Proposing a Namada Community Architecture based on RPGF funding

PGF Ops
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Hi all -

Ahead of anything else, it’s important I clarify that this post is written with me as a community member of Namada proposing a potential structure for Namada’s community, not necessarily expressing the opinion of Heliax core.

Based on some recent conversations I’ve had with members of the community, I wanted to offer a proposal for a novel funding architecture for the Namada community, focused around the Public Goods Funding Stewards as detailed in the specs here

This structure is heavily informed by conversations with @cwgoes, @cryptopital, Apoorv, Gavin Birch and many other members of the Community Builders who remained in the program after the first Community Builders Retroactive Public Goods Program.

Namada is built on a model of Retroactive Public Goods Funding, allocations of which are decided by the Stewards. The attraction of this model is that work done (either for or in agreement with Namada’s values) can be awarded a retroactive grant based on an agreement over the impact of the work done determined Public Goods Funding Stewards.

The RPGF model can be evolved to provide a basic architecture for a funding mechanism to support the Namada community itself. With the launch of the network itself, the RPGF module will be active, meaning that Stewards can allocate funding to public goods that benefit the Namada Vision. A part of this continuous allocation could be apportioned to the Namada community on a recurring basis depending on the needs of the community’s needs, as proposed by the community itself.

What follows is an architecture for how this funding could be apportioned at the community level, as well as a set of mechanisms for how this funding could be distributed among different parts of the community (here referred to as Working Groups) emerging at the community level.

An illustration of the Working Group Architecture
An illustration of the Working Group Architecture1920×1334 197 KB

Namada’s Working Group Architecture

As a part of this proposal, it is crucial to see how the community of Namada could be constructed to favor the model. In a post-launch architecture, there would be three tiers, from the most specific to the most general:

  • Public Goods Funding Stewards (PGFS)
    • Those who determine apportioned quantities of Public Goods Funding to different Public Goods, including the Namada Community
  • Working Groups (WG), Working Group Members (WGM), and Working Group Leaders (WGL)
    • Working Groups are separated on Focus Areas for Working Group Members
    • Working Groups elect Working Group Leaders on a recurring 6-week basis
    • This a period of time should recur as of launch but that can later be updated once there is less need for continuously changing Working Group Leaders and community expectations.
  • Community Builders
    • A selected pool of candidates who accomplish Community Bounties in order to be vouched into Working Groups.

Namada’s Working Group Funding Mechanism

Having understood the architecture of the community itself, we can now use a combination of this architecture and an understanding of Public Goods funding to compose a framework for funding the community’s efforts to support Namada.

On a recurring 6 week basis, the following could funding decision framework could be implemented:

Decisions at the Steward Level

  • Public Goods Funding Stewards decide on a quantitative retroactive allocation for the Namada Community to decide on allocations for a 6 week period.
  • This quantative allocation determines the pool of rewards available to the Namada Community to be used toward initiatives that to either:
    • Increase the userbase of Namada
    • Institute and sustain patterns of Maintenance for Namada as a whole

Decisions at the Working Group Level

  • In the last week of the preceding period, a Working Group Committee comprised of a Working Group Leaders and Public Goods Funding Stewards
    1. votes on the distribution of the Community allocation among Working Groups on the basis of
      a. The Namada Community’s overarching needs
      b. The ambition of working groups to take on initiatives benefiting the Namada Vision and its values.
    2. Decides on Working Group Bounties to be taken to Working Groups for completion over the next 6 week period, Retroactive Funding for which is distributed at the end of the 6 week period.
  • Working Group Members then commence each 6 week period in selecting Bounties within their Working Group to be completed.
  • At the end of a 6 week period, Working Groups vote to elect the next proposed Working Group Leader, as well as any Community Builders that are Vouched into a Working Group for the subsequent 6 week period.
    • Working Group Members earn retroactive rewards as a result of completing Bounties, and those Working Group Members who have completed the most bounties have a high likelihood of being voted in as the next Working Group Leader who will decide funding quantities for the next 6 week period.
  • Working Group Members who are inactive in completing Bounties over a 6 week period lose their right to vote on the next proposed Working Group Leader

Opportunities at the Community Builder Level

  • Uncompleted Working Group Bounties can be announced more widely to Community Builders who can choose to complete them, offering them a chance to be Vouched into a Working Group
    • Community Builders may also complete Bounties that are needed at the Community level but that are not specifically apportioned to Working Groups in order to prove their desire to join a Working Group
  • Community Builders who are accepted into the pool and do not complete any Bounties are removed if they have not been active in Bounty completion over a 6-week period.

