Announcing the First Community Builder PGF Voting Round
Greetings, friends and followers of Namada -
Namada has now reached 5 weeks of the Community Builder program, which means that starting next week, community voting will begin in order to evaluate the first round of contributions from Community Builders who have been a part of the program so far.
This first Namada Community Builder Voting Epoch will help determine the proportions of NAM allocated to those who took part in the program. This voting round will also inform those who will remain in the Community Builders program as ongoing contributors out of the 250 who were included until voting takes place.
What happens ahead of the first Voting Epoch
Community Builders can use this article as a guide for understanding what they can expect of the Community Builder RPGF round as it comes to a close.
As of writing this article, a small detail based on a functional issue will be changed. The Coordinape voting epoch will start on Wednesday, November 29th at 00:00UTC rather than the originally stated Sunday, November 27th, in order to offer one extra week-day for CBs to ensure that they have access to their Coordinape accounts for voting purposes. This is on the basis of it being clear that some CBs have not accessed their Coordinape accounts since submitting it in their application. The Voting epoch will still end on Tuesday, December 5th, at 23:59UTC.
Early Stewards will be going through and pruning out CB accounts that never submitted contributions to Coordinape, were heavily inactive on Discord, or were egregiously out of line with the requirements shared in the docs here. Pruning will take place over this coming weekend leading into the start of the voting epoch. If you feel you were pruned incorrectly, please appeal the decision by Monday, November 28th at 00:00UTC.
What CBs should do ahead of the voting period:
- Check that they can log into Coordinape and inform community leadershipif they can't so that it can be rectified. If you can login but are no longer a part of the circle, it’s possible that you were pruned out, which again you can appeal with me directly.
- It is not possible to be added to the epoch once the voting period starts, so please verify that you can log in and that you can see the Namada Community Builders circle.
- Re-read the community docs to understand what the parameters are for submission and what a good 'participant' can look like
- Ensure that their contributions have been submitted to either a linked CB profile / collaboration post in discord OR on Coordinape ahead of the submission end date of Wed 29th. (details are here)
- Either way, we want to be able to see the work that you did / evaluate the potential of its outcome, starting with your Coordinape profile, then linked out to a Discord parent post, (if this is how the Community Builder chose to track their contributions).
- Help other community members ensure that their contributions look right and prepare to allocate time to critically and honestly evaluate other people's work.
How Voting on Coordinape will work:
Community Builders should watch this video, or follow this link to the community Notion to understand how Coordinape works and how it will be used in this voting period. This article will proceed as though a reader understands Coordinape. The gist, however, is that Coordinape allows participants in a program to vote on the 'profiles' of other participants in order to signal whether or not they thought a participant's work was helpful to the organization they are a part of, which is why it was chosen for Namada. GIVE can be reallocated throughout the voting period based on individual preference and changes in opinion by someone allocating, so as a participant, please do keep in mind that you can do so until the epoch ends.
As a rule, this program will not constrain how a CB votes - on the one part because Early Stewards can't, on the other because we expect some level of defection from the ways we hope people will act. I've personally mentioned before that I expect some level of cartel-like behavior in those who vote, and I don't think this is completely avoidable - but I do believe it will be mitigated through vision alignment.
It's for this reason that the current RPGF program for CBs will have a 60/40 split on vote weight between the Early Stewards and the Community Builders themselves, with the intention that over time the vote weight of Stewards in subsequent Community Builder elections will go decrease in proportion to the rest of the community. Besides - over time, it will be evident who is actually here to help, in the long run.
How CBs should evaluate other projects and participants:
Ideally, Community Builders should be evaluating other Community Builders and their contributions on the basis of how aligned contributions are with the Namada mission and with the docs in their accuracy, effort, and collaborative spirit. Many projects that were proposed and completed both within and preceding the Community Builder's program were worked on by multiple community members - as was mentioned in the Coordinape demo, it is expected that those who worked closely with others will allocate their GIVE tokens to those they worked closely with. It's also possible to reallocate your GIVE throughout the entire voting period.
What I'd like to encourage, however, is that CBs critically examine the work of other projects and allocate their GIVE across all those that are a part of the CB program. Community Builders cannot see and evaluate everything, but if in theory every CB evaluates some portion of other CB's profiles, we will cover all contributions.
Additionally, CB members being especially deliberate in the allocation of their GIVE is a benefit to the final community design, as these votes will inform the final allocation of NAM to Community Builders who participated in the program and the final assessment of who was best regarded as helpful by the community.
How Early Stewards should evaluate other projects and participants:
Since Early Stewards hold 60% of the vote weight for the first Community Builder RPGF round, they will be using a more deliberate approach of reviewing every profile on Coordinape that is a part of the program using a mixture of quantitative and qualitative criteria, i.e. they will subjectively evaluate the points value of contributions and use these to determine how to allocate the GIVE they have as individual Coordinape circle members.
The criteria Early Stewards will include the following in their assessment:
- Factual correctness / obvious deviation from requirements
- Subjective Evaluation of effort made
- Usefulness to the community on either an individual or a contribution level
- Potential of an individual’s contribution (if a proof-of-concept)
- Volume of contributions (though this can be weighed against the value of a contribution)
What happens once voting concludes:
The GIVE results of the Coordinape round will inform the allocation of NAM to those who took part in the program on the basis of the quality of their contributions and profile history.
If a CB member participated in voting and received GIVE in the Coordinape round, they will be asked to generate and submit a Namada wallet address readying them for an allocation of NAM in the genesis block, alongside other PGF nominations such as the Trusted Setup and RPGF nominees. Early Stewards will then meet to evaluate the GIVE allocation results and propose the final Community Builder participants who will be a part of the nascent Namada Community Builder program, who will then be contacted to ensure that they would like to continue being a Community Builder.
Those who are still in the program after pruning will take part in designing the initial community structure and planning for the near future of Namada as a community and will be allocated to different working groups on the basis of their skillsets and desires to contribute. I can't wait to see what comes of this.
(probable) FAQs:
- I can’t log into Coordinape!
- Contact @motherpredicate (me) on Discord on having difficulties logging in - she will ensure you can access the account. Do this ahead of Monday, Nov 27th at UTC00:00, or you will not be a part of the circle.
- I got pruned out of the program and I don’t think I should have been!
- Contact @motherpredicate on Discord to appeal the decision - this is being done on the basis of accounts that have no activity in discord and no activity in Coordinape.