Thank you @solarcurve @Mog @LuukDAO @Xeonus @Mkflow for your hard work on this proposal.
I see this as an important step toward a more decentralized and resilient future state for the Balancer ecosystem. A service provider model lets the flow of Balancer core contributions come from multiple independent entities that are incentive aligned and held accountable by the DAO. This proposal would set the conditions in place to allow this to occur via natural evolution.
There’s a tough trade-off here between wanting to protect the DAO from foreseeable negative scenarios and wanting to have a framework that’s generalizable and welcoming to diverse contributors. As a community we need to decide where we want to be on this spectrum.
If we think, as it appears the working group does, that there is more net value in flexibility and relying on the community to use discernment and take action to fix problems, then the existing proposal seems pretty good in achieving that. The more rules we introduce into this system, the more complexity they create.
If we think that more protective controls are needed, as I read @Mike_B and @zekraken’s comments to suggest, we could think about solutions that would mitigate the most crucial risks to the system.
There’s a catch 22 between ensuring that SP’s will deliver value for the money they receive and ensuring that SP’s that take the leap to assemble a team of contributors will be able to offer stable jobs to the people they recruit. We want to give contributors the opportunity to get off and running in solving important problems for the ecosystem.
I don’t see a way around paying SP’s in tranches, but perhaps a way that risk can be mitigated is by requiring SP’s who have no proven track record of delivering value to the Balancer community (or other communities that we know well) to first complete a trial project/period before they can be approved for a more significant project/funding amount.
I find this idea interesting and worth more discussion if those who are concerned about burn rate getting out of control see this as a useful solution.
A challenge I see on this point is that when one SP makes a proposal to do activity ‘X’, veBAL holders would not necessarily know if another SP intends to also propose to do ‘X’. So voters can have a bias toward the first proposal they see regarding ‘X’. Of course it’s unrealistic to have all SP’s who want to do ‘X’ to appear at once and make their proposals at the same time so that voters can make an apples to apples comparison. I don’t have any great ideas on this.