Proposal: Budget for Treasurer/Product Owner

[Jolie_Ze]

Background

The Product Circle was assembled over many months and dismantled overnight. I am the sole remaining member of the Circle, with Thena having broken off with amrr to do heads-down development. My role as a product owner has often been difficult to place, but Thena – who works closely with me, holds context, and is my housemate – saw it and that’s why they invited me to join Product Circle membership. It was sudden that the circle dissolved and all promises with it. With it though, has gone any context for my work with SourceCred. So allow me to build some for you here!

What it means right now to be a product owner without a circle is that I continue to negotiate partnerships that began dialogue months ago (Stacks), hold knowledge of the product and experiment over time (1 year+), am a growing technologist (understanding of the technical aspects of the product), and additionally am trusted with and show up for crucial treasury acrobatics.

I will be continuing to hold space on Fridays (or perhaps a new designated time TBD) for devs to gather (in place of Product Circle), for the product circle bylaws to be studied, and for other potential emerging projects related to the product and junior devs.

As you all know, SourceCred community depends on deep relating and connection in order to be seen and recognized in our shared work. Well, my relationships at SourceCred are almost invisible now and so is my work! It’s tough, because I have to be patient not to inundate the community with the information and documents that I hold and have been holding for a long time, but, the truth is, I love this project and this community and I’m still here (some of you notice, I see I’m being given new value-aligned roles [I see you]). I’m still deeply committed to this emerging product. I’m holding many threads that I feel passionate about. I’m willing to show up for the project and for you as new treasurers and (re)emerging technologists.

But what I’m about to do is scary and new. Treasury duties specifically, are historically the highest stress and lowest recognition, reward, and transparency within SourceCred. We did a lot to dismantle this with the emergence of the multisig, the comms channel, and numerous pinned posts. Historically, rewarding treasury has been particularly obscure (top-down negotiations done off-screen awarding contributors directly from Protocol Labs on a stipend, for example), with the labor often unseen and difficult to reward by the algorithm, but also not well understood or explained by a didathing (how to explain on-call for emergency airdrop? or a 3hr conversation with a person in need of emergency aid?). Not to mention the mundane-ness of it and the many barriers folks have to onboarding or talking about finances/money/blockchain tech sometimes for their first time with others. But what I mean to do here is to set a precedent and ask for my labor be rewarded explicitly in the coming months, in the short term, as I continue to work and hold these high-value threads.

I will add that it hasn’t been a choice to be out-of-relationship with the new emerging SourceCred community. Besides needing to take space from the server and re-aligning my relationships in the new year, the emerging SourceCred calendar since returning from break has been in direct conflict with my other SourceCred related ecosystems and product work. Dropping in randomly has felt more like a burden than an aid in the recent weeks, but that’s all I could muster with a calendar that didn’t consider my needs, so I have mostly been absent.

Goals

• Stacks Partnership & $100k expedited grant
• Managing Stacks partnership expectations including PR, milestones, comms, and roadmap
• Continued, dependable, collective-driven multisig actions
• Continued management of the ongoing tithes & comms
• Continued management of the incoming tokens that may be put toward a matching grant by PL (TBD)
• Delivery of Gnosis Chain (formerly known as xDAI) multisig pending community approval
• Provide one-on-one support for new treasurer onboarding
• Provide support for a token launch, should the community decide to focus on one [I have a grain pool draft ready when and if the community arrives at this place]

Proposal

$3,000 per 2 weeks for a total of 8 weeks (or $12,000 total). If I discontinue any of my treasury or partnership responsibilities before 8 weeks is up, the remaining budget will be ceded back to the community.

Considerations

• The dollar amounts solely reflect my stated need
• Seth is the other Treasurer! I have not forgotten him! Seth and my needs are different and in some ways divergent. We also have different positionalities in SourceCred and different relationships to the work we do (for instance, I LOVE treasury/numbers/accounting work). I have had his blessing in going forward with my own proposal for the things that I do and track in SoureCred.
• This is an amount I ask in response to being an on-call active treasurer in addition to the above
• Two week disbursements were chosen to align with [Thena’s proposal] (Proposal: Budget for heads-down development)
• I hope folks will consider this a precedent for asking for what they need to sustain themselves as individuals and/or working teams as well

Edit: A couple clarifications below:

• This original post (above) was not intended as an exit plan at the time but as a short term proposal for compensation for unseen responsibilities.

