Pre-Hatch Impact Hours Distribution Analysis

We discussed a few possible approaches for proposals moving forward with the analysis in soft gov today. It was a discussion call where everyone present was able to share their opinions. I think is worth sharing some of the sentiments here, specially the 2 most polarized ones:

  1. The analysis is great for implementing future changes that won’t affect the already quantified praise and Impact Hour set. The distribution we have now is seen as the results of agreements and expectations that shouldn’t be changed retroactively in favor of the trust built in the community so far.

  2. The analysis could possibly change the IH set we have so far via proposal making because it is offering relevant information that we didn’t have before. The distribution we have now is seen as skewed and unfair because agreements and expectations were stablished without enough insights of their consequences.

I think this is the first debate we should have that will greatly affect how we move forward with the process and what is the scope of the proposals we will have.
I’ll tag a few people for advice process here. :pray:

@ygg_anderson @octopus @Griff @santigs @ZeptimusQ @JeffEmmett @JessicaZartler @Tamara @Suga @sem @Solsista @mzargham

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Thank you @liviade for this update and advice process.

In the Stewards call now, @ygg_anderson is looking to create a summary of the Praise System analysis, and initial suggestions for a possible intervention.

I feel we should schedule a discussion with a more diverse and larger group of stakeholders who will be affected by this decision and would like to have a voice and input in this process, especially those who could not attend this last meeting. I propose we advertise this discussion/agenda at least three days in advance - to hear more points of view and together, discuss possible proposals going forward, and a process by which we decide on those proposals.

I propose we hold this session next week during the regularly scheduled Soft Gov meeting next Tuesday, June 22 OR, maybe a time that is more friendly to those in Europe/CET?..

I also would like to say that trust building is an ongoing process, and this is a huge part of it. When we realize that our systems aren’t serving part of our community, and that part of the community is asking to be heard, how we respond is part of building trust as well.

The agreements that were made, were made several months ago (August 2020 / December 2020) with only a total of <10 votes. Should a community of hundreds have to abide by 10 people’s decision six months ago? Or should we now re-assess, hold a vote, and hear more voices with the information we have now?

These are questions to consider - so, I think meeting with a larger group, hearing everyone’s voices once again, and then put it to a vote. We could vote on whether or not to have an intervention first, and if the community decides to intervene - do a similar process to the Hatch Configuration process - we could do with or without the forking depending on time constraints for the hatch - let’s discuss the decision space and process, would love to hear everyone’s ideas.

Here is a sketch:

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Thanks for replying to this! It’s super important to have multiple stakeholders opinions, specially the ones that have been most involved in this discussion.

I would love us to use advice process more often so we can have well articulated written points to help with sense making. - Sounds great to host another session to hear everyone during next soft gov meeting. What about we start adding the emails to the existing calendar invite now?

I had similar thoughts about the decision making process. @Tamara also suggested we can add the non intervention as a proposal to come together with all the other proposals for intervention. I think that’s a good approach if we debate them openly.

After coming to the session with @octopus chatting with @ygg_anderson @Griff and listening to the lab calls with everyone I suggest this 3 possible categories for proposals

Paid contributors deduction

  • Restitute x% of governance power through infinite vesting
    • Could the vesting be broken in the future?
    • Could vested tokens be burned?
    • What are the implications of programming the bonding curve for the governance tokens?
  • Restitute an x% of governance power and compensation

Categories

  • What categories are under or over represented?
  • Implement a distribution similar to SourceCred? Eg. percentages of total IH go to different buckets.

UBI/Gini Coefficient

  • Decide the amount inside a range of 5 to 25IH to be distributed
  • Distribution would happen in a bell curve to the middle.
  • How do we decide the middle?

I initially thought Tokenlog would be the best tool for this, but I’m starting to lean towards lots of debate + 1 person 1 vote to have a better representation of people’s opinions. I would love to discuss this more as well.

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Thanks @liviade for these ideas… I think it would be great to use our TEC email list to advertise the discussion to all IH holders to come and participate via newsletter - perhaps @chuygarcia92 would be willing to work on this? Or at least make a Tweet with the invite link about it with enough advance notice to participate (at least on Friday/Monday), and if we hold a vote, to advertise via email in a newsletter.