What this Funding Mechanism Implies

The result of this community funding mechanism is set of feedback cycles that afford retroactive incentives toward community members to participate in maintaining Namada. The recursive nature of this proposed structure allows the community to make choices in rewarding activities within the community, while also providing a filtering mechanism for finding community members who are willing to lead their Working Groups through a social signaling mechanism such as voting.

Since those who are most active in the community are rewarded for increased activity and ownership, this also controls for worker churn throughout the growth of the community, as every 6 weeks it is possible for

  • a Working Group Leader to be rotated out
  • Working Group Members to be rotated out
  • Community Members to be rotated out.

This means that over a given 6 week period, Working Group Leaders and Public Goods Funding Stewards will meet to decide on

  1. What might be expected in the subsequent 6 week period from Working Groups
  2. What practical sorts of Bounties for these Working Groups might be proposed (the expectations could also be shared with the wider community for both feedback and comment)
    leading into the next 6 week period.

Closing remarks, the proposal of tools, a start date for implementation, and next steps.

I welcome the community’s feedback on the use of this architecture to institute rewards and community mediation structures into the community, and would look forward to feedback from the community on whether this proposed structure should be used.

For voting, I think that community sentiment can/could be controlled through the use of just about any voting mechanism, but would propose that Coordinape be used at the Working Group Committee and Working Group level since the community is already familiar with this and the technology can be used to automatically prune people out on the basis of uncompleted bounties or vouch people in on the basis of completed ones.

As for a start date to implement this, I would propose that this structure be implemented on Feb 12, 2024, with an initial set of Working Group Members and Working Group Leaders selected by early leading members of the Namada Community ahead of this start date.

  • Park
7 Likes
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Hi Park,
this looks well thought out to me. I like the idea of different working groups, election of a leader for each group that keeps track of the deliverables and organizes the group. Important here is to keep working groups small; much more convenient for accountability. Also the length of 6 weeks makes sense to me initially.

I do understand that community builders can be vouched into working groups, working groups do have a leader, and that leader might or might not be part of the public goods funding stewards. But I do wonder how one working group is created after the whole thing has been initialized? Can a new working group simply appear and apply for a bounty or must that working group be accepted somehow?

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I think this proposal looks good in long term, and in my opinion this is most crucial for every project, looking forward to participate. Since this mechanism is new to most of CB it will be good experience for all of us, and i am sure we will succeed, because we always have stewards in case of any misunderstanding.

And users will choose their working group by themselves? Can 1 user participate in multiple groups?

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Hi Park, this community architecture seems like a great idea, I like especially the working groups organised by focus areas with community builders completing bounties to be able to join specific working groups. Have the focus areas for the working groups been decided already? I think for example, if a focus area is video educational content about Namada, we could support with research/content preparation, thumbnails and video editing/design or presenting specific content as well.

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Hiya Park,

I applaud the initiative and forethought here :clap: :clap: This seems to be, overall, a good engine for getting meaningful work done.

A few questions that jump out a bit:

  • What about ideas and initiatives that come up outside of the purview of the stewards & working group leaders? Will people be incentivized to still pursue these ideas, or perhaps hold off and see if that work might come up in a future round of working group effort?

  • Every 6th week is “voting” week, where almost all the attention will be on reporting, evaluating, voting, etc so almost no generative work. Neither saying this is good, nor bad but is ~15% of time going towards upkeep governance about the ball park we want to be in?

  • Also, any particular reason for the 6 week period? i.e. that you can do (2) twenty-one day “lean” sprints in that time? or could there be a reason to consider 8/10 or another number of weeks?

