Week 18

Mon 28th Apr - Sun 4th May 2025

Thursday 1st May 2025

Governance Workgroup

• Type of meeting: Weekly

• Present: LordKizzy [facilitator], CallyFromAuron [documenter], LordKizzy, CallyFromAuron, PeterE, Tevo, Effiom, UKnowZork, LadyTempestt, AshleyDawn, Duke, hogantuso, Kateri

• Purpose: Regular weekly Open Governance meeting

Narrative:

Are "high-cost individuals" are earning too much? First, we noted that we could call them something less pejorative, such as "high-contributing individuals", since those who earn the most are generally those who contribute the most. We also noted that the reason that many of them contribute more seems to be that they feel some sense of accountability and an obligation to deliver something.

Key points raised:

• Are some "high earners" doing too many roles within workgroups, rather than tasks, with insufficient clarity on what work their role covers, or the time they are spending? Or roles that others are restricted from doing? If so, is this an abuse of the system?

• For some tasks, only a few people have the skills to do them, so others can't take those tasks on.

• Are "high contributing individuals" actually preventing anyone from taking tasks? Or if they stepped down, would we find that nobody else would step up? We noted that the high contributors often do try to share the work, but to no avail, as others are unwilling to take tasks - do we need to explore why that is?

• On the above, how can we hear from "lower earners" in the Program to find out whether they do feel blocked from taking on tasks? We might be making assumptions about how they experience things.

• If we implement a cap, it might not necessarily be on the total an individual can earn, but on how much an individual can earn from a particular workgroup, or how much a workgroup, or the program as a whole, can spend on a particular type of task.

• Should a cap on earnings only come into play when the AGIX exchange rate falls below a certain level?

• Would a cap on earnings create a cultiure of volunteerism, and an atmosphere where people don't feel able to expect to be paid something for the work they do? Would it be more ethical to just say "if you do the work, you should be paid for it"?

• Would an earnings cap encourage people to be more selective on the tasks they do - e.g. NOT do a task if it is taking too much time, or be more innovative with using tools and automations?

• Are there tasks being done just for the sake of getting paid, that do not really need to be done?

We didn't agree on implementing an earnings cap now - but we did agree it should be discussed further, and in the light of considering what kinds of tasks we reward, and whether a contribution is of value to the Ambassador Program or not. People shouldn't be rewarded simply for doing things, but for doing things that are deemed to be of value - and we noted that the community as a whole gets to determine what types of activities it considers to be of value and worth rewarding; so this is a conversation we need to have.

We discussed what we mean by "contribution" and "participation", and the difference between them. For example, we currently log "participation" by recording who was present in a meeting - but sitting passively in meetings is arguably not a meaningful "contribution". Can we reward more imaginatively? - for example, rewards for those who (whether verbally or in Chat) say something that makes others think, or those who contribute an opinion. And do we need a category for "attendance" rather than calling it either "contribution" OR "participation"? We also wondered about ways of recording micro-contributions that are too small to track but which can add up to a lot; contributions that are not about specific, finite tasks, but are more general; and particularly, voluntary contributions. We drew no firm conclusions on this.

We noted that some "higher earners" appear to be doing more hours for their rewards than others - but we realised this is partly due to how tasks are recorded on Dework. It emerged that not everyone logs "task points" (the equivalent of "hours spent") on Dework - sometimes because they don't know how long the person took and it would be too vague of an estimate to be of any value as data, and sometimes because they question whether "amount of time spent" is a valid measure. Some in the meeting felt that time-based tracking is meaningful, since it is a data-point that we can at least measure; others argued that there's too much potential for it to be misleading. For example,

• if someone is new, they take longer to do a task, but that doesn't make their contribution worth more;

• some people tend to do tasks that are more time-consuming, but that doesn't mean their contribution to the ecosystem is more valuable than that of people who tend to focus on quick tasks;

• if someone is by nature a slow/fast worker, should we pay them more/less?;

• neurodivergent people might do tasks quicker than average due to hyperfocus, or slower than average due to executive function issues, and it can feel exposing to be asked to assess your work as if you were working in a neurotypical way when you're not.

Overall it might not be helpful to scrutinise time, and it isn't always a very valid measure of how much someone is contributing. Task-based rather than time-based measurement might be better.

We also looked at the taxonomy that is used to categorise the type of task in the Treasury system. Different workgroups use different names for tasks that are actually similar, which can skew any assessment of what we are paying the most for and spending the most time on. We agreed that this taxonomy might need some looking at, but it's a big task, and we didn't determine who will have the capacity to do it.

Discussion Points:

• "High-cost individuals" - do we need to decentralise further on fund distribution? If so, should we do so by putting a cap on what an individual can earn?

• "Hourly rates", or the ratio of work to earnings - are some people doing more work for their money than others? How are we recording the time that people put in?

• The pros and cons of time-based tracking of work

• What do we mean by "contribution" and "participation", and is there a meaningful difference? What kinds of things does this community value as a "contribution", and what data can we capture about it?

• How do we classify tasks? What kind of work are we spending the most budget on?

Decision Items:

• We agreed that the issue of an earnings cap needs further discussion, and for now, we won't implement one

  • [rationale] Because we didn't finish the discussion, and we need more data on what kinds of tasks we are spending the most money on.

  • [effect] mayAffectOtherPeople

• We agreed that we need to hear from the lower earners in the program, to find out whether they are facing any obstacles to taking on more tasks, and whether they want to do so.

  • [rationale] Because we realised we don;t have much concrete information on how they feel.

  • [effect] mayAffectOtherPeople

• We agreed that we probably need to refine the taxonomy that is used to classify tasks in the Treasury system

  • [rationale] to make it clearer when different task labels are actually referring to the same task; and to enable us to get a clearer idea of what kinds of work we are spending money on.

  • [opposing] We didn't determine who will do this, or when.

  • [effect] mayAffectOtherPeople

• We agreed that it might be useful to encourage workgroups and individuals to use Dework to track the voluntary, unpaid work they're doing, even if it's just an estimate of the time spent on several micrro-tasks over a week.

  • [rationale] So that these contributions are at least recorded and made visible.

  • [opposing] Perhaps, if this kind of work is not part of a project budget or workgroup budget, maybe it shouldn't be recorded. And if someone doesn't want to record their voluntary time, that is fine.

  • [effect] mayAffectOtherPeople

Action Items:

• [action] Tevo will calculate some totals that we are spending across the Program for some of the different task categories, as a starting point (although we recognise that maybe they won't be very accurate due to discrepancies in the task-naming taxonomy) [assignee] Tevo [due] 30 May 2025 [status] todo

• [action] Peter and/or Vani will draft a Googleform to collect info from "lower-earning" people in the Program to find out why they don't do more paid tasks. Is it:

• because they don't want to,

• or they don't have time,

• or don't have skills,

• or do they feel they are being prevented by the "high earners"? [assignee] PeterE, CallyFromAuron [due] 30 May 2025 [status] todo

Keywords/tags:

• topics covered: time-based recognition, rewards, particpation, contribution, high earners, high contributors, task types, role-based or task-based, neurodivergence, hyperfocus, ADHD, volunteer work, Dework

• emotions: Discursive, No decisions made, wide-ranging, inconclusive, thoughtful, data-driven