Operations Workstream Outline

[TylerShapeShift]

• The Operations department at the current centralized ShapeShift has been an integral part of the growth and development of healthy systems for reliably producing and maintaining the ShapeShift product suite and its uptime, responsiveness and feature functionality. As ShapeShift moves fully to decentralization, many of these responsibilities will continue to be an asset to the success of the ShapeShift’s products.

  Proposed Responsibilities for the DAO Operations Workstream:

  24/7 coverage for Prod Issue escalations.

• Triage Management
• Regularly scheduled regression and deployment testing
• Cross workstream alignment and stakeholder resources
• 24/7 coverage for Prod Issue escalations

  Operations maintains and tests against a list of states, errors, or issues that would warrant escalation to an on-call engineer for immediate action for resolution. This involves scheduled regression tests, as well as protocols for discovery, identification, recreation, escalation, tracking, testing, and verified resolution of issues or bugs within the production environment.

  24/7 Coverage for this requires a team with set schedules for on-call responsibilities, this may not be achievable at the beginning of the transition period, but we hope to grow to full coverage quickly.

  Triage Management

  Operations manages a Triage channel (currently in centralized Slack, but moving soon to decentralized Discord) with a strict flow for reporting issues discovered in any of ShapeShift’s Production Environments. (ShapeShift Web, Mobile, CoinCap, KeepKey, Portis) This channel consists of an issue reporter bot, threads for individual issues, and weekly reports as well as a manually maintained spreadsheet and ticket board of reported issues and progress.

  Similar to Prod issues, there are protocols for recreation, identification, escalation, tracking, testing, and verification of resolution followed by Operations team members for succinct and accurate triaging of issues presented to the channel.

  Operations also acts as a first line of communication and resource for users and Community Mods in Discord when looking for support with a suspected bug or production issue.

  Regularly scheduled regression and deployment testing

  Operations has regularly scheduled regression tests to catch bugs or unexpected behavior in the production environment of all products. Tests occur multiple times a day and results are recorded and shared for any escalation purposes.

  Partnering with Engineering and Product, Operations is available to test all new deployments. Testing includes new features and expected functionality of existing products for both staging and production environments.

  Cross workstream alignment and stakeholder resources

  Operations provides resources for the DAO via organizing and running meetings across departments and stakeholders. These meetings can include:

  Weekly Ops Syncs for all departments to share weekly updates across the org.

• Monthly AllFox meetings for all stakeholders to get updates on progress and development.
• Go/No-Go meetings for launches of special projects and new features
• Retro meetings for issues, breaks, and problems deserving and conversation and learning and growth opportunities.
• Scribing and meeting organizing for whiteboarding, scopes, kickoffs, standups, or any other scheduled gathering in which Operations can help support with leading, organization, notes, and or any other administrative responsibilities.

I look forward to discussions in this thread about these and other potential responsibilities of the Operations department moving forward with the DAO.

I am currently employed at Centralized ShapeShift in the Operations Department and will be maintaining a lot of the above outlined responsibilities along with the rest of the Operations team through October. In the coming weeks after transitioning our current tools to the discord channel for DAO use, I hope to propose to be the Workstream Leader for Operations for the DAO. My proposal will also include a more detailed outline of the department team needs, timelines, funding requests, and a more detailed look at success metrics for the team.

[jonisjon]

Thanks for putting this together - great to see this laid out!

Operations is such an important part of ShapeShift today and I think it is vital to keep this workstream going in the future for the DAO. I think you would be a great leader of this workstream and look forward to seeing this evolve into a formal proposal over the coming weeks!

[willy]

This is awesome . You and the operations team have been integral to ShapeShift since the beginning, and I’m so glad to see you intend to continue offering issue-triaging, prod-issue escalation, and regression testing, not to mention the million other things we’ve come to depend on you for.

Looking forward to seeing your proposal to lead this workstream in the coming weeks 1f642

[FOX_McCloud]

Great proposal for a much-needed workstream! This has my support!

[goodfaith]

Production oversight is something that I’ve wondered how a DAO would manage. Obviously, there is still overhead costs associated with the DAO functioning. Shapeshift is shedding: office expenses, insurance, healthcare and tax liabilities, but people build the products. It still requires structure.

Those already familiar with the code base and manage the development pipeline are what might be deemed in the COVID pandemic scenario “critical workers.”