  • Evaluation of the work being done seems to be the stickiest-wicket to me. Do group members vote on their own work as well as vote for who stays in the working group? Do stewards overview and then vote (they’ll need really good, succinct reporting if so), will people be consumed with just producing to stay in working groups…basically how do we avoid becoming politicians :sweat_smile:

Thanks again for bringing this initiative forward!

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I had some concerns before reading the proposal from comments in the Discord thread.

I think this is a very well thought our proposal. One of my original, uninformed thoughts was that retroactive rewards would disincentivize work. For example, I would not task a team to work on hard core infrastructure which would cost a lot in development hours, without a clear idea of potential rewards. Hard Core building requires a risk reward analysis. But this is solved by the bounty idea expressed above. I am also sure that serious builders could approach the team with pitches and get a rough idea of what is at stake. Perhaps a process should be built around this. I mean this for projects that would require large outlays of funds or development time.

I am also very fond of the Stewards model. I have seen across multiple projects I am involved in, an on-chain funding mechanism without stewards devolve into civil war. This is not commonly the case, but having a guiding voice to shepherd the project along is a good idea. I would even argue that stewards should be kept for many years and that the launch team keep control of it for the foreseeable future. The team has the most at stake to steward the project to succeed. Of course at all times being sensitive to the community, this sort of control over the protocol funding can lead to blinding of community needs and goals and later exodus.

Overall this is quite well thought out and works around issues on funding other projects have had. But values regarding community input and valuing community contribution not monetarily but with thought out consideration and team time to hear and discuss sound community ideas and proposals should be baked into this proposal. At a process level. Talented community members and those willing to comitt a lot of time to building should be given priority access to team resources, also as a stated process. The community is integral to Namdas growth but this proposal makes sense and is a good start.

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Great point, it’s crucial to have clear qualifications and a transparent selection process for these roles, they need to ensure to have the necessary expertise and commitment to Namada’s values. Diversity in representation should be a priority to make sure all community parts have a voice in decision-making.

Regular education and training for stewards and leaders can help maintain high governance standards (?)

With the consequence of having to remunerate certain figures and have them consumed with producing to stay in Working Group, and somehow failing to prevent the formation of a real polics state.

In my opinion a shorter period between elections could be useful to address this by preventing the entrenchment of power, although making the whole process more laborious and require time and sweat from the participants, who would end up wasting more time evaluating everything instead of producing ‘public goods’.

I have many doubts this could work well but at the same time I can’t think to other ways to do so. :sweat_smile: Perhaps a trial period with continuous feedback and adjustments might help us find the right balance.

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wow, thanks for creating this, @mother0x!

I need to read through a little more carefully, but my first thought is that it would be helpful to know what a minimum viable version of this looks like

like how would we pilot this if we wanted to start in a week? purely as a thought exercise

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Hey everyone,

I just wanted to share my thoughts on Namada’s RPGF plan for community building. After taking a closer look, here’s what I think:

Pros

  • Innovative: The RPGF funding model is a unique way to reward community members for their contributions after the fact.
  • Engagement: The plan is designed to keep the community active and contributing, which is crucial for any successful project.
  • Rotating Leadership: Regular changes in leadership can help keep ideas fresh and prevent stagnation.
  • Community Focus: The plan emphasizes giving the community a voice and empowering them to shape the direction of the project.
  • Flexible: The plan is open to adjustments, which is important in the ever-changing world of crypto.

Cons

  • Complexity: The plan may be overwhelming for new members who are not familiar with the RPGF model. But that should be fine with old members who can take a lead.
  • Demands Resources: Implementing and monitoring the plan will require a significant amount of time and resources.
  • Admin Overload?: There is a risk that the plan could become bogged down in procedures and bureaucracy.

Overall, I think Namada’s RPGF plan is an intriguing approach to community building. While there are certainly some challenges to overcome, I believe that innovation and flexibility are key to success in the crypto space. It will be interesting to see how this plan develops and evolves over time.

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@mother0x i’d also like to better understand the bounties. why six week periods? a scenario could be a helpful way to illustrate what you’re imagining

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perhaps a signalling governance proposal?

