Proposal: Gitcoin DAO Budgeting Process Redesign

šŸ¤– DAO Governance and Vision
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Super appreciate all the additional comments, all! The general theme that Iā€™m hearing is that while folks are aligned on direction, to implement this all at once and fully replace the exisiting budgeting system feels that itā€™d be risky + hard to change-manage and evaluate. This is very fair - internally weā€™ve been looking at this for a few months so have had a bit more time to digest the various components, but even so, a more iterative process would also be easier on the team as we continue to remain focused on the upcoming protocol launch.

We discussed this during the CSDO strategy meeting earlier today, and the general direction weā€™re leaning towards is starting to experiment and iterate with the Workstream Health Cards (module 3 of this proposal). This component aims to resolve a number of tensions:

  • Workstreams essentially evaluating their own performance in the current system
  • Stewards lacking context required to provide meaningful feedback on performance
  • Lack of opportunities for Stewards to actively share feedback other than quarterly budgets (which tend to focus on costs rather than performance)
  • No way to easily track performance changes over time
  • OKRs being designed to be ā€œsafeā€ since they are used to measure performance

We discussed making a few amendments to this module (cadence/subset of Stewards participating etc) over the coming week, before sharing with Stewards during the Feb 1 Steward Council meeting. More will be shared here on the gov forum as this develops!

To respond to your concerns on this component @epowell101: this wonā€™t replace OKRs being used to create targets at workstream and individual levels, however performance will not be evaluated against these OKRs (this is a known problem when using OKRs for performance evaluation).

Yes! I shared the research that I conducted during the internal design process - happy to share here too if thereā€™s interest (or DM you with this). I was unable to find anything innovative happening in the web3 DAO budgeting space - all DAOs are using some form of the traditional budgeting process, with changes being in cadence/using tools other than OKRs for planning. I think a lot of DAOs look to Gitcoin for operational best practices.
However, there is plenty of innovation in budgets in ā€œweb2ā€ Teal organizations; the framework I took inspiration from for this process is Beyond Budgeting - you can find a lot of high-quality academic research on this framework if youā€™re interested in deep-diving.

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Not to rabbit hole - but the article on OKRs being problematic when tied to comp sort of says that specific tasks & self-set goals CAN be tied to comp reviews however you have to be careful in setting them & in reviewing them not to do so blindly - or in our language ā€˜autonomouslyā€™ or mindlessly. Otherwise, such OKRs can naturally lead to sandbagging and zero-sum behavior.

What Iā€™ve done in the past that I think worked is to have a section of OKRs & 360s that was tied to teamwork & taking initiative & other activities that are more about values & collaboration - the very sort of things that sandbagging & zero-sum behavior would cause low scores on. It isnā€™t perfect however it highlights the need to acknowledge the risk of errors of omission vs. commission dynamics.

TL;DR - I think that we are all looking to reduce the incentive to game the system. One approach is to have a section of the OKR that is explicitly about not gaming the system.

ALSO (added this a little later than the original response fwiw) - this may be conventional wisdom as opposed to a blinding insight - one approach is to tie any bonuses to the achievement of the overall organization as opposed to a particular department or workstream. For example, what Iā€™ve done in the past is that there is a pool set aside for organizational achievement and then use an algorithm such that everyoneā€™s bonus is graded based on overall organizational achievement AND then VPs have their bonuses based mostly on organizational achievement as opposed to the achievement just of their org. Those that are in the org / department / workstream are somewhat more closely tied to their org success.

There are always tensions as you know @safder - a classic one is MQLs - SQLs - deals - NPS.

Speaking of which NPS is sometimes useful as a means to encourage a focus on building superfans and references. We would build that in as well.

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