30 ETH Loan From Griff to Governance

(FYI: My reply was in reply to @griffgreen 's comment - that comment strangely doesn't show here anymore, but I did receive it in my email)

I guess that depends on what the expenses are...
Expenses that were approved by giveth in gov meetings (Per week):
$600 for me which i don't intend on collecting until the donation side of the dapp is out.
$600 for Kays work
$600 for Bowen's security work on the bridge and milestone triple check (a dapp expense the gov campaign is covering because it will not be 100% on the bridge)
~$933 for RewardDAO (a giveth galaxy expense)
~$1000 for events (a giveth galaxy expense)
~$300 for bounties

So if you include me: $4,033 per week is our burn rate, about ½ of it should probably be split amongst the other circles, and an argument could be made that Kay Bowen and I spend more than ½ our time working on stuff for other circles as well.
EDIT: OOPS! I got hasty and didn't do Euros vs USD right, the total is €1800 (Salaries) and $2200 USD (RewardDAO, Events, Bounties)

Of course answering the rest of this question is a non sequitur because all of the assumptions are guaranteed to change. ETH will not be 500 consistently and the Payouts we receive will not come on the supposed dates... if they come at all and we are not a closed system we will receive other donations…. So I’m not going to do it… The ETH price is going to move erratically and unpredictably and so are our donation streams. We need to deal with that and I have always said i will be the safety net if we run short on ETH...

I hear a desire for transparency around setting a precedent for future cases like these, so if it lends legitimacy to this case right now we could say the DApp campaign loans the Gov campaign the money till I can use the next release of the DApp to actually donate transparently… then I can donate the amount they loaned to the Gov campaign directly to the DApp campaign using the DApp…

But the question is about why the Gov campaign is over budget…

For the last several months the Gov campaign has chosen to jump on the RewardDAO and Events grenade to save the other circles from having to worry about it. Once the dapp allows us to donate funds directly to the campaign... the gov campaign will be able to survive forever because it will be able to receive donations directly ;-)

And in recent months, besides supporting the RewardDAO and Events the gov campaign was forced to hire a lot of extra people to mitigate for the issues that arise for the fact that we are organized around using a dapp that doesn’t have the features we need yet...

I had to hire Lorelei (off the books) and Bowen for milestone triple check to mitigate exchange rate issues.

Linds is off the books as well to help with burning man but she ends up managing all the events and coordinating RewardDAO (RewardDAO eats a lot of her time… i can’t wait to make the DApp work for RewardDAO).

The Gov Campaign has created bounties on the Points bot, the Manifesto, and various other bounties throughout the Giveth Galaxy.

The Gov campaign does what needs to get done to make sure Giveth stays afloat and tries to act as a buffer to support the rest of the circles so that they can focus on their main tasks and the Gov campaign can deal with the extra BS.

This is easy because the Gov Campaign has an angel donor. This angel donor has an inside view of where their funds are spent.... We will talk about this more during the fireside chat… about transparency, and what is our scope for transparency, now and in the future.

Right now the transparency around how the money is spent is 100% public and easy for everyone to see because we have all these milestones. The Transparency over how the funds got there are 100% public but difficult to see because we haven’t implemented that side of the DApp yet.

Once the donation side of the dapp is transparent, we won’t need to split funds any more.

Once the donation side of the dapp is transparent, we won’t need to have these discussions anymore... people can donate freely to each campaign.

Can't we just focus on getting the dapp out and stop manufacturing drama where there doesn't need to be any?

I really don't understand the perspective that allowing me to donate a bunch of extra money to Giveth to save us from all this drama is a bad idea… I mean i can see it being a bad idea from my side… but i don’t mind spending the money, this is my life’s work, and I’m patient… maybe too patient.

But I digress… back to why the gov campaign ran out of money

We made this budget based on projections till March 1st... the dapp has been delayed many months IMO due to scope creep and not building a DApp for Giveth to use first, instead focusing on other imaginary future users, the Gov campaign has stepped up to fill in the gaps when necessary above and beyond what the other circles have so it makes sense that the gov campaign is out of budget.

I made the decisions to do that so that we could be more efficient and focus on actually working instead of this needless chatter, which in my opinion is derived from not having the donation side of the dapp working... once the dapp is working all this chatter goes away from being internal and starts to be external, as in, each campaign can start requesting donations directly based on their merit.

I had a great convo with you Yalor and with Vojtech about how the dapp team wants to skip meetings and all the giveth galaxy waste of time and focus on building the dapp.... what happened to that? How much time is being wasted on this conversation? What value is being added? Why is it that the simple “Griff will pay for overages” was objected by you two when you guys were the ones that want to focus on building the dapp?

If you finish the dapp this convo is done.... I have been trusting the dapp team to handle the dapp stuff... why is there no trust in the Gov circle to handle these issues?

