A Big Test for DAOs: Honing New Compensation and Contribution Practices

DAO infrastructure is an emerging sector, and novel compensation mechanisms are a key part of it. Fortunately, over the past year or so, we’ve seen more tools to help compensate contributors in various ways. The sector has also seen well-funded DAOs adopt more traditional mechanisms like USD-based salaries that feature token-based compensation pack... See more

As discussed, the hardest part of this seems to be assessing the value of contributions. In the short-term, this is inevitably quite subjective and requires a largely qualitative assessment. Over time, we’ll be able to design governance mining distribution mechanisms that are quantitatively driven, creating greater efficiency & less subjectivity th... See more

Contributor evaluation & growth: As more DAO members join, how can we help contributors evaluate their personal growth & development? How can the DAO effectively align compensation and value created within a non-hierarchical context?

1) How to lower the barrier to meaningful contribution: Because contributions to DAOs can come from anywhere, tools that qualify and quantify different types of contributions (e.g. bounties, DAO-specific metrics) can be used to create a shared understanding of priorities of how one can expect to be rewarded for different levels of participation. In... See more

Is the impact and visibility of this task wide or narrow? DAOs (hopefully) pay for impact. But, incentives often work based on the visibility of such impact. We all know salt-of-the-earth DAO contributors who are the community's spiritual glue, but will their over-sized achievements be fully recognized in social graphs or mechanisms like Coordinape... See more