Blind Voting & Council Pay IIP

[final flicker]

With upcoming elections we wanted to bring something to the community that has been requested before during elections times, which is blind voting.
Also per this document you can see after several talks with CFO the best route moving forward is pay in $ILV not treasury stables. This is all being said so that we can test some of this before Governance v2 goes live to the community. It's almost in a good place to share so that we can have as many questions answered as possible before brining to community. Both these options were added into Gov v2 IIP so we can remove them and start implementing some things we know the community wanted and is better for the DAO as a whole. Please show your support with a 👍 for this straight forward IIP and feel free to ask any questions I'll answer as many as possible.
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1oReveg1CpV90L7ZgNaZHZoPP0GCoQKmcdOkzeKTwBww/edit?usp=sharing

[cold canopy]

I'm highly supportive of this proposal. Delegating the decision to those who are best able to make a recommendation, the conversion back to $ILV is financially identical to the DAO and beneficial to the runway per guidance from Danny, so this feels like an obvious change. As for blind voting, I've been supportive of that for some time and excited now that the technology enables it. To me, this ensures the community's preferred candidates are more likely to be elected, and seeing the results will not impact the results themselves. Last election had multiple dimensions of how visible voting impacted results, which this should eliminate for the better.

[waxen laurel]

This is a great first step. full support. Won’t say more, those 2 guys already said it all 🫡

[rough flower]

Both great ideas, glad to hear there's a solution that will allow blind voting.

Just to be super clear - The determined ILV price to be used for council pay will be the average of the 3 ILV prices at the end of each month within the 3 month pay period?

This could use a bit more specific wording to avoid any confusion - The example does help make it clear how it will work in practice.

If I'm understanding correctly, in a 6 month epoch, 3 months elapse, the ILV price on the last day of those 3 months is used to find an average, council is paid for 3 months based on that average. That process happens once more for the final 3 months of the epoch.

It could also be beneficial to reference the blind voting demo that snapshot provided as a Test Case. https://snapshot.org/#/pistachiodao.eth/proposal/0xa5077ef17097b1d59304b110337bd1c7ce98d95d3ff81d138c3886a80074b4d9

Just to give people an idea of how this looks.

[robust sandal]

In respect to the coming recession, why dont the council take a paycut?

In respect to the DAO, there should be some penalty for missing meetings, or not voting. if you are too busy, maybe council is not for you. i see a lot of people from the community who are more active

[final flicker]

We have some changes proposed in gov v2. without having to dive to deep into that now since ppl havent seen it yet, essentially there would be a pay cut to accomodate more councils while hopefully getting qualified parties into those positions... this is simply to move to $ILV pay to preserve stables and blind voting, I have written into gov v2 a transition plan so if it does get passed a month after this next epoch starts we can implement the new gov with litte issues

[brave parcel]

Why is ILV price determined by snapshot dates? Can't we just use the 90 day daily moving average for ILV? Having less data in the calculation is prone to anomalies showing up.

I'll also advocate lowering the council salary to 3-4k is reasonable. I'm pretty sure we're going to find qualified people willing to do the work at that paygrade. In some countries this salary is astronomical. We should leverage the fact, that we're having members all over the world.

I mean I'm working a job, that pays 5 times the national average, which is huge and it's still under 5k USD.

[rough flower]

$5k per month is $60k per year, which puts it about $2000 above the yearly income for an average Australian (after conversion to USD - average weekly was $1769 AUD in May 2022)

Regardless, council salary is always a contentious debate with a lot of baggage attached. Perhaps a dedicated IIP would be appropriate, considering council pay has been the subject of 2 or 3 (or 4?) IIPs to date. There's no reason I can see to piggyback another council pay debate on an otherwise straightforward IIP.

I'd also like to see the structure proposed by the Gov V2 IIP, as it may already address your concerns.

[robust sandal]

that $58k is a 9 to 5 job
how many hours does a council person spend a month, if we annualized it (40 hours/week) im sure it will be much more than $60k/year

i think this is a perfect time to include the paycut

[brave parcel]

Very well argumented, however I'd like to see something in place before we sweep it under the rug for another 6 months.
To add to your "straightforward IIP", I don't see a reason why we have to decide 2 things in 1 IIP. Let's split this in half.

IIP1 - Blind voting
IIP2 - Council salary

Now if we all want to have blind voting in we have to approve a salary change, which is irrelevant to the blind voting.

Let's follow the Single-responsibility principle for IIPs. One IIP should be abount 1 thing. The moment you see "and" or "&" in a title, something is wrong.

[robust sandal]

make sense

[final flicker]

Well then Gov V2 is going to need like 30 IIPs with this train of thought, they are both relevant to council and that’s why they are in a single IIP

I think you guys @brave parcel & @robust sandal have some strong opinions as usual, but should write you own IIP and thread here in ideas to see if you can drum up support to lower the pay, since most here already are fine and in support of this the way it is written

[brave parcel]

I was just trying to bring improvements to the way this is submitted. To me if you split it in 2 IIPs will be much clearer and will allow multiple discussion on both topics.

