meta-DAO as the below. People bootstrap the Meta-DAO's legitimacy by bequething their social capital (e.g., Anatoly signaling support), which is what causes people to invest their money, time, and energy into the Meta-DAO, which hopefully converts into financially-valuable outputs (i.e., revenue-generating products), which feeds back into legitimacy and completes the loop.

To me, the most important part of this cycle is converting time into revenue-generating products. Before the DAO accrues significant revenue, it is dependant the opinions of others to maintain its legitimacy. And those opinions tend to be ephemeral and based on non-fundamentals. So in my view, we should highly weight these activities when distributing compensation.

Here are some other things I think the DAO should signal:

• High-agency problem-solving > waiting for instructions
• Consistent contributions > contributing only when the DAO has the limelight
• Puts the Meta-DAO first > puts short-term interests first (although the goal is that there is no long-term divergence between your and the Meta-DAO's interests)
• Getting things done > effort

Contributions

In the vein of "getting things done > effort," I think it only makes sense for the DAO to compensate effort once it's been done, except for when the DAO gives an entrepreneur a budget to execute on a project. So we shouldn't pay for anything related to Vota yet since that's not live.

I'm now going to rattle off all the contributions we've had to the DAO, grouped by contributor:

• Bigz
  • Created Dune dashboard
  • reviewed conditional vault / autocrat logic prelaunch
  • wrote a research report / retrospective after proposal 0. and raised github issues on design considerations https://hackmd.io/@ansatz/metadao-prop0
• Proph3t
  • Wrote 3 blog posts: An update on proposal 1 (which set forth a strategy), The Story of Proposal 3 (which explained why manipulation is hard), and A Futard's Guide to the Meta-DAO (which clarified how to make contributions)
  • Migrated the autocrat program to a new version that allows the DAO to configure various parameters such as slots per proposal and TWAP expected value
  • Wrote the docs
  • Worked with 0xNallok to create a DAO LLC in the Marshall Islands for the Meta-DAO
  • General core administrative work, including directing people to the right places, responding to questions on Discord, giving announcements about the DAO
  • Drove the Marinade consultation
  • Coordinated the proposal 3/5 fundraise
• 0xNallok
  • Worked on UI
  • General core administrative work, including directing people to the right places and responding to questions on Discord
  • Helped create the DAO LLC
• Dodecahedr0x
  • When the original UI was crappy, created a new one
• Nicovrg
  • Organized both community calls
  • Common responder to questions on Discord
• Deanthemachine
  • Managed the Twitter with a medium-low degree of frequency
• Durden
  • Worked on the Marinade consultation
  • Consistent challenger / shaper of ideas in the Discord
• shio
  • Created the Flipside dashboard
• Donderper
  • Challenger / shaper of ideas in the Discord
• Pantera
  • Created credibility for the DAO by creating Proposal 7
• Marie
  • Re-designed and re-factored UI
• Unlayered
  • Created credibility for the DAO by having Proph3t on podcast before futarchy was popular
• r0bre
  • Reviewed the core protocol code
• agrippa
  • Reviewed the core protocol code
• sapph
  • Reviewed the core protocol code
• Ben
  • Created proposal 6