Ok i had to get that off my chest…. It is frustrating that it is so hard to just throw money at you guys to get shit done.

What is at the heart of this? Is it the visibility of the milestone? The conflict of interest in funding my own campaign? The fear that if other circles spend money they don’t have then there won’t be an angel donor to back them up, so we need to set a precedent of no one spends money that isn’t directly covered and buffered by current donation funds?

What is a simple way to get this dealt with so that we can go back to building?

" Well I did this for all of you and now you all need to pay for it" - this is pretty ridiculous... that is what you are proposing... what i am proposing is "" Well I did this for all of you and now I am going to pay for it out of my own pocket once the dapp works and I can"

It might help if there was evidence that the gov circle creates a plan of how to improve handling their funds in the future, but I haven’t heard of any remorse about being out of money. All I hear is 'lets add more money' to fix the problem, which will only lead to another round of drama in a couple of months.

I have no remorse for spending money to do what needs to be done. All of these decisions to spend money (Hiring Bowen, Kay switching to Gov, Gov paying for events, RewardDAO throwing down extra money last month, etc) were made publicly by the group. Most of the extra costs stem from the fact that we are trying to #dogfood our dapp but it's delay is more impactful then predicted.
I am the most transparent about how the funds are spent in my campaign (every hire/decision that uses Giveth funds is actually made via the Gov Circle, no other circle does this).

I spend lots of funds outside of the campaign to support these efforts... I also do lots of work that sends money to Giveth. I will continue to do that and when the donate button works, I can use it to support these extra costs (Linds, Lorelei, bonuses, etc) on the DApp in a more transparent way. :-D Until then (2 wooks?) lets just keep this simple focus on the actual product and let me pay for things until this next release.

Man, there's so many points here. But I'll try to make a quick response to all.

1. The DApp is being built, I don't think anyone is taking time away from "real" work to be a part of this discussion.

I can't take responsibility for the DApp Teams work (presently or historically) I am just trying to wrap my head around where we are, how we got here, and where we're going.

To reiterate something that I heard during the Aragon meeting, the ability to analyze what is affecting progress is one of the key ways they improve productivity . And interestingly they noted travel as one of the things that hindered productivity. Maybe if we did some analysis of the "Events" or of the many unfinished projects we have, we might see that they are actually negatively impacting our ability to execute! (just a thought)

For example Is Burning Man a Giveth thing ? Was this decided officially at some point, this was before my time so I don't know. But it doesn't feel like something that Giveth should be spending resources on to me. ( Even though I'm really excited to go)

To play on that last point, where do we decide what "is" a Giveth thing and "Isn't" a Giveth thing. ( Maybe another loomio)

2 .In regards to making a budget

I suppose the question is "Does Giveth feel that fiscal responsibility is part of it's core values or not" because if the answer is YES then we need to create a better way of managing donations and spending than we currently have. If the answer is NO, then I'll just shut up.

3 . A desire for "True" transparency is something we all want.

The DApp having a donate button will help, but communicating effectively is where it starts.

"What is at the heart of this? Is it the visibility of the milestone? The conflict of interest in funding my own campaign? The fear that if other circles spend money they don’t have then there won’t be an angel donor to back them up, so we need to set a precedent of no one spends money that isn’t directly covered and buffered by current donation funds?"

In short, Yes. It's all of this.

But at the end of the day it's about accountability. Who are we accountable to and who is going to hold us to our commitments.

In response to your second comment
I did not know this is what you were suggesting, I thought you were suggesting that you would loan the Governance Circle ETH until we get the grant money and then reimburse your expenses from that money. Obviously I don't have any desire to tell you how to spend your money.

It's great that the Governance circle has an angel donor, but yeah the other circles don't so they need to be self sufficient. We should all be creating value for Giveth and then supporting each others work through donating.

In response to your third comment

I believe it was your decision to start using the DApp before it was ready, so all the issues and extra expenses are stemming from the fact that we started using this tool that simply wasn't ready to be used. Alas, i wasn't here when those decisions were made so I can only ponder what if retrospectively.

At the end of the day I think we need to be accountable to one another, whether you're funding your own campaign or spending other peoples funds. And that's what I want to see come out of this discussion.

So I won't block you or draw this out any further. Do what needs to be done. Until July 1st then DONATE away 💸

"1. The DApp is being built, I don't think anyone is taking time away from "real" work to be a part of this discussion."
Specifically, there was a meeting 5 days ago where the DApp team asked me to not "help" them with the DApp and they wanted out of participating in this sort of thing... you were a major component of that but now we are wasting our time debating how exactly i shoudl throw money on this project... this is a major distraction.

