That’s great to hear! Let’s find a time to set up a call with the t0wn team as soon as we get our pitch deck finalized. We’d be very interested to learn more about basinDAO! You can also feel free to add me in discord: Da3vid#1983
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I echo what @Da3vid said above. Very excited to hear about your interest and would love to set a time to connect!
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I like the trigger pre stage-two commencement.
Overall I’m in favor of this project.
That said, no startup can afford $100/hr for the core team. That would be a rate to put most startups directly into insolvency immediately and imho CityDAO is no different, CIP-100, t0wn and any other projects too. Again, imho, $100/hr is at twice too much for a startup project. $50/hr for a founder with a bonus upon tail end 100% completion of the project with successful outcome would be more appropriate.
It’ll be up to ppl to decide on the rates but I suggest we push for a more conservative budget for all projects when it comes to compensations.
Moving forward, once the Stage-2 trigger kicks in, there’s some really interesting discussions/media work that’ll kick in which I’m excited to engage with.
Oh ya, re your Stage One action of Twitter Spaces; we still need @scottfits to give us access to host Twitter Spaces. I’ll just keep plugging this in wherever I can until it happens. I still don’t know what the holdup is, no word whatsoever has come in to me on that front. I’ve had to stop/cancel more than one Twitter Space so far cuz of this.
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agree - the retroactive comp and $100 / hour comp is pretty steep. let’s be frugal
Thank you @MemeBrains and @scottfits for your comments.
Totally happy to axe the retroactive comp, it’s a fair ask.
On the hourly comp, why should we be treated any differently than the CIP 100 folks? Scott, are you, as an advisor on that project, willing to revisit that compensation and convince them to post a CIP halving their hourly rate? If that happens, we’ll do the same. Until then, I’d like the DAO to vote on our comp as currently proposed.
I can appreciate that, but also CIP-100 has $250,000 not ear-marked for anything except team comp (at $100 per hour with no need for tangible results) and “misc” so if we’re being frugal as a community, maybe this is something CIP-100 should consider as well.
Yeah I hear you and agree with you and @gugz that it would come across as unfair to look at base compensation from one project differently to another project.
imho, I think all projects should cap compensation at $50/hr. This is startup.
I don’t know how to implement something like this. I think everyone should volitionally come forth and adjust max compensation to $50/hr.
This would probably not do well as a debate topic, most people might argue one way or another to increase it.
I think an exception could be made for t0wn and for network-city that when there’s specific professional level legal or accounting or other type work that’s required, and the project lead is able to provide exactly that service without needing to hire an outside $500/$1000/hr type firm, that a higher than $50/hr base is logical and fair ie: $100/hr or maybe even higher, but for the core base compensation to be in that $50/hr range to reflect a typical startup founders salary after a Seed raise. We raised $7mil which falls pretty clearly in the Seed round range (while bull market was hot that is haha).
Just my thoughts. Hope people agree 
This is incorrect. CIP-100 has $100k earmarked for Team Comp and $150k for Miscellaneous Expenses (e.g. legal, insurance, travel, construction costs, security, contractors, etc.).
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Just to reiterate:
I didnt write the CIP100 text and I have never talked about things in terms of $/hour or commitments around hours/time
I don’t know why we would pay hourly in the first place - it should be milestone/deliverable based comp (incentives, not expectations)
We have not been “paid” anything, in fact as of this writing, the only expenses are a PO Box and legal fees, and we have not been reimbursed for those
Even if I am billing $25/hr at this point I would theoretically be paid several thousand dollars - I have spent an insane amount of time on this project just in talking with Will. However - we literally have nothing to show for it other than some filings.
So… is the new expectation that project teams should be paid for having organizational calls and other non value add deliverables - simply because of this seemingly never ending debate about hourly comp?
My opinion is that comp should be incentive based: “Team A will receive $1500 per member upon completion of XXXXXXX”
Doing it this way would incentivize efficiency in execution and the outcome of the execution.
Having “hourly pay” becomes a world of tracking billables, non-value add work to justify said billables, etc etc. and does not incentivize outcomes, it incentivizes taking a long time.
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This is what I said above. CIP-100 gives $100K for team comp with no deliverables or accountabilitty of what must be accomplished to earn the funds, and $150K for “miscellaneous”. You listed some misc. things above. Is there a researched budget for all this? In all this time, has research been done on these costs?
Also, your previous post indicated that you strongly agreed with your legal counsel that, for the good of CityDAO, CIP-100 needs to be a non-profit and that there will be a new vote. Is that happening?
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Ah, okay, I misread the double negative.
Re: 1&2 – yes, with as much specificity as is currently possible.
Re: 3 – yes.
For the record, I support the t0wn budget to be paid to the team members regardless of deliverables.
These projects are not predictable, like sales, where meeting a quota and being paid a commission is a time-and-tested process. They are primarily experiments and more likely than not (>50% odds) will not achieve their originally stated aims.
Like in startups, this is ok, and to be expected, or as Jeff Bezos said “to invent you have to experiment, and if you know in advance that it’s going to work, it’s not an experiment.”.
Trying comp to deliverables disincentivizes trying things that you don’t know are going to work in advance and ultimately decreases the probability of achieving any outcome that would be defined as “successful”.