• If I could I would add to the Considerations section that all the items listed in the Goals section are things I already do or am tracking the need for that I was trying to bring attention to, not additional responsibilities.

[blueridger]

I support this. While my and Amr’s “squad” has somewhat diverged from the Product work you do, your ongoing Product work is still very high-impact and highly complimentary to what our squad is doing. Getting grants on the basis of the squad’s roadmap, carrying the torch of internal instance configuration as a SME on the product, working closely with a number of instance admins in the ecosystem, driving Product specs innovation with tech artists… huge and hard to measure. It appears the funding you will almost certainly capture will more than make up for this ask.

+ it’s way past time we show some respect to our diligent and taken-for-granted treasurers.

[rachel]

Thanks for putting in the time to articulate all that you’re holding in the org right now Ryeder. I have such care for you in the shock of the prod team dissolving, and care that your calendar is so misaligned with key SC meetings that would’ve allowed you to be more a part of the lightening fast transitions of the last month, and I hear that you haven’t intended to be out of relationship and that you genuinely want to be woven. (This is news to me and I”m glad to hear it, I thought your disengagement was intentional and perhaps permanent b/c I’d understood that you intended to leave.)

I’m also hearing and want to affirm the ofcourseness of the distress you’re articulating: I imagine it must feel so shitty to have been co-holding the high-stakes role of treasury (much of it invisible and difficult to articulate) without been seen or compensated for that work that we all depend on; definitely agree w/ Thena that its high time to reward that labor and explicitly acknowledge and see you for that.

I appreciate the specificity of this proposal, and there are some potential amendments and community conversation I’d like to see happen before approving this, which i’ll outline below.

First, at a base level, to affirm some things:

• I agree that you are a good candidate to hold the role of product owner, given your deep existing and emerging relationships within the product user ecosystem and other value-aligned communities who might use SourceCred to do rad things in the future and give us funds for that, as well as your 1+ work as a growing technologist w/ Thena’s support to grok technical pieces many of us might be missing.

• I hear and trust that you do really love this community and want to continue participating in the radical social experimentation (although I do feel a little disoriented to hear this given my understanding that you’d announced your intention to leave, would love more open conversations in community about that, especially in light of this new proposal).

• I believe we need a product owner whose actions and ethos bridges the product with the community and supports the latter to be an incubator for radical ways of relating that then informs and co-steers the evolution of the product (in addition to the larger user ecosystem).

• As mentioned above, I suuuuper agree that we need a treasury lead to perform tasks on call and to hold the complex and high-stress elements of this role, especially given Seth’s longing to be free of those roles.

Here are some concerns, questions and conversations desired:

• I’m tracking and aware of a handful of historical, and on-going, interpersonal conflicts that you walk with in this org. I want to center some amount of attention on healing these, and setting up feedback and grievance systems to prevent the individual tensions and collective group-body atrophy and departure/attrition that is left in the wake of unmetabolized conflict.

• I do not consent to putting you in explicit positions of power (in addition to the role and social power you already wield) without directly addressing this as part of this proposal. I deeply believe, especially given the radical nature of our value system, that we each have custodial responsibilities to be well with each other and engage in containered feedback, and that those responsibilities should be baked in to salary requirements for all of us, including you. (FWIW Thena’s proposal addresses this by providing office hours and the receptivity they’ve shown in inviting in, and relating to community in the conversations that led to their squad proposal.) Knowing you personally, I imagine you agree with the need for feedback flow? I’d love to weave with you for systems building and ways forward to be well, if you consent to that.