I will be very interested in hearing your teams thoughts on the difference between the corporate structure and the DAO structure, both in form and finance. I bet there are some university professors, or someone seeking their postgraduate, who would relish the opportunity to engage with you now and upon the dissolution of the organization, and track your progress as the DAO takes shape. It would make for a great business dissertation and is interesting experiment fitting for out times. (Not to call anyone’s existence an experiment, but I associate different political frameworks, languages and cultures - as one big human experiment cohesively)

I can only imagine that COVID may have impacted the corporate direction. If that is true this transition to a DAO would be an even more interesting case study. It’s easy to understand that this move creates value that isn’t present under a corporate formation, but I hope this workstream helps the DAO keeps the fabric of innovation and production I assume existed in your corporate structure.

[CAO_shapeshiftdemo]

Agreed - this is an imperative work stream and would be well led by you !

[danielle]

I’m in full support of the Operations Workstream. We have learned over the years in the Operations department of ShapeShift that keeping oversight on the systems in production is absolutely vital. The DAO should have a dedicated team that is accountable for the uptime and system reliability of all front-facing products under the ShapeShift umbrella.

Another area that Ops plays that will be key to the DAO is organizing stakeholder alignment and orchestrating major initiatives in collaboration with all other workstream leaders to keep all boats rowing in the same direction.

Super excited to see this progress 1f44f Nice work Tyler!

[Beorn]

You have my support , thank you for putting this in motion!

[Beorn]

Can you link in here to the budget request which is more recent?

[TylerShapeShift]

Here is the link to the proposal in Boardroom with the included budget requested at the bottom of the proposal: Boardroom Management Portal

[Beorn]

Here is my feedback on the Operations Workstream proposal, ahead of it going up for formal vote. Obviously, Ops as a function is critical, and Tyler has all the background/experience of this function in centralized ShapeShift, so he has my support to lead it.

Further, I appreciate very much | ShapeShift#8065 stepping up to form this proposal and get this Workstream started. Thank you!

Reference: Boardroom Management Portal

Please take all of my comments as mere suggestions. Here in the DAO, I’m not the CEO.

My concerns and suggestions largely revolve around the cost structure of this Workstream. I posted a general message relevant to this yesterday, here: Concerned about salary expectations and costs

• Costs for the work stream are coming in too high @ $60k/mo for me to support as-is.

• I’d like a better understanding of job role specs between Workstream Leader and Operations Coordinator. There seems to be a lot of overlap there, but I might be misunderstanding? If the Workstream Leader is managing the Ops Assistants, then why is Coordinator needed? And if Workstream Leader is not managing the Ops Assistants, then what is the justification for $150k/yr salary for this role? Either it’s a demanding role leading and managing this Function (in which case $150k may be justified), or the Coordinator is taking most of the day to day work, and then Workstream Leader seems more like a part time role. Please elaborate or explain these functions more if I’m not understanding (very possible!)
• I’m not convinced we should have as our goal full-time paid roles to enable 24/7 coverage, and I would prefer to lean on the community itself for some of this responsiveness.
• Instead of 8 full-time roles as shown, I’d suggest 3-4. Workstream Leader (who arguably is the ops coordinator, see point above), and then 2-3 Ops Assistants.
• Test Funds @ $7,500/mo seems really expensive. The “cost” here must be gas fees, correct? Other than net loss on gas fees, test fund crypto shouldn’t be loss, but should be re-used. So if it’s just gas fees, and we assume avg of $20 per test transaction (which seems high as an avg), that’d be 375 test transactions per month, or ~12 test transactions every day of the month. Is this appropriate? If more accurate math estimates are available to justify the $7,500/mo, pls post.

We should be clear that CoinCap and Portis support functions are not in the scope of the ShapeShift DAO’s responsibilities (though they were

• in scope in centralized ShapeShift).
• I’d like the Mission of this work stream better defined. As written, “The Operations workstream has and will continue to herd the cats of ShapeShift, now into open source and decentralization. This workstream is focused on helping increase the efficiency and productivity of the other workstreams’ success metrics, tests, velocity, and output.” This seems very different than the opening paragraph of the proposal, in which it states the Ops Workstream is for “producing and maintaining the ShapeShift product suite and its uptime, responsiveness and feature functionality.” This sentence seems much more appropriate for the mission. I’d suggest just duplicating it in the Mission section, as it will help the community understand what Ops is specifically doing.