There was also a suggestion to look at additional TE notable contributions that came up, or potentially offering everyone a # of impact hours to “gift” to someone other than themselves for work they feel wasn’t recognized. Also want to keep it as simple as possible…

And just one comment about voting and intervene vs. no intervention - If we put up a vote with one no intervention proposal, and three intervention proposals, this would split the vote and not really be a clear indicator - unless we were to total the votes for the three intervention proposals, and weight that against the non-intervention proposal - something to discuss and think about… thank you!

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More diverse and wider-community POVs are highly desirable. As Stewards, we serve the community. Even the community that is not highly visible, or present, in our daily calls. Though how much wider-community participation we can expect is a question. It takes time and commitment to understand the origin, process, strengths and flaws of Praise and Praise Quantification, of TEC Impact Hours and what we mean by the “builders” distribution, of the unique circumstances of the people involved, and then, after grokking all this, having the confidence to make a decision that may affect other people’s lives in ways they are not sure they can imagine or affect the TEC in ways they cannot be certain of. I am sympathetic to the challenges present here. Yet I still think that more should be heard and their perspectives sincerely considered.

On the subject of the decision space, this is not an area I have any expertise. Looking at this rationally, here is my thinking:

On having an initial yes/no vote on whether to have an intervention or not:

  • If the interventions are not first defined, then the alternatives to a no-intervention are unknown. Effectively, a yes-intervention vote would commit one to an intervention without knowing the specifics of the interventions to be proposal.
  • If the interventions are first defined, then the alternative choices to no-intervention are known at the time of the vote.

On having a vote for all proposals, one being no-intervention, at the same time:

  • I concede the point, @JessicaZartler, that the yes-intervention vote will be split in this case.
  • The idea of totalling the yes votes presents some problems as I see it. Rather than splitting the vote, it introduces a multiplier. I wonder how that can that be resolved.
  • One possibility is having only one proposal for yes-intervention and one for no-intervention.
  • Another possibility is a runoff of the top two voted proposals no matter what they are.

On 1-person 1-vote versus token-weighted voting:

  • 1-person 1-vote presents the following problem: should the long tail of dozens of people with less than 4 IH carry the same weight as the relatively few people with dozens of IH? Probably not.
  • Token-weighted voting presents the following problem: Taking into account the distribution is what is being decided, should “whales” essentially make this decision? Probably not.
  • Token-weighted with a method to add caps to different brackets (0-50, 51-100, 101-150, ….)?

On the subject of open-to-intervention versus closed-to-intervention,

  • I remain open to learning the results of the data analysis and making the best decision we can with all the information at our disposal.
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Let’s not forget that the nature of the TEC is flexibility, inclusion and celebration of the Cultural Build.

My immediate comment is simply to point out, based on the above, that the system tentatively adopted for evaluating and weighting IH was arbitrary, non-mathematical, established prior to the existence of a community and naturally open to improvement. We are honored, grateful and humbled to now have the opportunity to make those improvements based on a non-arbitrary, mathematical and community-inclusive disposition.

A note on community: Joining the TEC means taking an oath to honor your community collectively, its members uniquely and the advancement of what the TEC stands for with all due respect to that community. As humans we are fallible, and it is quite easy to lose sight of values when you personally feel in some way threatened. It is our responsibility to ourselves, to each other in the community AND to the greater implications of what we are publicly creating in the world (setting an example for all to see) to remain level-headed and focused and to put the community and the MVV of the TEC above the personal.

A note on logic: To that end, it seems important to point out that a number of logical fallacies seem to be running around on this topic, which I’ve seen repeatedly in calls and on the forum. Again, we must be careful. We must be careful with our language for it is powerful. For example, when we start identifying concepts such as “in the past” and “in the future”, we are actually creating, not simply marking, such points. (In other words, there are different ways to see what is happening here than through this temporal lens.) When we use language like “take away” or “steal”, etc. we are giving power to that particular paradigm that then forces an “opposing” viewpoint to defend from within that, instead of presenting from its own position.

These are not objective positions, and they run the risk of radically skewing what is at stake.

