Ambassador incentive structures and ability to make changes

Ambassadors
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The Governance Guild is considering proposing several changes to the current incentive structure of the Ambassador program - probably things like a) additional levels of ambassadors to distinguish contributions deemed more valuable, b) changed allocation/vesting schedules to be more back-weighted or at least even, c) make Ambassadorship, and any levels including Lead, less permanent. (This is not a comprehensive list, but should make it clear we are talking about material changes to the incentive structure and rewards under the program.)

There will be topics here to discuss all of the important changes, but I also want to discuss the idea of changing it at all, and whether or not that seems acceptable to the community and particularly to the existing Ambassadors, since we would be directly impacted by the change.

I don’t think it would be acceptable or fair for Labs to try to impose changes like this, but I do think it would be okay for the Ambassadors to agree to make changes.

We need to consider the signal / precedent a move like this would sets, and should also determine now whether we think this would be a one-time change, or do we think that it is important to have adaptable and responsive incentive structures that can changed over time?

A few key questions that I am considering are:

  1. What do you think about this in general? Should incentives be immutable? Mutable but with very strict parameters that could be adjusted? Flexible, with enough consensus?
  2. What is a fair way to manage these things with present / past / future Ambassadors, and the community in general in mind?
  3. What is the right level of consent to have this be seen as legitimate in the eyes of the community at large? Would it have to be unanimous acceptance of new terms by every single existing and past Ambassador? Would it be fair if one person could hold everyone else ack? Would a 2/3+1 supermajority be sufficient? 80% supermajority, or 90%? Simple majority?
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I generally believe that a leader should not be paid more. Because it can easily happen that a leader will work less than someone else (who doesn’t have the title of “leader”).
Or make them constantly rotate, right down the line.
Rotating power has some

pros:
  • Preventing corruption;
  • Leaders, knowing that their mandate is temporary, can be more accountable to the public.
  • Rotation promotes diversity of ideas and approaches to governance, which can foster innovation and adaptation to change.
cons:
  • Leaders, knowing their time is limited, may lean toward short-term solutions at the expense of long-term strategies.
    Also inexperience and consequent slower decision-making.

But we have to make decisions together.
I am so generally in favor of no leaders at all, but of work amounts.
To make a system where more knowledgeable and helpful to the community person will be rewarded more.

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Has the incentive structure moved on since this post?

One novel approach that has some merit is proposed by Dan Larimer’s latest iteration of human DAO incentives using a reputational point system (he proposed a sliding scale using fibonacci sequence but imo that fails to reward people correctly).

The idea is to have several reward tiers, and relevant contributors vote periodically to recognize individual contributors, and thus elect them to reward tiers for that period of time.

E.g. Tier 1 gets 3x standard reward for contributions, Tier 2 gets 2x and Tier 1 gets standard contribution. All 5 people stack-rank each other for contributions that week, with 1 position available for Tier 1, 2 positions for Tier 2, and the rest for Tier 3. Hence the small competition encourages everyone to do a little better to receive the higher rewards.

A way of gamifying incentives in distributed governance. There are of course many.