"For example Is Burning Man a Giveth thing ? Was this decided officially at some point, this was before my time so I don't know. But it doesn't feel like something that Giveth should be spending resources on to me. ( Even though I'm really excited to go)"

Is Giveth spending money on burning man? Please show me the milestone. My point is that I hired Linds for burning man help but she does giveth thins instead. And well since over 1/2 the core team is going to burning man, i would say it is a Giveth thing. It will be obvious how much of a giveth thing it is when you get there.

"Does Giveth feel that fiscal responsibility is part of it's core values or not" Is it fiscally irresponsible for me to spend my money on Giveth? If a donor wants to spend money on a project that in our opinion is a bad idea, are we supposed to stop them? Should we even waste time judging how donors want to have their donations spent?
Again, we are working with one arm tied behind our backs. Donors are supposed to have Oversight over how their funds are spent. I am very excited to have these new features and then the fiscal responsibility question is actually answered..

Also to this point... is there a cost that is being judged as fiscally irresponsible? I am solving as many problems as i can outside of the giveth budget with my own funds... Cardona for example was ~70 euros per person, including beds, transport and food... that doesn't include the countless hours linds spent organizing (which Giveth gets for free). I am being EXTREMELY fiscally responsible to my own detriment and get this static, when i would hope to get gratitude. I can't Imagine anyone could do better.

Can you Define "True" transparency? Where does it start and stop? What is the boundary layer? Should we know how much you bought your underwear for? Do you wear underwear? I don't so i'm saving giveth money ;-) To me the transparency starts with donations and ends with donations. We have donations in our multisig and every wei that is sent out of our multisig is painstakingly accounted for. What you spend your money on, and what I spend my money on is not anyone's business.... It becomes Giveth's Business if I ask for compensation for it...

"But at the end of the day it's about accountability. Who are we accountable to and who is going to hold us to our commitments."
We are accountable to our donors. at least, that is the design of the dapp... who do you think we are accountable to? Who do you think we should be accountable to?

"I did not know this is what you were suggesting, I thought you were suggesting that you would loan the Governance Circle ETH until we get the grant money and then reimburse your expenses from that money. Obviously I don't have any desire to tell you how to spend your money."
That is your suggestion in this thread: My suggestion is here: https://www.loomio.org/p/Iq5ELBH7/gov-is-going-into-debt-to-the-rest-of-the-circles-
the key piece being: "any overages the gov campaign has will be covered by my (Griff's) direct donation out of my personal funds during the migration process"

"I believe it was your decision to start using the DApp before it was ready, so all the issues and extra expenses are stemming from the fact that we started using this tool that simply wasn't ready to be used. "

Well thats just not true, it was a team decision, forced by the fact that people wanted to be paid, we wanted to maintain transparency, and the old dapp was broken.
Since Giveth's inception, a core value has been to #dogfood that by definition means using our product before it is ready... that has never been challenged...

Giveth's first effort was to build Minime, Vault and Milestone contracts and we didnt get paid for them until our first donor could send money to it and then we could use them to pay ourselves.

Then we built a very decentralized POC DApp so we had a UI for those contracts... that didn't work very well because it was very decentralized.... we used it the whole time... even long after it was broken... we made a team decision to not continue to work on the old dapp and use it the best we could for as long as we could.

Then it became COMPLETELY unusable. The DApp team had the choice to spend time fixing it so we could pay ourselves or stop paying ourselves until we could use the new dapp to pay ourselves.

So we, as a team, mostly influenced by the DApp team, decided to stop paying ourselves and push to get the new dapp out.

So we made a big push for mainnet and the DApp was ready for it. And it was AWESOME. But the scalability issues, which were killing the old dapp also killed the new dapp, so we, as a team, decided to continue on testnet... I definitely made the proposal, we talked about it for weeks, no one made any other real proposals... though sasha was definitely a proponant for using Mainnet and paying shit tons of ETH for donations and milestones.

In the end, Sasha was right, we really should have because the gas price went way down, and using the test net was hard. We had to make a multisig and a multisend thing and a lot of supporting bureaucracy that wasn't planned or budgeted for. The Gov Circle has had to work really hard to mitigate this choice to use the dapp in a ghetto way, instead of using the mainnet version. It was a mistake for sure. But it was a team decision that was made with fiscal responsibility in mind (should we really pay miners $8 per donation and $80 to create a campaign?)

But then Scope creep came in... we didn't prioritize our own use of the dapp, we started to build with a strong focus on other users, we decided that the current implementation is good enough to do a complete rewrite of the smart contracts to make it an Aragon app and to include multitoken functionality, upgradability and many other features. I actually support this decision, it was the best time to do a re-write. But it wasn't planned to take until July. I have been doing everything i can to support this with the 16% of the donations that i get.