One thing that this kind of language creates is the “strawman” fallacy. This means that you build up your opposition using qualities that are not actually accurate, therefore making it easy to tear it down (or blow down, as a strawman would be in a field by the winds).

A note on bad analogies: I would also like to note that I have heard some poor analogies used in favor of non-intervention of IH data analysis. Again, please be careful. Deliberate or not, this is sophistry. In other words, it is persuasion based on false information. For example, re-evaluating the distribution of IH is not comparable to giving some one fruit from a tree and then taking it back. This is highly inaccurate and a dangerous comparison because it makes the sober, analytical process of evaluating the best implementation of the Praise system look tyrannical. Now, whether or not you think that is true is actually beside the point. (And if you do, there are other problems here!) The bottom line is: you may be in favor or not in favor, you may be in the middle, etc. but we have to look at this situation with logic and reason and with a mind for the best implementation for the system. It is not about you or me. It is about the model – a working, robust, dependable model. All corners of that model must be illuminated and examined.

Perhaps the tree from which you were promised fruit did not bear anything after all. Perhaps the tree was planted on toxic soil. Perhaps… Then what? I use the same poor analogy to demonstrate there are different ways to see the same thing. I hope we can open our eyes to that and allow this process to serve the greater good for all of us that it is attempting to do.

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Thank you for the insights Suga, I couldn’t agree more. I have felt somewhat disheartened that my request on behalf of the wider TE community for what should be a routine scientific analysis and open discussion around appropriate algorithmic governance policy of our experimental incentive tools has been met by some with what comes across as misleading/antagonistic language in opposition. I believe this has unintentionally subverted the dialog and introduced unnecessary emotion into what should be a rational and good faith discussion, which has led to it being an unnecessarily awkward and inflammatory debate.

This discussion is around the governance initialization of a community committed to advancing Token Engineering as a Commons - that means prioritizing the collective health of the organization over the interests of individuals (myself and each of us included). Rather than merely worrying about how big any one person’s slice of the pie is (a zero sum exercise), we should focus on growing the pie, where we can all win in a massively positive sum game.

How do we grow the pie? The health of this ecosystem is improved when we are able to engage a wider group of stakeholders with relevant domain expertise, and reward them commensurately for their contributions to this collective endeavor. By ensuring a more representative allocation of IHs, we can also likely expect to see more interest & contributions on behalf of TEs, since this action will be recognizing the importance of their hard work & labor, which has thus far not been a priority of the TEC. Hopefully, this can help to set the precedent that the TEC stewards recognize the value being created by the TE community they are here to represent.

Through the course of my analysis, I’ve come to realize that the praise system is a tool that can perhaps measure “order of magnitude” of contributions, which may work to quantify some of the work that was put into the TEC. But this tool is not fit for precise measurement of those contributions, which is what we are trying to use it for. It just isn’t fit for the task without appropriate human oversight regarding fine-tuning the raw data outputs of this never-tried-before incentive tool.

To demonstrate this inadequacy, we have people who contributed for a few weeks/months who are in the top 10, and people who have been grinding for years who are not even in the top 30. We have people who did a lot of little things get far more praise than people who did a lot of BIG things (like, foundational-to-the-TEC type big things). When you look rationally at the outputs, it just didn’t do a great job allocating IH to many contributors - it recognized some types of work, and almost completely missed others.

To be fair, we didn’t know that 6 or 8 months ago when these parameters were chosen, but we do now. And it is our responsibility as ethical stewards of this ecosystem to act on this knowledge and rectify a poor distribution of recognition for work completed in the TEC thus far - not for us, but for the community we all represent.

I would also like to comment on Impact Hours being used as “wage compensation” or any kind of promise or guarantee for future returns that are now felt to be “threatened” or “taken away”. I have spoken with CS legal counsel on the issue, and was advised that IH tokens are not compensation, wage guarantees, or any promise for future monetary reward. This is an experimental organization we are all contributing to (some with pay, some without), and there are no guarantees that these tokens will have financial or any other kind of value. I would be happy to connect anyone with further questions on this topic with appropriate legal counsel for discussion.

I recognize that everyone had to make a choice as to whether to accept pay (and an 85% reduction in IH hours) or work without pay for full IH rewards, and I agree that those who did not receive pay should be compensated with more Impact Hours.

