GIP-17: New Community Management, Roles and Backpay

Proposals
1

Authors: parallacs, RP

Summary

It is a proposal for a new community management structure, a way of defining the members of the community who will have appropriate roles in the management structure. This proposal is also made in accordance with the pre-screening of candidates pursuant to the previously approved process for selecting the new cohort.

Motivation

With the expiration of the authority of current Community Management members on June 14, 2022, whose terms of reference were given to them after approval by Council the successful vote on GIP-08: New Community Management, Roles and Backpay proposal we propose a new Community Management structure that will help further the goals outlined in the GIP-06 Proposed Goldfinch Roadmap and any subsequent initiatives by the community.

Specification & Requirements

Key Requirements

  • Optimal community management structure that is aligned to the protocol needs of high-level community management, governance, answering technical questions re the protocol and global debt capital markets, reporting, among others.
  • Backpay to previous community management members starting from June 15, 2022 until August 1, 2022.

Specification

Estimated Stats of Community (as of July 21, 2022)

Discord Members: 40k+

Twitter Followers: 48k+

Language Discord Telegram
Russian 10k+ 2,2k+
English 7k+ 5,9k+
Ukrainian 4,5k+ <50

Other language channels in discord or telegram have low participation to count.

New Community Management

We propose the following roles based on the statistics above as well as our interactions with community members. Each role has an owner, a set of duties and responsibilities, and expected hours. Members of the new community management structure are required to engage in asynchronous communication in Discord and meet once a week to casually discuss topics to community management. All of the proposed candidates for the roles have proven their dedication and involvement in the project. In addition, all of the candidates have shown great interest in becoming part of the DAO, putting the second proposal on the voting.

Term of authority: 3 months.

Roles: Community Manager, Community Moderator

Role description

Community Manager

Owners: parallacs, RP

Estimated hours per week each: 17,5

Responsibilities:

  1. Evangelizing Goldfinch: responding to concerns / questions about Goldfinch on Youtube, Twitter, LinkedIn, Reddit, and other social media channels;
  2. Designing engagement initiatives for Goldfinch:
  • Working closely with other community stakeholders to provide feedback on / design initiatives on community engagement;
  • Creating and describing engagement processes and coordinating their implementation using various tools (e.g. Notion);
  • Keeping track of all Community Management tasks;
  1. Evaluation of the activity Community Moderators according to the reports in notion;
  2. Interacting with / providing feedback on governance proposals on https://gov.goldfinch.finance/;
  3. Running election cycle for next Community Management cohort;
  4. Maintaining election process documentation;
  5. Connecting community members on Discord with responsible for the relevant areas members then the larger community is looking for specific support or partnership opportunities;
  6. Proposal tracking: keeping a public tracker that enlists all past proposals and their status, as can be seen here;
  7. Updating news about the proposals in the #proposal-announcement channel on Discord;
  8. Updating Snapshot to reflect when governance proposals go live;
  9. Manage discord server, bots, channels, etc. as necessary;
  10. Community management to meet in weekly 60 - 90 minute syncs to discuss issues / surface community pain points;
  11. Misc. tasks as determined and agreed on by the Community Management.

Community Moderator

Owners: mcegor13, Eloquent, J.B.

Estimated hours per week each: 17,5 hours

Responsibilities:

  1. Follow the Goldfinch server rules on Discord and Telegram channels of Goldfinch according to the moderation rules, rules in Goldfinch Discord server and the rules in the Telegram channels, if such rules are announced in them;
  2. Leave no question unanswered in Discord, and flagging responsible for the relevant areas members through DM in Discord or in the Community Management channels if a Community Moderator cannot respond to specific questions;
  3. Surfacing community FAQs to the rest of the Community Management;
  4. Interacting with /providing feedback on governance proposals on https://gov.goldfinch.finance/;
  5. Welcoming individuals in the #introduce-yourself channel in Discord and answering protocol related and other questions in the #support, #discussion and when possible other categories in Discord;
  6. Answering / surfacing community complaints / questions in respective local (Telegram) channels to the larger Community Management in the weekly meeting;
  7. Supporting community members in #proposal-ideas channel on Discord to form a group, author, and push forward proposals;
  8. Translating announcements in the Discord servers to respective language channels in the Goldfinch Discord, especially around big launches / community events. Translation of Goldfinch articles / Tweets in local language channels i.e. localized Goldfinch Medium or Twitter. This should only be done if a) the community is large enough; b) the platforms used are popular in the said location;
  9. Reporting progress / work being done using tools proposed by Community Managers (e.g. Notion) once a week at least one day in advance before the regular meeting with the rest of the Community Management;
  10. Community management to meet in weekly 60 - 90 minute syncs to discuss issues / surface community pain points;
  11. Misc. tasks as determined and agreed on by the Community Management.