[cold canopy]

Compensation is always debated, & I anticipate the changes in Gov v2 will improve perception of the stipend paid to council members.
Compensating the council is critical for two reasons. First, it validates the commitment of the DAO to a representative system, and secondly, it serves as an incentive to attract talented individuals ensuring a commitment. In the DAO’s existence, the first objective has been achieved. It is subjective whether the second goal has been achieved.
I’m not sure everyone has viewed it this way, but personally, I’ve weighed the expectations of being on council, and it has taken many hours of my time to serve in this role effectively. Compensation is an element of ensuring I commit that time.
This is also not meant to brag, but I also don’t make the median AUS or US salary in my day job, and I place a high value on my time. For the DAO to attract the best individuals with the skills and experience to build the community, compensation is something that will need ongoing evaluation to assess if we are getting the people we need, and adjust accordingly.
Framing is always a key argument to these discussions, and median national compensation typically comes up. I would propose a better framing is the compensation paid to Boards of Directors for key competitors. Overall, Director roles for companies carry compensation from $75k-$500k USD annually, with a typical expectation of 4-10 meetings annually for 3-4 hours. At Activision, Director compensation is between $345k-$490k USD.
Now am I the same caliber as their directors? Absolutely not. Is Illuvium at the same level of development as Activision? No. However, if that is the vision of what the DAO can become, governance needs to work towards attracting this level of talent, and compensation is always going to be a factor. Again, more to come on what we’ve been developing for Gov V2, but the goal is to make progress towards having educated, talented, committed people in roles to guide the DAO.

[cold canopy]

The intent here was also to not have the compensation debate (as wishful thinking as that may have been) by keeping the USD equivalent the same as the last time this was discussed, merely changing the currency in which it was paid at the recommendation of the individual most qualified to guide the choice of currency, Danny. The only change proposed here was clarification in how the $ILV amount is calculated, and change from stable coin to ILV. This is financially equivalent to the last time this was approved. Hope that helps that in debating this IIP, the amount of compensation was not considered a change, so in theory out of scope for the focused discussion.

[rough flower]

I'd absolutely agree if either of the proposed issues were contentious, but one of the proposed changes has been previously requested by the community. Blind voting is great, and I have yet to see any argument against it here. Changing the currency council receives pay in, by the advice of the CFO, is a minor change - If it helps the team, per the most qualified person to make that assessment, why wouldn't we pass it in a timely fashion?

I'd argue that any change that's going to make a basic IIP much more difficult to pass should be the subject of it's own proposal, which you are free to draft. No one is sweeping anything under the rug, just trying to stay on the topic.

[brave parcel]

Don't we have like a month between council stipends? Why do we have to rush it. That's why I'm pushing to separate the blind voting and have it out of the way in a couple of days.

I'm actually gonna split it myself and submit it. And no one will complain about it, because it's better. I think we're being lazy about it.

[waxen laurel]

Lol, be ready to spend 2 weeks splitting governance v2 🤣

[cold canopy]

@rough flower is going to need a pay raise to moderate it

[austere bluff]

Zero times more is still zero 😜

[rancid ore]

But zero divided by zero is infinite. 😏

So if we pay him none of a non-existent token is he infinitely wealthy?

[austere bluff]

https://tenor.com/view/stare-compute-think-complicated-gif-10481635

Let me know if true. I want to become a trillionaire

[stable agate]

I'm all for blind voting and I see no good reason not to change the stippen to ILV as proposed in this IIP specially if it was recommended by the CFO.

[rancid ore]

Fully agreed. This is an easy IIP with little downside. The other discussions are good but really more related to other topics and we should discuss as either part of Gov V2 or a separate IIP.

[robust sandal]

thats a really good point there.
if we want to be as big as the Activision, we need to attract the best talent for the job.
i completely agree, maybe we should propose a minimum requirement for running a council, such as:

• education background
• industry expertise
• previous board of director experience or previous top management experience (set the standard of the company as well)

[cold canopy]

i'll say that's an end state vision. we're not there today, and we want to ensure we're attracting top talent from the community. Eventually, we may need to recruit such directors to serve. For now, we're still in a building phase of governance. A few of us have been discussing doxxing requirements, qualifications, and that's something I'm confident we'll have some heated discussions on as a community. Not the topic for this forum, but giving some perspective on the role of council and that compensation will be a big factor in who you can attract at today's budget.

[robust sandal]

i believe the community will support such qualification, it will boost confidence of the community and future investors. we can showcase the council as indutry leaders on the website too.
discussion for a separate thread.

[marble rover]

I look forward to those discussions tbh, they will be interesting but I am confident gov v2 will be far superior to the current build

as for Blind Voting, I have been a huge supporter and pusher of this for a long time now, great to see that snapshot has now integrated it as an option on their platform which we are still using until we eventually build out our own governance system from scratch (i expect eventually this would be needed so that we can have greater flexibility in the crafting of this DAO without externally imposed limitations)

as for the payments being in ILV, I understand the reasoning brought forward by Danny the CFO and support it

[gleaming sundial]

Yup, as soon as I saw it was possible with Snapshot, I passed it over to Rich. Many of us have been wanting blind voting for a long time.

Looks like the vote will pass with good reason and little complications. The reasons you and Deraji gave for this in #📯〕council-chambers are sound.