In terms of Metrics, the proposal says “We hope to develop a strong set of KPIs after the first quarter of the workstream’s existence. “ This is not accountable enough. Needs to say “We will produce

• an appropriate set of KPIs after the first quarter of the workstream’s existence.” Minor change, perhaps, but important.

[TylerShapeShift]

Continuing the discussion from Operations Workstream Outline:

Hey thank you for taking the time to provide critical feedback to my proposal. I have some responses that may clarify some of the questions you presented.

• Beorn:

  Costs for the work stream are coming in too high @ $60k/mo for me to support as-is.

I will be providing a more thorough breakdown of costs and potential budget line items that will be returned to the DAO if unspent. The $60k a month spend for the workstream will most likely not be fully reached on any of these months but is available for the Operations workstream to achieve maximum success and not be a blocker for any other workstream’s development or testing needs.

Beorn:

I’d like a better understanding of job role specs between Workstream Leader and Operations Coordinator. There seems to be a lot of overlap there, but I might be misunderstanding? If the Workstream Leader is managing the Ops Assistants, then why is Coordinator needed? And if Workstream Leader is not managing the Ops Assistants, then what is the justification for $150k/yr salary for this role? Either it’s a demanding role leading and managing this Function (in which case $150k may be justified), or the Coordinator is taking most of the day to day work, and then Workstream Leader seems more like a part time role. Please elaborate or explain these functions more if I’m not understanding (very possible!)

It seems a little pointed that this workstream is being targeted for detailed job descriptions and justification when the other proposed workstreams have not undergone the same level of scrutiny as they pass. Perhaps this is to make a greater example, but it also strengthens the feelings that Operations has always been an underappreciated and misunderstood department of resources (beyond ShapeShift).

We currently run a barebones Operations team at centralized ShapeShift with 1 director, 2 Ops coordinators, and (2) Ops assistants. While the Ops assistants focus is primarily on testing, the coordinator and workstream leader will have both of their hands full with 40+ hours a week responsibilities of managing and coordinating the stream, other streams, meetings, triage, and ad-hoc requests.

In meeting management, Operations is looking at coordinating, leading, and maintaining:

Weekly Ops Sprint, Monthly All Fox, Unsolved User Problems, Weekly Governance, Workstream Kickoffs, Project go/No-gos, Retros, and various other meetings held on recurring schedules. While there will be coordination with with C-mod team on some of these meetings in terms of av capture; the organization, agenda, documentation, moderation, communication, implementation and success of all of these meetings will be on the accountability and responsibilities of the Operations Workstream.

The Operations workstream leader (and coordinator) is a very demanding role aside from the aforementioned meeting moderation and workstream resource Operations provides to the rest of the DAO. All meeting managment resources will be provided by the workstream leader and Operations Coordinator. While the workstream leader will have both the coordinator and the assistants as direct reports, the coordinator will be positioned to be an escalations and triage specialist for the assistants to assure timely responses and correct information relayed to the proper workstreams given the issue and priority. The Coordinator will have no management responsibilities to the assistants outside of training and triage/testing resources. The coordinator will be the only other Operations workstream member with meeting management responsibilities.

The workstream leader will be the manager of the entire team with responsibilities including but not limited to, all Colony interactions regarding payment, funding test wallets, one on ones (reviews, metrics, individual kpis), Cross workstream collaboration, triage resource, greater meeting manager/coordinator/organizer, testing, and reporting. This jump in responsibilities is a large leap from my current responsibilities as an Operations Coordinator (manager) and this job is currently well over a 40+ hours a week responsibility.

• Beorn:

  I’m not convinced we should have as our goal full-time paid roles to enable 24/7 coverage, and I would prefer to lean on the community itself for some of this responsiveness.

The goal will be to achieve 24/7 testing and triage coverage in the future. The early version of my budget was a block with all 6 assistants starting to receive payment on Nov 1. I recognize that there will need to be a hiring/fit process and we will not be able to achieve full 24/7 coverage on November 1st, and we will not be able to hire all team members on Nov. 1st. My statement under the pictured budget is definitely considered for this circumstance: “Any unspent test funds or other budget items will either be returned to the DAO, or rolled over to the next month’s budgeted amount with the remainder being returned to the DAO at the end of the quarter.”

There is no assumption that we will spend all budgeted assistants’ salaries on Nov 1 as we build the team out, any unfilled positions will lead to FOX in the Operations workstream that will be returned to the DAO. (Either at the end of each month or quarter, whatever is preferred and set as protocol.)