• I am oriented toward stabilizing the community and distributing some of the centralized power you hold, where possible. I’d like to know whether part of this short-term salary agreement could include you creating (or collaborating w/ others to create) how-tos and tutorial documentation for treasury tasks, so that you are not holding the role power that comes w/ no one else knowing how, and so that key tasks can be easily continued by others in the future should you decide to exit?

• Regarding meeting attendance: I wonder if we might collectively consider potentially rescheduling some of our key weekly meetings based on your schedule to support attendance? And whether you actually want to and would attend to the real-time movements in a more consistent way?

• FWIW I am personally challenged by the nature of your server contributions (abundant and flooding in very small time-increments and big in their impact eg let’s talk about a token launch, let’s talk about dissolving core, proposing this budget w/out inviting more discussion first to build context) in light of how little context you might have for the movements of the group body which are difficult to track without consistent real-time engagement and relating.

• I appreciate your acknowledgement of this when you noted that you want to move with patience and not inundate the community with info and documents and I do trust that you are attempting to hold this with care, but/and/also I personally would love to encourage all of us to consider supporting cohesion in the group body and titrating our new ideas and movements in tandem w/ the pulse of the org, tracking the big pieces we’re trying to cohere around (mission/vision, new funding model, better onboarding and membership criteria, etc) which are the activities that stabilize, before we add new high impact pieces – and this is supported by live time engagement and pulse-taking.

• As it relates to the scheduling misalignment, I am negatively impacted by the pattern I’ve experienced in the last week+ of you dropping into high-context meetings at the very end, when the group is wrapping and attempting to move into next steps (which is a different pace than the slower belly of a meeting), and then sharing your personal tensions around not feeling well-related to/not enjoying the pace and time-constraints of the relating. This isn’t a sustainable model for me and I hear you pointing to this non-ideal set-up where you can’t attend key meetings due to scheduling conflicts, but I would like a solution before approving this budget. (Also, TBH I don’t attend all meetings at SC and am not aware of which meetings you are regularly attending, if any, so i can only speak to the meetings in which i’m noticing this.)

• If we cannot reschedule key meetings in order to support your attendance, maybe we consider establishing consistent office hours, and an agreement to possibly allow those hours to be driven by community needs and requests and updates that would support you to build context, as opposed to your desires for what you’d like to use those hours for? This would allow the community to receive your wisdom, ask your advice, and get input on key proposals that you many not have context for given your unavailability for key meetings. It would also hopefully rectify the pattern of you not being able to attend meetings, then hopping on at the end and dropping a bunch of key info that would’ve been lovely to have at the beginning and during the meeting.

• I super appreciate your intention to hold space on Fridays/other time for an alternative to Prod Circle, for community to gain insight into product, and to focalize junior devs and emerging projects related to product, and I wonder if you are holding this intention (or perception of a need for) additional strategies to ensure a kind of mutually reciprocal circuit for community and product to stay in better step?

• Basically I would love to hear more strategies for how you might, as product owner, support the product and community to be in deeper dialogue and mutual reciprocity with each other. The forking madness of last year, and the ongoing current exodus of developers, and the continued weight of community expansion that doesn’t track the actual product ecosystem could use some better structures, and I’m wondering to what extent you are tracking that and interested in attending to it as part of your role as product owner. I would personally like those systemic and currently abstract tasks to be embedded in this proposal.

As for your last point about encouraging other folks to consider this a precedent for asking for what we each need: I love the spirit of the invitation, and I feel some tension and sadness reading it; I perceive this to be a bit of a miss given the squad that is currently putting energy into supporting the full group to collectively move toward a UBI with CredEquate experiment, and supporting group process around that new allocation model, to getting needs met and beginning to articulate and consider the value we bring within structured iterations of assessment and communal pauses. If we all chose to instead pitch our salary proposals individually in this way, we might potentially miss the opportunity to see ourselves together, to see the big picture and move as a collective around how individual needs might dovetail with organizational needs, setting up better systems for onboarding, for feedback, for assessing how our contributions are meeting organizational needs, etc.