The real question for me, is how much more? To approximate a rule of thumb, 1.5x or 2x more IH tokens among comparative contributors seems reasonable to me, maybe even 3x, but I think 10x+ more is a little excessive, especially considering our compensation pay is a mere $3000/month (or less, for most contributors!)

To insist that “we set these rules so now we have to play by them” is to deny the fact that we are still in the process of creating these systems. They are not set in stone, and even if they were - aren’t we all here to question entrenched systems that are not serving the majority, but are instead captured by a small group of elite decision makers who are unwilling or unable to share decision making power?(Note: I am not talking about this community - I hope we are better than this!)

We stand at an historic moment in the TEC, where we can choose either to:

  1. bake the entrenched inequities of a poorly calibrated reward system into the core initial governance distribution of the TEC and deny this community call for a more representative distribution of IH tokens, or
  2. to engage in good faith discussions about equitable and appropriate adjustments to IH distributions, with scientific and democratic discussion leading the way towards a TEC community that values its constituents as well as its representatives.

It is my opinion that a wider cohort of Token Engineers may actually wish to engage in the latter. This is also a much better position for the TEC to be in, prioritizing positive sum games and win-win-win situations over zero sum arguments and win-lose dynamics.

One final diagram of the governance breakdown of the Builder’s Pool (up to 25% of the overall TEC governance pool, depending on amount raised), which for me iterates the importance for a reasonable IH distribution adjustment, in order to prevent the majority of governance of the builders pool going to a very small group of <20 people out of a community of more than 400.

The choice is ours, TEC. Let’s make it wisely.

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My goal throughout this process has been to answer specific questions that the community has. Working with @ygg_anderson and a few other people has helped me see the importance of also building tools (dashboards, etc.) so the community members can answer their own questions. Those are skills I will work to build in the future.

Here is my video on calculating some quantitative metrics for decentralization/distribution of Impact Hours compared to some other projects:

I am hoping to do one on the distribution by different categories later today. I hope this is informative and helpful.

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Impact Hour Intervention - Tokenlog voting session

Tomorrow, June 22nd at 7pm CET - 1pm EST, we’ll have a session to share the praise analysis results, chat about proposals and decision making and open space to listen to each other. :loudspeaker:

:memo: Call agenda

:star: @ygg_anderson and the Labs team will present the praise analysis tools and findings, including this awesome Praise Analysis Dashboard!
:star: We’ll go over the decision making process and share the problem set.
:star: Everyone who wants to share their opinion on possible solutions will have 1.5 min
:star: If we have extra time, we’ll start hacking on proposals.

How will the decision making process work?

Similar to the MVV and params sessions on Tokenlog, so most of us are already familiar with it. Here is a step-by-step. :slight_smile:

Step 1 - PROPOSING

  • Go to Tokenlog · Token-weighted backlogs
  • To submit a proposal, click on “new issue”. This will bring you to a Github issue template.
  • Mark YES or NO for the first 4 questions.
  • Play around with the Dashboard to help you make an informed proposal.
  • Explain which interventions you are proposing and their reasoning.
  • You can also propose no interventions and share your reasoning.
  • Click “Submit new issue” when you’re done. It will pop up automatically in Tokenlog.

What if someone submitted one or more interventions I like, but I want to change or add something?

  • Copy and paste the ones you like and credit it by mentioning the number of their issue.
  • Add you changes.
  • Add “fork of #x” to the title and submit your issue.

Step 2 - VOTING

  • You can vote if you have Impact Hours and/or a CSTK score.
  • Go to Tokenlog · Token-weighted backlogs
  • Choose the xDAI network on your wallet
  • Click “connect” on the top right corner, make sure to be logged in your Trusted Seed address
  • Pick your favorite proposals and distribute your votes! Tokenlog uses Quadratic Voting.

How is the winner chosen?

If a proposal has more votes than all the other proposals combined it is the clear winner. Otherwise, the top 3 to 4 submissions will have a runoff voting round and the one with more votes will win. Because of the potential for votes to be split amongst forked proposals that are similar, the Community Stewards will choose the top submissions for the runoff in an open call on the following Tuesday, June 29th at 7pm CET.