About Community Management Members:

Eloquent - I’m an economist involved in research in fields of strategic management and marketing, advised brands on media planning during the last 3 years. I’ve been in Goldfinch since the beginning of Flight Academy, which I’m lucky enough to be a contributor and help a lot of great participants figure out how to work on this project. During my time at Goldfinch, I’ve studied the protocol and needs of our community, so I know where to begin to build a truly international and professional community. Will be glad to continue my work with you!

J.B. - This is Jangir. Investment and credit risk professional with extensive experience in the fields of financial technology and banking. In more than 15 years I have covered debt finance both in emerging and developed markets, across large corporates and SMEs of different credit grades. A recent convert to DeFi, I believe that decentralization (on the back of secure public networks) is how the broken business model of SME lending can finally be fixed. It is also a potent tool to broaden investment opportunities (in a responsible way) otherwise currently available only to high-net-worth individuals. We are witnessing a tectonic change in the world of finance and I want to be part of it.

mcegor13 - This is Egor. I started actively participating in the Goldfinch protocol in September 2021 during the Flight Academy. While participating in the Flight Academy, I was able not only to understand the mechanics of the protocol but also actively helped manage the community as a Contributor. My interests also include research, investment, and active participation in DeFi and Web 3.0 related projects.

parallacs - This is Ian. I have been involved in the Goldfinch project for a long time as Community Manager during and after Flight Academy, after that for 3 (4,5 in fact) months I was an Admin in 1st cohort of Community Management. I also have experience in many projects as a person who is involved in organizing and developing the community. I have a master’s degree in economics, and of course the goal of the Goldfinch project is very interesting for me from a professional point of view. I like the idea of Goldfinch providing loans without collateral and what has already been built around that idea - which is a working protocol that has increased lending capital by more than 400 times in one year. But most importantly, I like the vision of the protocol expressed in the Goldfinch Roadmap and I would like to keep on working toward those goals of moving all private debt to the chain. “The whole multi-trillion dollar market of it
 Goldfinch will be that protocol” ©

RP2743 - This is Robert. Serving as Community Manager in the very best interests of the community, I have been involved in the GoldFinch Protocol since the Flight Academy. I also have real-life experience and a proven track record in finance and general management. I have always been exposed to other cultures and diversity either through learning new languages or through traveling and working across the globe.

Compensation for New Community Management

The compensation of each Community Management member has two components - USDC + GFI. Each member has a base USDC hourly pay. To make things simple and also give community management members exposure to GFI and potentially participate in governance, the compensation of GFI is set at 5% of the monthly USDC base taking the GFI value of $1.22 (30-day trailing average as of 07/21/2022).

We propose the following USDC hourly rate - $40 for Community Manager and $30 for Community Moderator. The bonus amount of GFI is adjusted proportionally to the estimated monthly wage. The number, hours, and wage is decided based on the current community stats as mentioned above. We are also influenced by guidelines from previous proposal. The proposed wage structure for each role is detailed in the sheet.

For compensating members of new community management, we request budget for 3 months of 39 300 USDC (13 100 * 3) and 1 680 GFI (560 * 3) to be transferred from protocol reserves/treasury to community management multisig. We propose the following members in the 3 multisig - parallacs, RP, ahuelsen.

We propose to make the payment twice, 50% USDC + 100% GFI within the first month and 50% USDC within 3rd month. And the second payment is only to be done if responsibilities are adequately fulfilled, as determined by the members in the multisig. We also believe that renewal of community management mandate should be made possible, but the community management most likely coming up with another proposal before the end of the 3-months term, justifying the case for renewal and with or without changes as necessary.

