Edit

Week 46

Mon 10th Nov - Sun 16th Nov 2025

Thursday 13th November 2025

Governance Workgroup

Narrative:

TOPIC: What is "work", and how do we recognise and value the invisible work we all do

  1. What does this community value as "work"? What do we / don't we count, and why?

  • participating in governance, monthly WG updates, Town Hall, etc are invisible work

  • R&D decided to reward otherwise invisible work on Gov-Dash - the off-record discussions and async chats. A lot of this kind of work we don’t even track the time. Tevo did similar in Treasury

  • "Emotional Housework" is pretty much always invisible

  • Support for new members and mentoring to tasks

  • Small micro-efforts - reminding people about stuff, posting reminders, that makes stuff work. Too small to put on Dework

  • Attending WG calls could be work right - but is attendance the same as participation? Participation over presence

  • Filing out surveys or consent forms

  • Things that people pay out of their own pockets - tooling etc (and paying tourist dollar rate on credit card!) Need to update lists of what paid accounts the program has and what individuals are paying for.

  1. What's paid, and what's voluntary? How do we decide?

  • We prioritise tech tasks over admin, emotional, community - perhaps we shouldn't

  • Lots of WGs are doing operations with no rewards - keep outcomes and scope, but rewards have dropped 70% of our work became invisible... LatAm; Onboarding; Archives; all have done this But tracking it still, so can reward it if price goes back up

  • Should we pay everything? Does it change the nature of it (e.g. giving someone emotional support) if it becomes a transaction?

  1. How do we count and record the voluntary bits?

  • Vani shared demo “invisible work” log - could everyine do this?

  • Important to keep overheads minimal - if it takes more effort to log than to do, it's not good. So keep it as rough estimates

  • we do need to know WHAT it was

  • It’s all equivalent

  • For now, no need to check - it’s an honour system (or maybe check very clear outliers but that’s it). But maybe it becomes an issue if it feeds into a reputation system

  • We also shared Draft “invisible work hero” nomination form https://forms.gle/aujqzYv4SpkisPEt5

  • It's not competitive - anyone who is nominated gets added to Dework and gets task points.

  • People liked this idea.

  • Maybe nomination could eventually lead to a bonus??

  • Are there ways we can reward work other than money/tokens? To be further discussed

Discussion Points:

  • What does this community value as "work"? What do we / don;t we count, and why?

  • What's paid, and what's voluntary? How do we decide?

  • How do we count and record the voluntary bits?

Decision Items:

  • We will start by implemeting the "Invisible Work Hero" form

    • [rationale] feels like an interesting way to start capturing hidden work

    • [effect] mayAffectOtherPeople

  • We can also implement the spreadheet to record invisible work for those who want, although there was less enthusiasm for this

    • [effect] mayAffectOtherPeople

Action Items:

  • [action] Vani and Peter will be happy to add the results to Dework [assignee] CallyFromAuron, PeterE [due] 12 December 2025 [status] todo

Keywords/tags:

  • topics covered: invisible work, volunteer work, emotional housework, token price, we used collaborative documentation

  • emotions: thoughtful, Collaborative, Interesting, sad, surprising, realisation of how much we all do

PreviousWeek 45NextWeek 47

Last updated