What if there is a polarized scenario, where 2 different proposals have an evenly split majority of votes in the run-off?

(By evenly split, we consider a difference of less than 10 votes between first and second place.)

In this case, the top 2 authors will be invited to a hack session to merge their proposals together and commit to a collaborative result.

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Jeff! What you are doing is super brave and it’s important to stand for our beliefs, voice our concerns and suggest ways to improve. I’m sorry that you have felt disheartened and misunderstood, so I want to thank you for opening this discussion and for all the contribution you have done to the TE ecosystem, with the same strong ethics and skill.

This kind of processes are the ones that test our capacity to integrate feedback and improve our initial ideas. We are passing from fix to adaptive, in order to be short term responsive and long term strategic by proposing innovative solutions to our problems.

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Here is my report specifically on “Meetings” and “Retweets”:

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Here are the notes from today’s call. Thanks SO much to everyone who joined, special thanks to Ygg, Mohammed and Octopus for all the data analysis and dashboards!

Please submit your intervention proposals ASAP, preferably until Thursday so we have a comprehensive overview to vote on until next Tuesday!

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I wish that we had a few people who would read Alfie Kohn’s book called “Punished By Rewards”. Summary: Kohn - Outline of notes from Punished by Rewards

I feel like I barely do anything in this community but try to bring awareness to personal development, interpersonal relationships and organizational development; but I have a lot of praise and impact hours.

It’s flattering, but not granular. I like Sebnem’s Dada group’s Ikigai on this:

“Visible, but not measured”

Which recognizes the aspects of the flow of feeling and praise for a specific set of needs being met, rather than a flatland idea of “praise” by itself.

Also, it seems to me that it’s not particularly important that “praise” in and of itself is not required to be all that fungible. Why can we not create a system whereby I, as a part of my own profile, be seen as someone who is “grateful” in one of the 8 forms of wealth: Sharma: The 8 Forms of Wealth | SUCCESS to some people?

Rather than “assign praise TO people”, we would ALLOW people to assign gratitude to themselves FOR a specific kind of wealth they have been given BY a certain person.

In this way, we handle the ACTUAL ownership of the gratitude where it belongs, and then you can see how someone’s relationship was shaped by their interactions, creating a map of their interaction and positive expressions toward others.

I find myself barely engaged in the praise system, as it does not speak about the only person I really care about- myself. That might sound horribly narcissistic, but what I’m saying is that changing how one represents one’s GRATITUDE is far better than representing it through praise, in my view.

We could still perhaps sum up ALL praise if we decided to do so, but I am continuously disappointed by the lack of actual humanity that the singular praise system flatland implies. I want to express my full self. Praise also has a kind of “flattery” feeling to it that irks me. I want to simply REVEAL MY GRATITUDE without having to SAY IT to them directly all the time.

Moreover, I wish that I could express my gratitude in terms of what ACTUAL impact a person has had upon the group itself- not just how I express gratitude in a personal way but also toward how I witness their impact upon the group.

For this, I’d want to use terms and representations that make sense to ME, regardless of the larger group’s decisions.

Also, “showing up” does create a certain kind of understanding of their participation in a group, but not in a granular manner. I often just audit some meetings and end up with praise for something I didn’t contribute to.

Why? Perhaps this praise I receive is a way to say “I showed up” and I get that, but I cannot see HOW a person is behaving without seeing also that not ONLY did they “show up” but also communicated authentically, or coordinated well (like Livi and Jess and Griff do, for example) which would be in “clean up” mode.

I myself am not that great at the “grow up” TECHNICAL part of the crypto space, as it’s a bit dense for me and I lack the time to penetrate into the depths of how it all works; even I display the “grow up” portion in other ways and areas. By lacking these things, we cannot properly engage with our community, quantitatively, since we are ‘flattening’ everything into mere praise.

We can see that our participation in a group setting would be greatly impacted by how one chooses to “show up” in a social setting. Maybe a person doesn’t talk much but when they do they are clearly communicating authentically, and I would want to recognize this, even during the meeting.

