Week 4

Mon 20th Jan - Sun 26th Jan 2025

Thursday 23rd January 2025

Governance Workgroup

Narrative:

Criteria for core contributors:

In the last round, there was room for self-nomination and nomination by others, for people that didn't reach the criteria for getting the core contributor role.

The meeting noted Tevo's comments in the GovWG Discord channel about the rewards threshold and participation threshold: "Some of the downsides come because the rewards are more centralised to current core contributors and seems high earners are earning even more funds compared to last quarter, leaving out less tasks for people to reach 1000 AGIX threshold. In addition the core contributor list by rewards also affected by the price changes. The higher the AGIX price goes, the harder is to reach the threshold. However, the majority of renominated members are due to not attending enough meetings or not being recognized. From next quarter if people interested we can double down on Process Guild service to import Zoom participation to Treasury Manager, for now I do not know if we have funds for that. we definitely have the capability (even if still semi-automated)".

and from Vani: "But interestingly, this means we have 60 core contributors this time - and (what I am pretty sure is) a record 20% having been manually nominated. Hmmm... does this suggest we need to have a look at the criteria? Or are the criteria fine, and these are just anomalies?"

Currently we use:

  1. Time-based recognition What does "participation" mean? Is it just for passively attending meetings, or for actually taking part? speaking, commenting in Chat, etc) Vani noted that for now it is based only on attendance - we can't easily capture who is contributing in a meeting, as it could be complex to capture who spoke or commented in Chat.

  2. Fund request recognition Clement noted that the criterion for having to be rewarded with at least 1000 AGIX in the last three months is not fair because of fluctuation in token price.

Peter noted that we don't require both time-based recognition and fund request recognition: it's either / or. However, the meeting still felt that the threshold should be in USD, not AGIX, to minimise the effects of token price fluctuation. After discussion, we agreed the threshold should be 300 USD a quarter.

Self nomination:

Should self-nomination continue to be possible, for people who have not reached the criteria for being a core contributor? Vani raised the issue of potential hostile capture if people can self-nominate, and suggested there should be no self-nomination; nominations should have to be made by an existing Core Contributor. Peter said he thinks it would usually be OK if a person is new and nominates themself. A poll was drawn and 11 people out of 14 said there should be no self nomination, but we agreed that we will revisit the decision after the end of Q1 2025.

Proposal for Attendance at the ETHiopia conference https://eth-iopia.xyz/ By Clement and Advanceameyaw They would like to be funded from Program reserves to represent sNET at this event. We noted that 2 focus groups have met to discuss criteria for using Reserves for event attendance - their recommendations have not yet been discussed or ratified, but this proposal meets most of them except a suggested budget limit per person. However, we also noted that this suggested limit may be too low - flights within Africa are very expensive, so a low budget limit could have the unintended effect of preventing African’s from attending African events The proposal was explained and we concluded that the proposal should be posted in Discord for all core contributors to consent or object, and the results should be discussed in the Open Governance meeting on Thurs 28th Jan.

Discussion Points:

  • Criteria to be core contributor

  • Self nomination

  • attendance at ETHiopia conference

Decision Items:

  • We agreed to change the fund request recognition criterion for becoming a Core Contributor from 1000 AGIX to 300 USD

    • [rationale] Because, given that many WGs set task prices in USD, having the threshold in AGIX makes it unfairly difficult to become a core contributor when token price is low.

    • [effect] mayAffectOtherPeople

  • We decided that for the coming Quarter (Q2 2025) self-nomination will no longer be possible

    • [opposing] we agreed that we will revisit this decision after the end of Q1 2025

    • [effect] mayAffectOtherPeople

Action Items:

  • [action] Vani to make a consent form for the proposal to attend the ETHiopia event in February, and post it in the "Decision To Be Made" Discord channel [assignee] CallyFromAuron [due] 28 January 2025 [status] todo

Keywords/tags:

  • topics covered: core contributors, participation, self-nomination, events attendance, Program reserves

  • emotions: long, slow, straightforward

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