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i’m ++excited about the opportunity we’ll have to experiment with driving our own development with our own token. it’d be a game changer if funding ultimately didn’t need to come from foundations or other more questionable dependencies.

i don’t have any additional questions yet. my vote is to run this as a small experiment (as small as possible), and we (Luminara) would love to champion that ASAP.

@mother0x this is an interesting framework that i’m eager to try. great work :slight_smile:

two asides:

  1. acronyms - we have this tendency as people, but they’re hurdles for newcomers and shouldn’t be enshrined in any considered post / article / docs

  2. “RPGF funding” - heretically i think that “RPGF (retroactive public goods funding” is a bad name for our on-chain funding mechanism’s social process. the tldr is that “funding” is provisioning financial resources, whereas we’re proposing to incentivize behaviours / outcomes by rewarding people with NAM, our community token. so i’m also ++resistant to “grants.” “PGF” and its accompanying “R (retroactive)” also feel wrong, but i’ll make a separate post to open a convo about the naming thing

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Thanks, everyone, for your responses! Obviously with other goings on around the network, I wanted to give some time for responses to roll in.

This is a good question - The method behind how a working group forms can/should come from the needs of the community at large - I think this is why at first, there should be Working Group Leaders who seed Working Groups during the first epoch.

Further on in the future, it could be possible to have Working Group Leaders vouch in a new Working Group leader that has been selected by a prospective working group - if some majority of the Working Group Leaders believes the working group should be a part of the overarching rewards structure, then the WG can be seated with a WGL for the next epoch that would ultimately decide on the retroactive funding for the subsquent epoch.

It could be this, or the new WGL establishes the list of bounties for the upcoming epoch for this new WG, and this allocation is voted on at the WGL+Steward level. I have some details here that I’ll offer further down.

One user can participate in multiple groups, but cannot lead multiple groups, otherwise yes, I think there would be self-selection.

I think Working Groups are broader than ‘educational videos’ and are instead ‘Comms/Marketing’, which would decide on a bounty for a set of videos for an upcoming epoch.

Yes, they’ll still be offered incentives to do so through proposing RPGF proposals directly to Stewards as outlined in the Steward spec.

I would look at this less as governance upkeep and more like ‘review’, where the quality of output is signalled across WGs toward that which had the most impact over a period of time. Important to note here is that WGs are not voting on funding at the end of an epoch, instead are voting on the ‘seed members’ of the WG at the start of the next epoch and the WGL for the upcoming epoch.

We could, but to your above point on governance upkeep, the longer the period, the more time can be put toward much more complex bounties like campaigns, and the less time is spent on ‘review and governance’.

While iteration is welcome, I am envisioning Bounties at the WG level to be involved projects that can have trickle-down bounties at a smaller scale that might be made available to non WG members who want to be vouched in, so much of an epoch would be spent on 1) accomplishing presently open bounties and 2) ideating on bounties for the next 6 week period.

This is an important question - I think at first the quality of the work is likely to be somewhat poor - but you’ll want to plan for these WGs to improve using the signaling mechanisms of voting each 6 weeks that say ‘more of this, less of that’. As well, at the WGL/Steward level, if a WG seems to be cartelizing and not producing meaningful output, this level can choose to vote less in proportion to this WG, which should weed out those who are only there for extrinsic reasons. (just an idea)

In the specs, Stewards can actually be voted in and out arbitrarily - I think keeping them in place for too long might actually create incentives for laziness!

This is going to be tricky and I utterly agree - it will be exceedingly hard for us to continue regulating this part.

I’d be worried with this that too much time will be spent on politicking and not enough on actually producing what a community can describe as meaningful output. An unsolved problem here, however, is that the question of ‘when is a bounty completed’ requires some degree of human input to attest that it was completed correctly, so attesting that it was done well will require a WG to assess internally and at the Steward level using measurable results in this regard.

And yes, I’m strongly of the opinion that this is an experiment! The community should absolutely be playing around with this idea to see what works and what doesn’t - this is just one proposed architecture.