In DDOs, they even have created apps to allow for this. Read: An Everyone Culture: An Everyone Culture: Becoming a Deliberately Developmental Organization: Kegan, Robert, Lahey, Lisa Laskow, Miller, Matthew L, Fleming, Andy, Helsing, Deborah: 9781625278623: Amazon.com: Books

In short, I want praise to be a lot more granular and organized on people, not fungibility, or ease of programming or because we’re SO USED TO using oversimplifications of value like fiat currency to represent our gratitude.

In NVC, Marshall Rosenberg says that all we’re ever doing is saying “please” or “thank you”. I just want to be given tools to do this, and to reveal myself as transparently myself in a group like this, where I feel safe to express such things.

So, not having a way to assess or determine someone’s needs is also lacking here in the praise setup. Maybe a person doesn’t participate because they have a higher need for safety than others. Or they show up but never talk because of this. Or find it important to “be there” in meetings but their participation is expressed in other ways. Without other granular tools to assess and quantify these things, it will be harder to engage authentically.

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After seeking advice process with @liviade, I propose we extend the proposal submission deadline to Tuesday, June 29 1pm EST / 7pm CET, begin voting on Tuesday June 29 at that time, and extend the voting deadline for the first round to the following Tuesday, July 5 (at the time of the beginning of Soft Gov. as normal).

Due to current workloads, myself and a few others from the community would like to participate, but are unable to submit proposals by tomorrow.

Extending would allow for 1) more quality proposals 2) time to communicate about the proposal submission and voting.

We gave a lot of time to MVV and other votes, and this vote is equally as important - if not more. I know we have a pressure and want to hatch, but a few days extension will not make too much of a difference (would actually allow more time for Communications) and would give more adequate time to this process. Thank you and I look forward to developing proposals this weekend.

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@durgadas Thank you for that insightful contribution. I agree with you that I think the Praise system has perhaps confounded [still potential] monetary compensation with gratitude, and the two do not seem to mix well unfortunately.

Fantastic comment: “changing how one represents one’s GRATITUDE is far better than representing it through praise, in my view.”

Perhaps the Praise system needs to lose its [potential] monetary value. It appears to be destructive and counterproductive to the concept of praise (small “p” - common noun). I nearly wanted to say it is “counterproductive to its actual intention,” but that doesn’t seem accurate, as I think the Praise system was created as a way to compensate folks who were otherwise not being compensated.

Praise-gate (as @natesuits once called it :stuck_out_tongue: ) shows, among other things, the complexity and essentially impossibility of mixing gratitude with money --or rather perhaps, of “accurately” showing gratitude through money…

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@JessicaZartler, I want to get my head around the impact to timelines from the proposed extension.

Here is what we are currently aiming for:
Jun 29: Primaries close
June 29: Create runoff proposals
Jun 29 - July 1: Runoff
Week of July 5: Hatch

Admittedly, it’s the fastest option. The runoff proposals would be made quickly and the runoff would happen quickly, though there will be fewer, and more distinct, proposals on the table so deliberation should not need to take so long. But it does all happen during the week.

Would the timeline you are proposing look like this:
July 6: Primaries close
July 7: Create runoff proposals
July 7-13: Runoff
July 16/17/18: Hatch

When I look at this timeline, I question whether there would be any real significant benefit from drawing it out this long.

An extended version that was discussed in case the target was unachievable looks like this:
July 1: Primaries close
July 2: Create runoff proposals
July 2-6: Runoff
July 9/10/11: Hatch

It allows some more time for the initial proposals to be voted on and for the runoff to happen over the weekend instead of mid-week. I’d offer this as an extended alternative if we want one.

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We had to create a new repo for Tokenlog, please submit proposals to this one → Tokenlog · Token-weighted backlogs

I already edited all the other posts with the old links, but posting it again here just to make sure everyone is in the right one :slight_smile:

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I think this looks great and contemplates everyone. @JessicaZartler does this look good for you?

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Gentle reminder to submit your IH intervention proposal if you have one in mind! We’ll have the results of the primaries on Thursday during the community call, and it would be great to have at least two days fully for voting, when all the proposals are there.

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Today we had our first SourceCred test distribution. This sheet of percentages of rewards is also very insightful for our praise discussion