I don’t mean to belabor this, but think this miss lands for me in the “ooof, maybe Ryeder in their absence from key meetings is perhaps not tracking where other folks are putting attention, and where the movement of the group body is being helmed for some desperately needed cohesion rn” and I think I’ve articulated this above, and it is perhaps easily solved by re-aligning our community schedules so that you can be participating real time and woven if that is your desire, or some other strategy that allows for more cohesion to not split attention and resources in zillions of directions?

So - given these concerns and possible amendments to this proposal, is there a counter proposal that could meet your needs for some of this salaried work while we begin these conversations about how to address some of these tensions? And/also I see this proposal has been viewed 45 times with no othe replies, so I wonder what other folks are holding around this proposal.

[LB]

Tbh, I’m super uncomfortable with Ryeder taking on even more power in this space until the many outstanding conflicts have felt some form of acknowledgement and closure. My two cents.

[Jolie_Ze]

I would love the opportunity to work with @rachel further and in tandem to address their thought-out, care-full responses regarding the work I do and the desire to be compensated, the conflict I’m in/have been in, and the future of the org. I withdraw the proposal in its current form devoid of workshopping how to meet these stated needs, curiosities, and desires.

[LB]

Actually, I have more to say.

I have both witnessed in my own right and received upwards of seven first-hand accounts (from people across the power structure of the community) of Ryeder using their power/admin abilities to quietly undermine, manipulate, or harm others in this community. As well as a lot of dissatisfaction with a perceived willingness to game the system and use their power to take advantage of this community and its monetary resources. When these issues do come to a full conflict, it is usually done behind closed doors away from the community. I’ve also received additional reports that when these conflicts do happen in public, Ryeder is protected by Thena’s willingness to use their power as a visible leader to downplay complaints/reports and actively disregard those who speak up. The two together are a powerhouse in this space and based on what I’ve seen and what has been reported to me, it’s my personal opinion that -intentional or not- their power is being used in ways that deeply harm at least a sub-section of the people in this community.

I’ve been afraid to speak up because I see the way this community tears down anyone who doesn’t support the “everything is lovely” narrative; and in that time Ryeder has only increased their power over the social space, the money, and the product - making it even more dangerous to say anything against them. It’s been daunting enough to dissuade even someone with as much pull as I have from raising the red flag. Ryeder’s behavior has directly or indirectly lead to multiple people leaving this community or else choosing to continue working in an environment where they feel unsafe and undervalued. At this point I’ve withdrawn my grain, I have other job prospects, and my shame at keeping quiet has become too large. So I’m sharing my thoughts in this comment thread.

I also want to apologize to all the people who came to me and told me about Ryeder’s behavior. I wish I’d had the courage to speak up on your behalf and on behalf of this project earlier, when more was at stake for you and me. I don’t much consider myself a part of this project anymore, but I’m talking about this anyway in the hopes that I can advocate a little for those who haven’t felt safe speaking up – even if it’s late in coming.

I appreciate that Ryeder is obviously willing to step back from their proposal when concerns are raised, however I see this as a much bigger structural issue than one proposal for an additional salary. The word “accountability” is brandished frequently in this community and I’d like to see it clearly defined and implemented in this instance. Before they exercise current -let alone take on additional- power or money in this space, I’d personally like to see big efforts made to address the harm that’s been done already. I’d also like to see deep thought put into understanding: which of their behaviors are hurting their community members, why it keeps happening, and how to be conscious of/change those behaviors moving forward. I’d suggest starting by having a neutral third-party collect and anonymize a constructive list of grievances from current and past community members. It’s more than we ever did for EJ. I’d also encourage them to step back from power until this has been addressed in full so as to mitigate any additional harm.

You may deeply disagree or say that you’ve seen no evidence of these issues, but I’m blowing the whistle on behalf of the many people who have confided in me.

[AL0YSI0US]

I came to see if i had words yet, I dont really …

hyper individualism?

I havent had words that would do any good up here or off screen. English has not served me amidst the fvckery.

@LB Thank you for saying what many people have failed to put to words, myself included.