On our end, no. We don’t usually have direct lines of communication w/ SPs pre-proposal, neither do we view it as our place to proactively take action anymore, unless we’re specifically asked to comment on a proposal pre-forum. We’re just voters–we evaluate the proposals on forum–by which time the binary decision point has already been given.
I don’t expect the HR pro to come in on day one and have a full understanding what the community wants. There’s 2 issues here. First, as before, what is the meaning of community? Even if we define the community to be just the Balancer Maxis, or all-Balancer, ex-Aura, it’s always difficult to achieve universal agreement. Second, arguably, this HR pro will be more helpful if they are giving us baseline information both w/ and w/o “community” input, meaning that I would expect them to provide the following data points:
- What is the salary for X individual w/ X duties at X hours/week at X location?
- What is the salary for the job that X individual will be taking on?
- What is the suggested salary for X individual at Balancer?
Both 1 and 2 are fairly objective data points that can be provided w/o significant pre-existing knowledge. Based on my personal experience w/ headhunters, this shouldn’t be a particularly effort-intensive task too, so we might not even need to onboard a full-time HR pro. The controversial part is 3, and that will naturally take time, sensitivity, reputation, familiarity with the ecosystem, and all the points you mentioned, to make a reasonable and respected call. The HR pro might not even be able to get to stage 3 no matter how much time they spend here. But just points 1 and 2 already seem to be helpful enough to settle most disagreements through hard data. It provides a valuable service to voters, and hopefully, we’ll be able to tone down the level of contention as well, since almost all disagreements these days either stem directly from budget proposals or the resulting side effects of implementation.
Similar versions of this idea have been kicked around internally for some time now, but there hasn’t been an opportune time to propose this. Here’s what we went through:
- Orb funding proposal went up, counter-proposals, lots of noise, peace, it didn’t really seem like proper time to add in a oh, by the way…
- Beets proposal went up, numbers went up, employees went up. The new Beets marketing budget is, from my recollection, quite a bit more than Orb’s former marketing budget in its last days. However, we justified it because Beets had been doing great work, so no action needed.
- OpCo proposal went up, big budgets, big numbers, yearly budget instead of quarterly. Trit messaged us asking us to refrain from commenting w/o backchanneling first, so we just left a generic message. [BIP-XXX] Funding Proposal for the Balancer OpCo - Year Two - #19 by Franklin
- Maxi budget went up, very reasonable, one outlier, we asked about that issue privately. Trit requested we move the discussion to forum, back and forth, and here we are.
- Just saw grants went up, haven’t looked at that in detail.
- Next up is integrations, haven’t seen it yet, from my understanding more big numbers here as well.
I haven’t done the math, but it seems like adding everything up, we haven’t saved anything from the Orb days except for Jeremy’s salary. Overall spend should be up, performance has yet to be seen. The birth of this present topic would be more congruent had it originated from within the OpCo proposal. But given its implement-or-else structure and Trit’s call to action, there was no opportunity to do so.
Quite frankly, it’s exhausting monitoring these things; it’s tiring just describing them. There needs to be a better way. Solutions should come from the Balancer side, internally. We shouldn’t be reliant on third parties like Aura to police the ecosystem. It’s a thankless job. Some sort of checks and balances system seems to be the correct direction, whether it’s a version of what Trit proposed above, or this HR pro, and between the two options on the table so far, it seems that the HR pro is less of a logistical layer, has better defined goals, is more direct and elegant, and being a public solution, has additional value in returning a semblance of normalcy to all of our relationships as well.
These points that James mentions are key:
We should all have this information instantly available all the time. (Perhaps this is something Xeonus could help out with.) Every SP should be required to analyze this information in detail, cite it in their BIP, as they propose budgets. Otherwise all we’re doing is pulling numbers out of a hat, knowing that if you submit the proposal late enough, no one will have time to respond. It simply makes no sense to be spending money as it comes in with no sense of tomorrow. It makes no sense to take increasingly risky bets in an unending pursuit of revenue to make up for budget shortfalls. We don’t do that in our personal lives, neither should we do it here.
Thanks for being open to the idea, brother. This HR pro approach falls neatly within Balancer’s current legal framework, and resolves many prior issues that came up quite neatly, in particular issues with individuals or the DAO itself meddling w/ the independence of SPs. Complexity and bureaucracy should also be reduced, because ideally, those ordinarily unaccustomed to HR duties within SPs will no longer need to spend as much time on certain HR related matters themselves if a professional is freely available to assist.