Leaning on the community for first response will be good for first acknowledging an issue, but we will suffer a massive tragedy of the commons without an acountable and trained representative that knows and has access to the responsibilities included in deescalating and resolving the issue. There can be a delicate balance we develop and train our community to that can assist in the discovery and reporting of issues, but the protocol and trust in following through to resolution should never be up to crowdsourcing in my personal opinion.

When and if Operations is able to get to a 24/7 testing and triage response schedule we will actually unlock and support a truly decentralized workforce.

Currently Operations has to provide a very small window for deployment testing, limited to less than the current Denver 9-5. If the DAO ever has hopes of opening the development to a decentralized (international) workforce, providing a global testing and triage response schedule will be key to our process, development, velocity and regression ratio.

• Beorn:

  Instead of 8 full-time roles as shown, I’d suggest 3-4. Workstream Leader (who arguably is the ops coordinator, see point above), and then 2-3 Ops Assistants.

I disagree with this short-sighted devaluation of the Operations responsibilities and time available to provide what is asked of them. When the Operations team was a team of 4, I was working 60+ hours a week waking up to fight regressions and system breaking issues at 1-4am multiples times a week and continuing an 8-6+ regular schedule. Asking me to take on a huge excess of responsibilities plus my current role with a smaller team and no promotion (actually a demotion considering all the new developments around payment logistics) feels deeply inconsiderate and out of touch.

• Beorn:

  Test Funds @ $7,500/mo seems really expensive. The “cost” here must be gas fees, correct? Other than net loss on gas fees, test fund crypto shouldn’t be loss, but should be re-used. So if it’s just gas fees, and we assume avg of $20 per test transaction (which seems high as an avg), that’d be 375 test transactions per month, or ~12 test transactions every day of the month. Is this appropriate? If more accurate math estimates are available to justify the $7,500/mo, pls post.

During the Airdrop testing with small network congestion, our two assistants were each burning well over $200/day in gas fees on the Ethereum testing all wallets and features. When THOR swaps are a function we can test, the edge cases of assuring all trades are successful can exceed $150+ in a regression test that is performed at least 2x a day (full coverage would be more like 4-6x a day).

When the network has crazy fees, there is no ‘wait for it to calm down’ option for Operations or Engineering if we need to fix or test something. We’ve all paid heinous gas fees across all chains due to random events or market conditions and will need to make sure we have the ability to going forward. In Centralized Shapeshift, Operations has the keys to all test funds and could provide them like Oprah whenever requested. These requests easily exceed $7500/month and were solely used for feature/development testing. Going forward some workstreams have budgeted test funds, if they have not, they will need to coordinate with Operations for testing their features. Operations is preparing itself to be able to support all requests from all teams for feature testing regardless of the feature, time, or network status.

Is $7,500 a month a lot for test funds? Absolutely. Are there conditions in the past where ShapeShift has spent that much in testing? Absolutely.

Again, my statement about returning unused funds from the proposal rings true here: “Any unspent test funds or other budget items will either be returned to the DAO, or rolled over to the next month’s budgeted amount with the remainder being returned to the DAO at the end of the quarter.”

Beorn:

We should be clear that CoinCap and Portis support functions are not in the scope of the ShapeShift DAO’s responsibilities (though they were

• in scope in centralized ShapeShift).

Until they are officially not under the scope of Operations (and hopefully are successfully operating on their own), Operations will support issues, testing, resources, and triage of CoinCap, Portis and any other feature, service, or device in the ShapeShift ecosystem. When they are successfully Officially no longer in scope, they will not be a part of Operations oversight. This call should be made by all stakeholders of the feature/service in question and not the Operations Workstream. If these can be achieved before Nov. 1st, great, If Operations has to help support the DAO transition to a full DAO and it takes time, there will be no balls dropped in a transition period.

• Beorn:

  I’d like the Mission of this work stream better defined. As written, “The Operations workstream has and will continue to herd the cats of ShapeShift, now into open source and decentralization. This workstream is focused on helping increase the efficiency and productivity of the other workstreams’ success metrics, tests, velocity, and output.” This seems very different than the opening paragraph of the proposal, in which it states the Ops Workstream is for “producing and maintaining the ShapeShift product suite and its uptime, responsiveness and feature functionality.” This sentence seems much more appropriate for the mission. I’d suggest just duplicating it in the Mission section, as it will help the community understand what Ops is specifically doing.