I think if we wanted to try this next week, first step would be piloting some really small WGs for Focus Areas that can come up with a list of bounties and attest to their

Yeah, I think an MVP is definitely in order - it would be great to pilot this design and see what Community Builders can do to move it forward somehow. While it may see complex at first, I think that might just be because I’ve had to explain it, haha! I’ll try to outline it more so that it’s more intuitive, I think in practice people will be more involved on a basis that will not require them to interact with the whole beast :sweat_smile:

Yes - let me type up something in a subsequent comment that can outline a bit more what an MVP could look like and how it could evolve into the greater model with time.

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I wanted to leave a separate comment to outline three particular details that have come to light as a result of conversations with Gavin and as a result of comment feedback.

1. This is a proposal, not a plan.

As a result, please feel free to take and leave that which does/doesn’t make sense, so that there can be a line of best fit. Be critical! This is not a unilateral decision, I’m just one community member.

2. How do people get vouched into Working Groups

This is good question - Initially, I think that what Stewards can do is select who they think the first Working Group Leaders should be, then allow those WGLs to
select the first crop of WG participants from the Community Builders. This means that only the first crop of WG participants should be selected ad-how, and it should probably be some smaller number than the total proposed 15 for future epochs (15 is not some special number, it’s just more or less the max org-size number that comes to mind before things get confusing).

Beyond this point - Working groups should intend to be self-regulating entities. There are essentially two steps that come to mind around how it is that this could work.

The first is at the start of the epoch, where the WG participants who were voted in as the top 15 (or whatever number is settled upon) start out the epoch, with the top-voted WG member from the previous era being offered the chance to be a Working Group Leader. These new WG members can then select from a set of bounties that were established in the previous epoch as having been deemed important, and those Bounties that are not selected by WG members can be left as ‘open’.

Now, Community Builders who have either been reverted to the pool from having been a part of a Working Group or who have been sitting idle within the pool can pick up these specific Working Group bounties. This presents one way that CBs can be ‘vouched’ into a working group - if the bounties they accomplish are above a certain scale, active WG members can opt to ‘vouch’ them using some arbitrary limit (e.g. three WG members have to vouch for them) into the WG. The second way could be that simply WG members of a present epoch feel that someone was voted out of the WG at the end of the last epoch and that they are willing to vouch them back in purely on qualitative terms, in which case they can be vouched in using the same number of vouches.

This begs the question of ‘what is the difference between being in a Working Group or being a Community Builder’ (a question @Gavin posed in a conversation with me) - and the advantage is that Working Group members get first pick of the bounties to be completed, as well as getting to take part in setting the next round of Bounties for the next working group, in the upcoming Epoch.

Throughout the ongoing epoch, Working Groups would then have two tasks:

  • Accomplish open bounties
  • Plan for the next epoch’s bounties
    all the while Working Group Leaders would be arguing for and/or voting on the total Working Group bounty pool allocation from the Community Pool with Stewards.

3. Describing some of the finer details around Bounty creation and how this could work between epochs.

Bounty creation could take the form of two tiers of Bounties, separated by the qualitative impact of the bounties. These would be:

  • Working Group Focus Area Bounties - These would be larger works like campaigns - projects that are liable to take the full 6-week epoch to both plan, execute, and review impact. These could be things like campaigns, block explorers, tooling, discord bots, conferences, hackathons, initiatives, etc.
  • Task Bounties - These could be smaller, more measurably achievable bounties like making a video, writing an article, patching a bug, taking onboarding screening over for a few weeks, etc.

Bounties would be created in the previous epoch on the basis of their importance to a Working Group’s goals for the upcoming epoch, and assigned weights for the allocation of rewards toward their completion at the end of the present epoch. As yet, I don’t know what the mechanism for this could be - but I think some simple quadratic voting mechanism could help decide allocation toward given Bounties, run by the Working Group toward the end of the Epoch. It should always be the goal of a Working Group to come up with more bounties than they can achieve during an upcoming epoch, so that there is always something open to Community Builders to pick up.