Community management must update the task tracker have evidence of their contributions in order to be paid out. Reviews will happen for Community Moderators at the 1st month and 3rd month marks; lack of ownership of responsibilities may lead to termination of term instantly.

Backpay for previous community management members

Backpay is calculated according to the previous proposal and the sheet for the period from June 15, 2022 until August 1, 2022 (a month and a half). As the current proposal is expected to be successfully voted on and approved by the Council on August 1, 2022, and the New Community Management will be operational on August 1, 2022. Here’s a calculation of backpay for a month and a half, plus a bonus for Community Managers for managing the voting process for the 2nd cohort of Community Management and a backpay to parallacs in return for creating bots for the Goldfinch discord server Backpay for month and a half

Estimated Gas fees

The gas fees are estimated as of July 21, 2022. This may vary with Ethereum (ETH) price and the network effects. And so, we also propose a 25% buffer to cover up. Because of the limited liquidity of the GFI/ETH pair in Uniswap, we request USDC instead of GFI in order to swap with less slippage.

USDC to ETH Swap in Uniswap: 1 time

Estimated transaction cost: $5 in ETH

Approx number of ERC-20 transfers in a 3-months term, including backpay: 29 times

Estimated cost of ERC-20 transfer: $2 in ETH

Estimated total cost: $63 in ETH

Estimated total cost + 25% buffer = $79 in ETH

Budget Summary

New community management compensation: 39 300 USDC + 1 680 GFI

Backpay: 23 650 USDC + 1 650 GFI

Estimated gas fees: 79 USDC (to be converted to ETH)

Total to transfer to multisig: 63 029 USDC + 3 330 GFI

Benefits

  • The selected Community Management are self-empowered and sufficient to collaborate in a ‘flat structure’ with community;
  • Community is financially compensated for the work they are putting in the form of $USDC and $GFI;
  • Community Management becomes the voice of the community and surfaces complaints.

Drawbacks and Risks

We see no drawbacks in having an optimal Community Management structure and paying previous community management members for the deserved effort.

Voting

“Yes” - Approve the New Community Management mandate and backpay.

“No” - Don’t approve.

Resources:

Announcement of approval of the previous Community Management proposal

GIP-08: New Community Management, Roles and Backpay

GIP-06 Proposed Goldfinch Roadmap

Goldfinch Governance

Goldfinch Discord server rules

Governance Proposals tracker

Indicative_Payment_Proposal (from GIP-08)

Backpay for month and a half

2 Likes
2

I consider this proposal to be a well structured document and I agree, that there are no drawbacks in having an optimal Community Management structure. I also acknowledge, that new Community Management must keep serving in the very best interests of the Goldfinch community.
Hence, I vote “yes” for this proposal to be passed.

3

I checked the activity and posts on the server since 01.06:

Parallacs - 16 posts
Rp - 190 posts
Eloquent - 190 messages
J.b - 17 posts
McEgor - 170 posts
It has been 9 weeks since June 1.
17.5 hours × 9 weeks = 157 hours.
I.e. on average it turns out for 1 hour some participants write 1.1 message, and it will cost 30 dollars.
If you take Paralak and jb - their one post costs 10 hours or 300/400 dollars.
I don’t agree with the distribution of awards. It’s up to you, but I think a $30/$40/hour award is a bit steep.

4

I don’t think it’s worth to calculate salary only on public posts, but salary 17.5 * 40 * 4 = 2800$ / month only base pay in dollars + GFI bonus I think too much for simple answers, which can be simply put in FAQ.

Especially considering the fact that the activity and interaction rates with the community are only getting worse.

But it’s applause-worthy – to ruin the community and activity, answer a few questions a week yourself, and translate announcements (thereby staying active)
Make re-elections and motivate the re-election with the fact that we are the only ones writing in the branches for aprox $3k per month )))

Also strange to exclude salova as the only member who was the only one making creative suggestions.
But also a plus that they left Eloquent )))

5

I myself did not apply because we see interaction with the community a little differently.
I have a question about backpay, how come that manse with 0 posts since June 10 gets 3900$+270 GFI?