We do both of those things, but I’ll look at better simplifying the coordination part without cat wrangling metaphors if it is confusing the responsibilities and selling them short.

Beorn:

In terms of Metrics, the proposal says “We hope to develop a strong set of KPIs after the first quarter of the workstream’s existence. “ This is not accountable enough. Needs to say “We will produce

• an appropriate set of KPIs after the first quarter of the workstream’s existence.” Minor change, perhaps, but important.

Valid and will be updated accordingly.

[TylerShapeShift]

I’d also like to add that the Operations workstream will be one of the first, larger and hopefully longterm workstreams that will have an easier barrier of entry (no coding experience reqs!) for community members to apply to and get paid by the DAO. This should consequently allow easier eventual 24/7 coverage with the borderless job opportunity.

In terms of truly decentralizing the company into the DAO and the journey it will take to get there successfully, I feel a full team of 8 provides opportunity in a vessel for decentralization while also meeting the needs of the current product suite’s uptime, development, roadmap, and timelines.

We won’t be able to open up all of the code to the community to contribute on successfully on day one, and that’s expected and okay. The Engineering, Product, Marketing, Security, Tokenomics, and Support workstream propsals (in their various proposal states) all have small amounts of positions available for the community to participate in due to either the positions being filled by current centralized foxes or reduced team size. We also will have a hybrid of community members that would like to work in multiple streams, or ones who have energy and passion to contribute where they can but will need a more formal way into the DAO beyond buying FOX and using it to vote with it.

The Operations workstream can be a gateway drug into the ecosystem of ShapeShift, the DAO, and our product suite. It provides the close view of our successes and our pain points through real interaction with the product in whole as it is being worked on a push by push basis.

It can provide a critically important view into the cogs of the machine (or smart contracts) and how the DAO and community may want to to shape or develop future workstreams/projects beyond crowdbased and other community designed voting. Perhaps the Operations workstream can be a pipeline for recruiting similar to the OG Support team that developed many foxes that moved to other departments and higher responsibilities.

Keeping this team functional and full as a resource rather than an on-call crew and filling the team with community members early can provide a path for future teams to model in their own decentralization paths from ShapeShift to the DAO, while also doing more than just keeping the lights on.

We may not be able to hire the full team right away, and it may also be some time before the DAO can fully utilize the support that can be provided by 24/7 testing coverage, but those timelines can align together. If we are moving into the decentralized world we have to start preparing for what success looks like there. Looking at what Operations was able to accomplish under a centralized entity and trimming that for a blueprint of the future leaves all the community engagement opportunity and synergy aside at an important and ripe time for collaboration and involvement.

[CAO_shapeshiftdemo]

If there had not been a truly dedicated operations team (by dedicated I mean diligent and good at their jobs), I don’t think I would have been successful in my role (at centralized ShapeShift). The team was an invaluable asset to the product team with testing and recreating bugs that came from support. In the DAO world, I think this is just as important if not more. When we have a larger team working on different projects, there will be more testing needed and more requests for running meetings/retros, so having a solid operations workstream is imperative.

From personal experience, it is so valuable to have another person to test. There were times when I saw something and they didn’t or visa versa. Having 2 people on at most times will be very beneficial and having others to try to recreate issues when they’re available will make the product more robust and a better user experience. I think 2-3 ops assistants is very sparse and will lead to burn out very quickly. I see a huge value add to having ~6 ops assistants (depending on hiring timeline has spoken about).

[willy]

I hear both sides of this and appreciate the discourse. Collaboratively debating and refining proposals rather than just voting yay or nay will be essential to the DAO’s success, so thank you for providing thoughtful feedback and proposed improvements and thank you for incorporating or responding to each point.

I appreciate ’s intention to ensure the workstream has enough resources to be successful and help the DAO be successful, and I appreciate ’s intention to make sure the workstream isn’t overspending and we are applying just as much scrutiny to budgets as we have at centralized ShapeShift. I imagine the optimal balance is probably somewhere in the middle, so appreciate Tyler making it very clear that the anticipated budget is a limit rather than a target, as it sounds like either there will be a significant amount of FOX left over at the end of this budget cycle, or the operations workstream will have been super busy, and we will have been glad they were sufficiently funded up front.

Also, +100 to ’s comment. if it wasn’t for ops, there would be no ShapeShift.