Finally, I think it could absolutely be possible for Community Builders to propose their own Bounties toward a Working Group, this would simply be a function of WG members vouching for a Bounty they believe to be legitimate OR could be proposed directly to Stewards outside of the entire Community Architecture using the RPGF proposal model.

4. Describing what an MVP could look like for this so that we can hit the ground running with something that works on Feb 12.

Ultimately - I recognize that what I’ve proposed is the overarching model for what this could look like if it were to be fully fleshed out - so I acknowledge the need for an MVP model to validate the architecture.

As I mentioned further up, this could be as simple as Stewards getting together ahead of Feb 12th to select an initial set of Working Group Leaders who could participate in setting Bounties for the upcoming epoch, who could then in turn self-select a small inclusively invited group of Community Builders to participate in creating these Bounties.

The Stewards would then come up with some amount that would be allocated at Genesis as an RPGF proposal toward this work, which would in turn be seen as the Community pool for the 6 week epoch following Feb 12.

Then, Feb 12, the Working Groups could run an initial vote on who remains in the WG and is elected (or re-elected) WGL for the 6-week epoch, starting a lengthier planning process. Alternately, 3 week epochs could be used with these smaller groups for a couple turns, nonetheless aiming to stick with a 3-week period in order to cover the whole year in 3 week-to-quarter length segments.

I look forward to additional feedback from you all!

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Hey Park, This adds more sense to the previous proposal. So, I would like to understand, If hypothetically we are considering 15 or 20 Epochs, What is the Allocation assigned for such bounties from the overall supply?

Also, While the Stewards chose the WGLs during the 1st epoch, Will the WGLs then define the tasks to be executed or these have been predefined?

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hello @mother0x , don’t you think your proposal is too positive and long term?

We can talk about this endlessly, but you are missing the point, what the community can pass on to you, as part of the Namada team, as a part of it, so that it can be communicated to the rest of the team.

we need to understand what the value/price of the token will be after the maenet and then make some assumptions and programme launches. And if it will not be traded on the main exchanges and its price will be 0.1 - 0.01 per NAM, then what budgets and amounts can we talk about to allocate for various hackathons/grants/events/training materials and so on?

after all, if only 100-500 dollars equivalent to NAM for 5-6 teams is allocated to the whole community, it will be ridiculous and nobody will fulfil even 1% of what you are proposing here. And it’s just idle talk for the sake of talking.

we realise that we are not discussing price and all that, but these are the principles on which the community is also built, so that people put value into the protocol and into raising its profile etc.

the truths that Celestia has shown = a much bigger promoter of getting the community involved in the protocol than writing a Tutorial video about it. Still, we need to look at these proposals from the beginning and communicate what Namada will be able to give after the release to the community, both to the old community (programme members, etc.) and to the new community that can be attracted (marketing, staking, integrations with other protocols in the Cosmos and Anoma ecosystem).

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Love this proposal, really looks like something worth and should be involved in!
Except… As noted above, that we can get bogged down in bureaucracy/debates/politics, and it’s likely that this could even arise in the stage after the heads of the working groups are determined.
So I think we should start developing with a small number of groups.

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This approach looks good to me overall! Particularly, like the idea of bounties and voting process.

  1. Curious to see the bounties you have in mind! Will we have some sort of Post for each bounty as in #cb-contributions where people can discuss the bounty and track their progress? E.g. Educational Program one. Or you have something im mind already to track working progress on a particular bounty, because I think we will need something to understand how to spread our votes.

  2. In the forum post you say we will have initial set by Feb 12, are those members already defined and maybe even contacted or still in progress?

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Let’s imagine a working group in which several participants work on the idea and script of a video, other several participants work on the realization of this video and still other participants work on the distribution of this video on social networks using relevant hashtags and everything that can increase the reach. It’s something like a focus group but only using quality video.

It would also be interesting to have a “Focus Group” where a few speakers are prepared/selected who can make a clear, concise and accessible presentation of Namada products via YouTube, X space, Zoom or Discord, and the rest of the group works on attracting an audience for this presentation via their social resources.

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Great idea, well thought out distribution system