6

Well and I agree, 2600-2700 salary for moderators this nonsense. For such activity in discord enough 3 managers (at the same time and moderator) with such a salary

7

Thank you very much for your feedback, however I am not sure that the input of the community management is measured only by the number of messages on the server. The full list of responsibilities is detailed above and it’s much wider than just texting messages. Furthermore, every member of the community management also has to do an additional research in order to provide a community member with the thorough answer in case the question is not easy to be answered straight forward.

2 Likes
8

Also, I disagree with brdg about Eloquent, he is just a good moderator, does exactly what is needed
As I wrote above, most likely the salaries in relation to the work being done are significantly higher than they should be.

9

Thank you very much for your feedback. The server has a FAQ channel and the community moderators have been doing their best to structure the whole bulk of incoming information in different ways: threads, pinned msgs etc.

However, you should also take into account that both the protocol and the community are evolving and growing up. Hence, you cannot put all the information inside the FAQ and leave it alone, as things are changing all the time. Another challenge is, that FAQ will be either huge and unuseful if you try to put inside it all the new info, or small and uninformative enough if you add only some important milestones. This is the reason, why we need to have real people, who are capable of dealing with different type of questions and who know a thing or two both in DeFi and in TradiFi.

I would appreciate it a lot if you could be more specific, while saying, that “the activity and interaction rates with the community are only getting worse”?I have a slightly different point of view, as I can see people attending AMA, welcoming a new Grant Program and participating actively in a high-quality convo on the forum.

As far as I know Salova didn’t apply to become a part of Goldfinch’s community management and he confirmed it above.

1 Like
10

Thank you very much for the feedback. The proposed reward system is market average for the community management on Discord. However, as you can see we decreased the amount of Community Management members to make it bettor tailored for the community needs.

11

Hello everyone, after reading the discussion above, I can add the following from myself:

When calculating working hours, you should not only take into account the number of posts written, but also the work that is done outside of answering questions and participating in discussions. This is especially true for community managers, who perform most of the tasks not related to answering questions, but related to organizational issues. As for community moderators, in the previous cohort of Community Management, Mans and I worked in shifts. We had a schedule to cover different time intervals to answer users’ questions in real time. I think that this time we will be able to use a similar approach, given that the members of the community are in different time zones. In addition to this, as @RP2743 correctly pointed out, it should be taken into account that many questions cannot be answered immediately, and the formulation of the correct answer may take a considerable amount of time due to the need for additional research.

Also in comparison to the previous Сommunity Management cohort, conclusions were made and the number of hours was reduced, even though there will now be no “Governance Champion” and “Community Ambassador” positions and their responsibilities will be reassigned to the new community management cohort. So we will have to do more work than before, but the number of working hours has been reduced. As for hourly pay, in my opinion these amounts do not exceed the average amounts paid in other protocols and DAOs.

@salova correctly noted that Mans has been absent for the last 2 months. I think his backpay may be redistributed between Metatron and Eloquent, as they have been very active in the Support, Discussion, and Dev categories on Discord in addition to their duties as community ambassadors during these months. In fact, for the past two months they’ve been doing exactly the job that Mans would have been doing if he hadn’t been absent.

In general, I support this proposal and my vote is “Yes”.

1 Like
12

Many people write that the price of $30/$40 is the average price. Can I see an analysis or a “cross-section salary of the rest of the DAOs”?
Ty

13

Hey, @Ol4ik! Thanks for your comments!
Of course, as described in this proposal, we used analysis from the previous proposal. We are also influenced by guidelines from two protocols, namely, DXdao and Sushiswap.
We also accounted the decrease in the number of Community Management members, which reduced the total number of Community Management costs for the protocol.

1 Like
14

It’s funny how you ask “to be more specific” while using abstract concepts like “see people attending AMA, welcoming a new Grant Program”

I understand that you want to stay in your positions, because 3k / month is a big salary for 3.5h a day, and given the examples of the person above. I guess you spend much less time.
After all, no one is tracking your working hours.

But as for my words, I can give you some statistics.
The current team was at the beginning of the formation of the community and is fully responsible.

Also, to be objective, I will show the statistics since December. (The rest of July’s activity is also included using the approximation method)
Since the listing to Coinbase was at the beginning of November, people who were here just for airdrop should have stopped being active, so I took the countdown from December.

