Engineering and Product Constraints

I can’t stress this enough, 18 months is shortsighted and completely misses the problem it is supposed to solve. The number one thing that drew me to this community was the long-term thinking and only using 18 months to find the best methodologists in the world is mind-boggling.

This problem got even worse after the Set team decided to pull out all the possible engineering resources from the coop (as set by the Engineering WG Q2 OKR’s) before that 18 month period even ended.

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Following up on my post. I spoke with @dylan and @puniaviision about the post and my comment on Discord.

Here are @dylan’s comments from our Discord thread:

and…

@dylan @richard @puniaviision I would happily help kick off the expert groups and to start the process of responsibly transitioning ownership of product/index rebalances to the community.

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the Set team decided to pull out all the possible engineering resources from the coop

That is not at all an accurate description of the situation. Improvements to Index Coop products & operations continue to make up the vast majority of Set Labs’ internal engineering roadmap

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I made sure to include the word possible to acknowledge that. Removing every resource at this point is still unfeasible.

Thank you for clarifying.

I used the Ethereum Docs and CryptoZombies to get my head around the concepts and figure out what questions to ask. This helped me to write my first contract.

We’re also working on documentation for our repos that will make onboarding a bit easier.

EWG has had discussions on related content creation

I think Richard has a bounty out for a couple important ones on the bounty spreadsheet

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One of the ways we might address this problem is establishing a partnership with Raid Guild to work on new products. If we were able to get work into their pipeline we would have the confidence they are in progress and being handled as proper projects with Index Coop serving as the client.

Raid Guild is a DAO of crypto OGs and have a network with many of the roles we need support with.

Although they are also experiencing more demand than supply right now they are focused on expanding internal resources and working on ways to prioritize product work. Like staking to get projects moved up in queue.

I am currently an Apprentice with Raid Guild and getting up to speed with the CDWG at Index Coop. My passion is product development process and would be willing to push this along if it is an option we would like to explore.

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hi @puniaviision

Thank you taking the time to write the post and for shedding some light on the engineering work load. Reading over the post, something I am failing to grasp here is timeline and specific tasks being worked on.

I understand there is work being done documenting a lot of the rebalancing process to enable new contributors via PWG to help out. This is great, but it was presented in the comments.

I struggle to comprehend based on current Engineering capacity how many hours we spend on occurring tasks. For example, what is engineering resource utilisation for occurring tasks like maintenance - DPI rebalancing is x days per month and not expanding the functionality of on a product that was brought to market knowing it required ongoing development.

For example, what specific engineering tasks relating to FLI are being worked on ?
Is TokenSets integrating functionality like flash loans, something not available on Compound but is on other protocols not integrated into TokenSets.

What I am trying to communicate, is I understand the pitched narrative, but knowing Set Labs was working on products in private (cough FLI) without sharing them with Index Coop - I want deeper insight into what specific things are being worked on.

Naturally, this is a huge blind spot for Index Coop and the DAO community is reliant on external Set Labs communications for updates.

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Would it be okay to dig into this question a little bit?

At a thematic level, the smart contract engineering team [AFAIK] right now is concerned with infrastructure level upgrades to the FLI suite, documentation to be able to onboard the community, and any quick wins around automation.

Struggling to understand the underlying question/concern. Having our SC team regularly report their hours for the things they are working on would be significant additional overhead. Wondering if there are other things we could do here to build up trust.

Who is head of the Engineering Working Group for the Coop? Index Coop Org Chart

Pretty confident @dylan leads the EWG, but I’ll let him confirm.

If you haven’t voted on IIP-49 yet, take 1 minute to cast your vote here :point_right: Snapshot

IIP-49: DPI MetaGoverance Vote Delegation to Multisig will free up hours each week of Set engineering resources to focus on improvements that impact Coop produts.

Deadline: ~4 hours from now (11:00 am PT / 6:00 pm UTC)
INDEX needed: ~6,000 INDEX to reach quorum
Current Status: 100% FOR

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@anon10525910 Is there a easy reference to know what number of INDEX to reach quorum is? Did this reach quorum?

I voted YES on this a few days ago and in hindsight should have done more campaigning to get it to pass.

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Also voted Yes. :slight_smile:

Thanks for raising this here @anon10525910.

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the short answer is no :slightly_frowning_face: I manually calculate 5% of circulating supply and track progress for each vote. IIP-49 did surpass quorum.

Fwiw, there is a card in Engineering’s Trello board related to making quorum/progress against it more visible.

It is not in the current sprint, though I am noticing that the # of requests for this visibility is increasing

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Hi @puniaviision

The narrative around eng and developer resourcing is that everyone at Set Labs is basically full time on Index Coop. I have heard this countless times over the last few months.

When the community has sought further insight into who is working on what and how long these tasks are expected to take - Set Labs has failed to provide any meaningful insight. The community flagged concerns around poor communication in the past with Set Labs working on the FLI product months before sharing this with Index Coop’s community.

Fast forward to now, Index Coop has not been able to bring products to market quickly and Set Labs has been flagging engineering/developer workload as a concern. What is abundantly clear, is engineering work scopes flow through a Set Labs process which determines what gets prioritised.