I’m planning to vote yes on establishing this workstream, appointing Tyler as workstream leader, and funding the proposed anticipated budget knowing the operations workstream will be in great hands and should have more than enough resources to be successful. The only thing that is certain is that we’ll learn a ton in this first budget cycle. I do for one hope that with the new and improved open source architecture, ops will have far fewer regressions and prod issues to deal with, which will be great because there will be all sorts of new, hopefully more enjoyable things to help with 1f642

[Beorn]

Hey - I appreciate the thorough response. It’s clear that you took some offense to my post; this was certainly not my intention - let’s keep discussing. As an aside, while we could certainly have a phone call directly to discuss this, the open and public discussion is important so let’s stick to this venue.

Let me zoom out a bit here and explain where this cost concern is coming from.

As a corporation, ShapeShift’s organizational structure grew organically over many years. We are morphing into a DAO now — a different structure — and while some of what the DAO does needs to be analogous to Corporate ShapeShift, there will also be significant differences.

As an example: let’s pick on Accounting. Does DAO ShapeShift need the same accounting function as Corp ShapeShift? No, probably not. Some account is now handled on the blockchain itself, there are no Swiss accounting mandates, and GAAP is irrelevant. Some accounting will be done either internally by workstream leaders or via new tools like Colony, etc.

The point is the function will be different and we should all hope it will be smaller in cost

When the foundation of something changes, the structure built on top must also change, and must be built again organically in response to the new foundation.

All of us must recognize there is a strong bias toward inertia. The way things have been done in the past is the way people will try to do them. Sometimes that’s okay, but sometimes it’ll be counterproductive. When I see an expensive proposal put forward with no meaningful challenge/questions/critique of its substance, I worry about this inertia.

Do we need an Operations function in DAO form? Very likely we do. What should it look like? None of us know exactly, but with time and iteration we’ll figure it out together.

The point of my challenging the $60k/mo budget isn’t to say “ops isn’t important.” Importance is not judged by the size of budget. The point of my challenge is to suggest that because we don’t know what new structure is appropriate, we should err toward smaller and simpler.

Proposing an Ops structure and budget which is larger than current ShapeShift Ops runs counter to that principle. Maybe it should

• be larger? Perhaps! But I’d rather discover that with time and iteration, rather than designing a system to be large from the start.

  Hopefully that context will help illustrate where the concerns are coming from. It’s not because I “don’t value ops”. I value whatever efficiently helps us achieve our mission of building the world’s open-source crypto interface.

  Addressing a few other points in no particular order…

  I hear your point about “not all the funds will be used” and that’s helpful, I’m glad you re-iterated it, and is marginally reduces my concern.

• You mention lots of meetings and the responsibility of overseeing/managing/moderating those. Why do we need them all? This is a time to re-assess what’s necessary for the mission, not to continue everything from the past. We should not be looking for things to do, but things not to do, so as to improve efficiency. Anyone in charge of Ops should be championing that cause.
• I’m still struggling to understand the material difference between Operations Workstream Leader and Operations Coordinator. I’m sorry if I’m being dense.

“I disagree with this short-sighted devaluation of the Operations responsibilities and time available to provide what is asked of them. When the Operations team was a team of 4, I was working 60+ hours a week waking up to fight regressions and system breaking issues at 1-4am multiples times a week and continuing an 8-6+ regular schedule. Asking me to take on a huge excess of responsibilities plus my current role with a smaller team and no promotion (actually a demotion considering all the new developments around payment logistics) feels deeply inconsiderate and out of touch.”

• I need to respond to this one directly ^ Your above comment was a response to me suggesting, “Instead of 8 full-time roles as shown, I’d suggest 3-4. Workstream Leader (who arguably is the ops coordinator, see point above), and then 2-3 Ops Assistants.” Do you think your response and the offense taken was really warranted in this context? Corp ShapeShift has Ops team of 5… I’m suggesting we start with an Ops team of 3-4, and to you this feels deeply inconsiderate and out of touch? I need to express that it feels like a defensive overreaction.
• Understood regarding the testing fees per month. Considering the other point about returning unused funds, I can get behind this so long as its tracked appropriately.
• I don’t love the framing of “a full team of 8 provides opportunity in a vessel for decentralization” and “the Operations workstream will be one of the first, larger and hopefully longterm workstreams… for community members to apply to and get paid by the DAO”. It sounds like you’re suggesting we should approve the large budget to create more roles so that the community can get paid by the DAO. Let me know if I’m misinterpreting that? I want to be very clear: the ShapeShift DAO does not exist to create jobs and pay people who want jobs. That is not at all our mission. Our mission is to create the world’s open-source crypto interface, and we should do so with AS FEW jobs and costs as practical. If the mission can be advanced without a job or cost, that is always superior to advancing the mission with a new required job. We’re trying to build efficiently as an economic collective toward a stated goal, not provide income for people. This is super important.
• I hear and respect the comments from others in the thread here. I’ll re-iterate, I’m not CEO here, I admire debate and directness (thank you!), and appreciate the competing opinions and engagement as we all figure this DAO thing out together.

