@DarkForestCapital Thank you for drafting the proposal, I have a few questions that are mostly tightly linked to the full-time contributors proposal:
Here are the main incentives I can see:
1- Community Methodologists are now solely focused on their product
2- Community Methodologists are guaranteed a compensation in monthly salary and vested INDEX tokens, regardless of the level of commitment to & the performance of their product.
3- Community Methodologists get an additional compensation package for their product’s instant success (AUM milestones).
4- I can see little alignment between the product’s continued success on the longer term and Methodologist’s incentives. (INDEX success is dependent on so much moving parts, that direct link to individual products at launch is hard especially on the short & medium terms).
5- I can see little reputational or financial risk community Methodologists are incurring related to failure or abandonment of the product maintenance, and definitely little to no incentives to do so after the vesting of the INDEX tokens, which in itself (2years/6month cliff) is quite short by industry standards(4years/1 year cliff).
While I do agree that everyone bringing new & successful ideas to the Coop & implementing them should be handsomely rewarded, I would like to see more incentives alignment, especially that individual product creator/maintainer roles are very different from people working on the Coop in general, and pushing all products together!
Another consideration of mine, is that products we are building in the Coop are very long term endeavors that might unfold over several years, while the incentives being set are either instantaneous, like the AUM bonus, or medium term at best like INDEX vesting which is set at 2 years with a 6 month cliff, for liquid tokens, while industry standards are 3 to 4 years with a 1 year cliff for illiquid shares!
This is why, I think that the Community Methodologist role, incentives package should be re-though as a whole, and independently from the Full-time contributor role, because they are inherently very different roles, requiring very different incentives as well as timeframes.
I also have pointed out this previously, I strongly disagree with any large spending that is happening without community votes. There should be a cap on any $ amounts that ca be disbursed without going to a vote, with a quorum requirement, since any INDEX holders are entitled to
Quick tweaks (that need more fleshing out of course) that would align incentives much better would be:
1- Tie the INDEX rewards to continued and sustained performance of the Methodologist’s product, by disbursing an INDEX token boost based on revenue generated by the coop from the product, which would incentivise managers to optimize product performance.
2- Increase the INDEX vesting time from 2 to 4 years, with a 1 year cliff to make sure community methodologists are committed to make their products a success on the long term, especially that there is no reputational risk for failure here, and holding INDEX for longer periods is the best way to make sure the community indexes are well managed until they have escape velocity!
The above still needs fleshing out in numbers as I mentioned before, but I definitely think it provides better incentive mechanisms.