What we could observe

Activity falls every month, the total loss of activity is 95%.
The absolute(chart1 - messages every month) and relative(%loss messages specific month relative to messages prev month) loss in activity are shown in the charts.

As I’ve written before - you were only good in answering questions “how to take the money since the pools are empty” and translating announcements.

Most of your actions are unprofessional and negatively perceived in the community, but with the help of “miracle” have always been accepted in the proposals.

Active people who initially helped the project, helped with the revision of appeals, the generation of development ideas left the project, because they were completely ignored.
Today you encourage people who are active just to “get some rewards for their work”
You have completely destroyed the community, as you can see from the statistics.

What kind of bonuses or payments can there be for such work?
In any company you would have all been kicked out long ago.

You have proved only one thing - you can neither unite the community nor make it active.
As i see -
you deliberately ignore active people and suggestions so that they leave the project and you can be re-elected for another term.

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As for salaries, I would like to see community leaders receive such salaries. But there must be a corresponding result of their work.

1 Like
15

Thanks @RP2743 and @parallacs for putting the proposal. For those who don’t know, we had similar proposal before (GIP-08) and it did pass. As I have been in sabbatical leave for some time, I couldn’t follow-up on the current proposal. However, I believe things before and now are not the same. Discord is more stable, less message but highly improved conversations.

And such, things in this proposal perhaps need more clarity – why 2 community managers instead of 1 for similar responsibilities with 20 hours each, why 3 moderators and predominantly Russian speaking and why Japanese/Korean, etc. community is not included. Should it not be possible to share hours between different language community members such that things are optimized, the community management being more diverse (as Goldfinch is global) and fits within the budget constraints. Also, I think simply having responsibilities may not be enough now, some milestones should be tied. And milestone reporting be monthly like the way GIP-16 demanding monthly reporting from protocol borrowers.

I support backpay. But not the way it is calculated in the following proposal. Like in GIP-08, taking many variables into account, number of messages typed in discord, telegram, DMs, participation in governance discussions, twitter posts, etc. Because the last group mandate was until May 31, I suggest taking June 1 as the reference date until the date the (new) proposal is posted.

16

Thank you for your response.
As wrote @brdg above - the result of working from February to June only made things worse. I am not saying that the work was not done. It was done, but perhaps it is not effective for the community?
Before the launch of the project was a lot of participants and really needed constant help in discord.
Today Goldfinch is already working and successful, why keep 3 moderators and 2 administrators?
On salary level: you only took 2 DAO projects with some of the highest pay levels. Most DAOs (I think more than 80%) don’t pay those salaries. Don’t you think it’s not accurate to say that this is an average salary?

17

Good afternoon!

I would also like to note that @salova, as far as I know, unfortunately didn’t apply for the election. Do you have any specific complaints about my work, considering my position and the list of duties I perform according to GIP-08?

Responsibilities:

  • Answer community questions in language-specific Discord or Telegram channels;
  • Keep the Discord and Telegram spam-free;
  • Translate any new Discord announcements and share them with the local community in Discord and local Telegram channels;
  • Escalate any tough issues to Community Managers;
  • Work closely with Community Managers to establish KPIs;
  • Work on miscellaneous community tasks, as necessary.
18

GFI listing on Coinbase was January 11, 2022 and not early November as you say Goldfinch Protocol (GFI) is launching on Coinbase Pro | by Coinbase | The Coinbase Blog So your charts just confirm that the reason for the decline in activity was the flight academy rewards / retroactive LP and Backers rewards, and 95% of community members lost interest in participating in the community precisely after receiving their GFI and not because of incompetent managers / moderators

19

Thanks so much for your feedback, @mans9841!

Regarding our language communities: Goldfinch is definitely an international protocol. As you yourself are aware, one of our main goals is to follow the concept of a globalized community.

In the process of discussing the current proposal, it was decided that building and maintaining national or local community relations would look better in the Goldfinch grant system paradigm, given the reduced activity of certain local communities on the server at the moment. This way makes more sense, at least because it allows us to approach each local community individually, taking into account all its specificities

20

I apologize, I was looking on discord for the first listing notices on coinbase and probably misslead.
I will not edit the previous post to save the context and build new ones (from February).
But I assure you, the situation there doesn’t change much.
So total lost - minus 70% of activity


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