The recent launch of TokenSets on Polygon is a clear example of Set Labs with holding information from the Index Coop community. To me this is a clear signal to the market that Set Labs is trying to kick start the individual trading platform initiative that failed to gain traction on L1. What this does is creates additional engineering/developer drain on the same few resources. Looking past the resource constraints, this is not very honest or transparent behaviour on Set Labs behalf given Index Coop products have been largely on pause and now BEDs listing coincides with post Polygon Launch :thinking:

Further to the above @setoshi frames Index Coop as a Customer. Not a partner, not a 28% owned subsidiary but as a Customer. If Set Labs was a contractor, then we would should have a contract in place with T&Cs - that is how traditional business conduct operations.

I am also concerned that this framing implies Set Labs will monetise the relationship with Index Coop. After-all, contractors are paid for a service and replaced when performance is suboptimal or expensive. This is the nature of customer / client relationship. A partnership is different, but Index Coop is the same as Ember Fund in this context.

Whilst on the broad topic of trust, appears Set Labs is selecting its words carefully and mis portraying the truth to no only Index Coop but to other major partners.

I would like to believe Set Labs but in light of the above concerns, I am finding it increasingly challenging to do so.

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Conversations with Set show that this was not intentional. While it did affect IC’s Polygon rollout we are working to establish the appropriate channels to ensure that such miscommunications do not happen again. Set has been a great partner and look forward to continuing to work with them and expand IC’s suite to Polygon.

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I understand that tensions are currently high throughout our community on a few key issues.

Specifically:

  • Community autonomy and self-direction
  • Contract ownership/permissions
  • Methodologist and community member compensation

These conversations involve every major stakeholder in the Coop ( including us, DeFi Pulse, and Set Labs). Our current incentive structure and tokenomics clearly need work in order to fully align incentives across the community. I big factor in this frustration from the community is the reality that the core contributors (including FT and WG leaders and all Gold Owls) collectively own <2% of the protocol even when accounting for FT vesting contracts. For example, total protocol ownership for all FT contributors combined equals 0.6% over two years of work.

I highlight the above to illustrate that there are very real issues and frustrations shared across all parties, myself included. My loyalty does not lie with SET Labs or DFP. I did not walk away from a normal life for either party, I walked away because I love our community and community members. Seeing our protocol thrive, and our community succeed has been the proudest thing I have ever been part of.

We as a community are ready and capable of having these conversations without attacking our dragging stakeholders through the mud. Everyone including SET and DFP is giving their heart and soul to this project. That is a basic reality. SET Labs doesn’t need to front-run or monetize their relationship with Index Coop, they have a big enough stake that the further success of our protocol will generate far more revenue for them long-term than by charging us some future fee. To suggest that they have some nefarious plan is quite frankly ridiculous.

BD specifically asked for BED to be pushed back so that it would not launch on the same day as Sushiswaps’ Trident announcement. While the roll out of Tokensets on Polygon came as a surprise, that clearly was not meant to frontrun the Polygon rollouts that @oneski22 has been working so hard on for the past few months.

We can pick can snipe at any of the three legs of our collective tripod as much as as we want - but I promise you this will get us no-where. I am all for having frank and public discussions around the future of our protocol, but we need to have these discussions from a position of mutual respect and trust.

Here are a few actions that are completely unacceptable when having these conversations and we need to stop doing as a community.

  • Insulting other community members or working groups. We cannot have positive forward conversations if we are constantly sniping each other. If anyone wants to do that - they are more than welcome to go and join one of the million toxic chat rooms that exist across the internet.

  • Negotiating based on threats. I understand that emotions often run high and people can feel that their perspective is not being heard. But if every time we encounter some issue or friction people run around yelling that they “are about to leave the community” it becomes very difficult to have any kind of conversation.

  • Adopting an us-vs-them mentality. If we start this kind of thinking our cohesive team will quickly degrade into progressively smaller groups fighting increasingly more petty battles. Losing happens when we devolve into a zero-sum organization with community members fighting community members, WG fighting WGs, and stakeholders fighting stakeholders. If we don’t figure out a way for SET - DFP - INDEX to work together and collaborate, we wont get anywhere.

  • Attacking other community members. If you would not say it to that community members face, don’t F****** say it. This may be the hardest rule of all and no-one is perfect. But we can’t establish the trust needed to succeed as a protocol if we can’t trust each other.

Over the past few months I have had rewarding conversations with @setoshi @asoong and @scott_lew_is @Etienne. After each conversation, I come away absolutely blown away by their respective levels of knowledge and passion for DeFi. But my biggest takeaway from all four is their level of passion for Index Coop. All major stakeholders share a common belief that we are building something truly incredible with Index Coop and want to see it succeed. This shared belief in the strength of the protocol and what we have accomplished so far is a common foundation that we all need to rally around. :rocket:

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Couldn’t have said it better myself.

This one hits home. This has been the approach a few folks chose to take recently. It’s counter productive, it damages everyone’s morale, takes focus away from key priorities and it’s not going to get you what you want. What kind of leader or partner negotiates based on threats? We are all here for the same reason - make DeFi products accessible to anyone and build the next BlackRock. Let’s not lose sight of that.

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Do want to acknowledge this criticism and we need to have the Set Engineering <> IC communication be better understood.

Would also like to highlight that the Coop has the funds and capacity to hire an engineering team. It’s a question of doing the work. Part of this conversation needs to be community members very clearly understanding that they have the agency fix these problems.

Calling out that this is being prioritized by the EWG. That proposal is worth a read.

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