# Making sense of Holacracy and Bounties

Let's review building blocks of Holacracy starting from the very beginning.

## The Purpose

Group of people (**Partners**) gather and decide on a shared goal they want to work on together. This goal becomes a purpose of the organization (**Purpose of the Super Circle**).

It is like declaring "We all here together because we care about the thing we've written as the Purpose and we want to make it reality".

## Expectations instead of prescriptions

Ok, we've agreed on where we are moving to. Now what?

To move toward the Purpose a certain activities (Actions) need to be performed. Holacracy doesn't enforce who must be doing what. However, it is important for partners to agree on a set of expectations about what is _needed_ to be done on ongoing basis to move toward the purpose.

> In Holacracy, everyone is doing what they think is best, but they aren’t only doing that. They are also using governance as a shared playbook of expectations and responsibilities.

Enter Roles and Projects.

Role definition consists of a purpose, accountabilities (ongoing activities) and domains. The Roles set expectations across all the Partners, so that if you hold a Role with some accountabilities:

- you are expected to actively consider doing it;
- others can expect you take on work based on it;

The actual work Role is doing is captured as Next-Actions, which may be seen as a good-old tasks.

## Bounties for everyone

In LeapDAO, we use bounty system to reward task completion. I won't go into details about the system here, it is not much different from the traditional bounty system. Most notable difference is the authority of the bounty creator: we allow everyone to propose a bounty to be funded by one of our multisig's as long as it is "aligned with organization's purpose".

## Narrowing the focus

"Aligned with organization's purpose"? This part is not particularily helpful for bounties — organization's purpose is not concrete enough for that.

However, the help is right under your nose.

The purpose of the Holacracy constitution is to govern the organization and its Roles, not the [people](https://medium.com/@tealdog/understanding-role-and-soul-in-holacracy-7d7e87a1f708) within it. So if people are not working out of their Roles, they are essentially working outside of the Holacracy organization. It may be a sign of gaps in governance or, what's worse, pursuing something else instead of organization's purpose. In any case, working out of the Roles benefits both people and organization.

## Role Bounties to the rescue

So you are expected to work on things out of your Roles and you still want to get rewarded for pushing the organization further. Easy. Start creating bounties for your Next-Actions or Projects. Those are created out of the Role and each Role has it's own purpose which is concrete enough.

Whenever you want to create a bounty, ask yourself "Out of which Role I want to create this bounty?" or better yet try getting a habit of thinking in terms of your Roles and Next-Action and attaching bounties to existing Next-Actions.