We have been using the dapp the whole time... there has never been a time where we weren't using smart contracts to pay ourselves.... so this idea that that it was my idea to use the dapp before it was ready... i guess that it is true to an extent, it was my idea in October 2016, and we have been doing it ever since, and there has never been a governance proposal to change it. That has always been the way we do things.

Yeah, I noticed that as well. Maybe @griffgreen deleted his response :thinking:

yeah i wanted to edit it more but had a lot of work to do (RewardDAO and Open Source Block Explorers)

I feel this discussion got way out of proportions, so many stuff is mentioned but it doesn't answer the simple question:

How could a circle run out of money and realise that only after running out of money? There are no excuses really, it's basic accounting, a matter of watching and discussing your budget, and ringing the alarm way earlier.

So I have 2 proposals to solve this issue in a nice, fast & decentralised way, without borrowing or 'fund your own campaign' constructions:

#1
Tensions
Gov circle is out of money, needs 'urgent' fix so that it can keep paying its people

Proposal
Gov circle has been paying a lot of expenses, and has been doing a lot of work to support the other circles. All other circles are very happy with this, it's of immense value, and all circles agree that we must support the gov circle to fix their urgent issue with not being able to pay people.

The fix is that the gov circle will proposes a (couple of) milestones in the respective campaigns of the other circles, to claim and refund these expenses. The recipient of these milestones is the gov circle.

An overview of these expenses will be listed in a Google Sheet and transparently shared with ONLY the other circles leads. And unless not safe enough to try, will be accepted by the other leads as we trust the gov circle to make a careful and honest consideration which expenses to request refund for.

The gov circle can create these milestones in the next couple of days, and as such they can be included in the coming speedy payment batch. This way the gov circle can be refunded within a week, start paying its members again next week, and the problem is solved in a nice, transparent and decentralised way.

#2
Tension
We got circles run out of money and for whatever reason they did not realise this would happen, requiring an urgent fix and action from the team.

Proposal
We implement a policy that it's the circle lead's responsibility to watch the runway of the budget, and the lead should notice the other circles / gov meeting at least 4 weeks in advance that they'll be running out of budget so Giveth can take appropriate action.

As the impact of a circle running out of money is huge - such as influencing payments and thus potentially the living conditions of circle members - not reporting the budget running out at least 4 weeks in advance is a solid reason to discuss assign the circle lead role to someone else within the circle.

This makes sure we won't have new surprises.

As a side note:
I'm very much against hiring people of the record if they're doing work for Giveth, because I can't think of a single reason why someone would not be hired by a circle directly. Hiring someone of the charts sets a precedent for following ones own agenda.
I suggest the team to reflect on this.

Ummmmm why can't i just donate to my campaign... ? seems like the simple easy solution... Why is that not safe enough to try? Why are we preventing donations?

I knew i was going to run out of money, I thought we would get the dapp out before i would run out of funds, we havent run out of money, we have run out of features to utilize the funds we have. I am happy to pay for all these things.... and I had that in the back of my head when being nonchalant about this.

Again we are nowhere near actually out of funds. We just are waiting for features to be implemented so we can use funds we have, i am saying, hey lets wait for the new release to come out.

Funds we have that will be able to be added to the pot when we have implemented the dapp:

Total: A little more then 200,000 EUR (437 ETH and $17,000 worth of tokens)

THIS IS;

300 ETH (in the Donation Doubler) From Berns inc. Pegged for Audits and Security (I made the deal, i promised to use it for security and audits as a matching program, I think we can use this for Bridge Security costs, that's Bowens salary the next few weeks, and should be a big bump to the DApp team too.. basically any cost incurred for security can be 50% reimbursed by these funds.)

125 ETH (In a hardware wallet I control) From MKR Audit , slotted for Delegation by me (as DAC Delegate) when we have DApp working)

12 ETH (In a hardware wallet I control) From Aragon Audit , slotted for Delegation by me (as DAC Delegate) when we have DApp working)

We have $17,000+ worth of tokens in our multisig that we will have to play with when we add those tokens to whitelist in the DApp.

The Gov campaign is not out of money... there are many ways to unlock the money the gov campaign has... but why not just wait for the new release? I don't even want to dig in to these funds! Why not just let me throw extra donations in?

Much of the Gov campaign's future goals are going to be covered by the Aragon DAC... There are huge donations coming in from the Aragon Nest Grant as well soooo much money is on the horizon.... This is really only a problem while we don't have the ability to use the next release of the DApp

How did this money get here? Am I seriously being accused of being irresponsible with Giveth funds when i am the main source of funding?

Can you throw out any details on what milestones the gov campaign made that were irresponsible? All the milestones are there! Check them out! Where are we wasting our money?

This is soooooo frustrating.

Seriously... this whole conversation is such a waste of my time and yours... just let me donate money to get over this hump.