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I agree the hourly wage is pretty meaningless, and it essentially doesn’t matter. In the end, the only relevant question is: is the compensation enough for the team to be incentivized to see the project through? Realistically the hours don’t mean that much to me; if the project takes off, I will not stop working at 10 hours per week.
If you are tracking hours, then all the time spent on this would need to be added up. If you told someone who has a job paying them 100 per hour, they could leave the job, write a lengthy proposal, put it on a forum where people can critique it for weeks, then put it up for a vote to get passed, which might or might not go through. Then you get the 100 per hour. Do you think anyone would take the offer? The point is no one is getting 100 per hour. We are doing this cause we do want to be compensated, but also because we really want the project to succeed.
The bottom line, we can move it to 50 per hour. But then we would need to really build in some other payoff. I am all for it, but if there really isn’t a great way to work in I then get x percent of some profit, there really isn’t much of a point. There is still so much to be sorted out; see CIP-100 moving to non-profit, etc. We really don’t have a good setup to compensate risk with future rewards, so some approx-hour structure seems about the best we can do. But, as @DAOvolution states, it really isn’t even optimal or all that meaningful.
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Yes, great point! I think this is the correct perspective.
I support providing the requested funds to teams on their terms. If they want funds up front, they can have them; if they want to be paid by CityDAO periodically, that works too. Teams should also be responsible for disbursing those funds amongst themselves. If one teammate isn’t pulling their weight, I would expect the others to have an internal conversation with the teammate and come to a resolution; this is a team issue and not a CityDAO issue.
Another consideration: even when a timeline and comp are decided, this often will be insufficient. With CIP-100, we have $47.5k allocated for Josh and myself for 3 months worth of full-time work. This was a figure that we both agreed upon and believed would be sufficient to compensate the opportunity cost of working on this ~30hrs per week.
However, as we’ve gotten into the operational weeds, it’s become clear that more than 3 months of work will be required, and our comp has remained the same. Fixed comp actually makes it more difficult for experimental projects as the marginal opportunity cost increases linearly with project scope!
The ability to keep our promise to CityDAO (we’re not coming back to ask for more funding) while ensuring our spirits are not lowered by diminishing pay is a key reason the non-profit route makes sense for CIP-100. It allows me to continue raising funds via donations and pay my people salaries proportional to the effort they’ve been putting in (and Josh has been a rockstar in this regard). Ultimately projects are only successful if they’re setting their people up for success, and being paid less than you could be making elsewhere / your worth sucks and will make anyone unhappy, which is the opposite mindset required for creative thinking.
A lot of good points and perspectives being presented by all of us after I posted this.
This is a healthy conversation.
My only 2 inputs in the context of contributing to the continuance of this dialogue are;
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We’re all in this together. Finding a sustainable methodology re all compensation related topics is for the benefit of all of us here in the DAO. It’s not intended to poke or agitate
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Maybe there’s different classifications of projects. ie: a) Deliverable Based, b) Hourly Based, c) Other
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Much appreciated @MemeBrains. It is a good dialogue to have. Like most things in this space, it is more complicated than it would be outside web3, cest la vie lol
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This is an interesting conversation and I support in future proposals trying to shift more towards a deliverable based approach.
On one end of the spectrum there is the salaried worker - where you rely on management to ensure they are performing. In CityDAO that is tough because essentially every citizen is kind of like the manager and can scrutinize someones work. That’s not really a good situation, and neither is the creation of a full time staff and management structure (at least not at this point). The alternative here is shorter windows of guaranteed pay (no more than a year) so that citizens can relatively quickly evaluate if the money has been well spent, and choose not to extend a project or keep certain people on.
So then there is hourly - and there are good points brought up by everyone here - but in addition to the inefficiency of having everyone record their time and what they did during that time, I can’t imagine it will be useful for citizens to review these spreadsheets and then what… decide that they don’t think enough work was done?
Because of our decentralized nature of CityDAO so far, I think the deliverable based comp makes the most sense, though there are drawbacks as Will and others point out. A potential solution here is instead of just defining a big deliverable, you can try and break it down into smaller chunks so that you can get paid along the way rather than having to wait all the way until everything is done. This will require a little more work up front in developing the “scope” to be more detailed, but ultimately thats probably a good thing.
As CityDAO gets bigger and bigger I’d love to see city services and projects take a different approach than the typical salaried employee route. Could experiment with contracting as much of it as possible, like proposed in “Contract Cities.” How we handle early CIPs could prove to be a model for us and other cities down the road.
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I see a lot about benefits to members of CityDAO but where are they coming from? Who is going to maintain these spaces? Who is going to take ownership of them? That said, I am really keen on this proposal because physical space is so critical for building trust and creating the kind of experiences that could make CityDAO an even more exciting community to be a part of. May I also suggest that being in the vicinity of a library be considered in the location selection.
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There’s a discussion and potential bounty up for grabs in Discord-Bounties that @elmo posted for someone who might want to lead the membership benefits initiative 
u interested?
Breaking big projects down into smaller chunks with shorter timelines I think is a great idea, especially in this experimental space with an ever-shifting landscape. There’s a good chance that the scope of these big projects will change purely due to unforeseen factors/events – again, especially in this space.
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