Ops are critical and let’s make this a success. Thank you for hearing me out, and , thank you for moving this forward, being a leader, and stepping into the ring.

[TylerShapeShift]

(post deleted by author)

[TylerShapeShift]

Hey Erik,

This debate process is definitely something that is new and a bit strange to me, but I’m happy we can have a good discussion about everything in the open for the DAO and to ease any misunderstandings or hurt feelings.

I did take offense to some parts of your post when I read and responded to:

• Beorn:

  Instead of 8 full-time roles as shown, I’d suggest 3-4. Workstream Leader (who arguably is the ops coordinator, see point above), and then 2-3 Ops Assistants.

• I have definitely told myself a ton of stories in my response and reaction, namely:

  The future of ShapeShift in the DAO will have the same, if not more needs operationally to run successfully and smoothly.

• The centralized Operations department ran the smoothest it had with a team of 5 (still very limited testing coverage) This was the closest I achieved a sub 45+ hour work week and a healthy work/life balance.

My current centralized ShapeShift full time responsibilities +

• ’s current centralized ShapeShift full time responsibilities will be required in one new position of an Operations workstream leader going forward with the DAO.
• Eliminating Accounting and HR just moves all of those accountabilities and responsibilities to the workstream leader.
• And that you also had some knowledge/belief that these above points were true too.

If all of those were to be true, there is no way the job I envisioned in my head for a workstream leader could be achieved successfully in a single full-time job. The imagined workload would also put an almost unmanageable strain on the team, and that was a triggering thought to remember some of the harder fire fighting times before we got a full staff and protocol for successful deployment and testing.

None of those stories I told myself about the needs of Centralized ShapeShift are going to completely translate to the DAO in their current form and I do see that better now than I did when I first responded. I got my feelings hurt in feeling that your response did not acknowledge the extra new work that this venture will be beyond my current roles as Operations Coordinator when I would jump up to basically take on all of my boss’s responsibilities on top of my current ones.

I apologize for the defensive reaction.

Beorn:

Do we need an Operations function in DAO form?

The idea of answering this question with ‘maybe not (at some point?)’ does exist and is kinda scary and frightening to my sense of confidence and structure in the achievements we made in Operations at centralized ShapeShift.

Beorn:

The point of my challenging the $60k/mo budget isn’t to say “ops isn’t important.” Importance is not judged by the size of budget. The point of my challenge is to suggest that because we don’t know what new structure is appropriate, we should err toward smaller and simpler.

It was a good challenge, this was my first official budget proposal of any kind of this size. Your muscle for budgets in general is much more well exercised than mine here. I was able to review and tighten in a few things for a much more realistic than optimistic budget which will be posted after this response.

• Beorn:

  You mention lots of meetings and the responsibility of overseeing/managing/moderating those. Why do we need them all? This is a time to re-assess what’s necessary for the mission, not to continue everything from the past. We should not be looking for things to do, but things not to do, so as to improve efficiency. Anyone in charge of Ops should be championing that cause.

I personally find lots of value in the current calls/meetings that are being held in Discord. There is a lot of work going on behind the scenes to make them happen and a lot more requests for more forms of organization, collaboration, connection and MOAR meetings (that are sometimes more intensive and cumbersome than what I have proposed we carry over).

We may not need all the old meeting formats, but the framework of kick-offs, retros, and go no gos, and the useful information dumps like weekly ops sprints, unsolved user problems, and the All Fox have brought a lot of value to individual teams and the company as a whole. I would rather provide the DAO with the option for all of these resources if needed, and found putting them under the responsibility of Operations highlighted where to go to for them. My hope is that like any unused budget, if the meetings aren’t necessary, the time will be returned. I’m very comfortable cancelling any unnecessary meetings and definately be looking to always expedite and increase efficiency.

• Beorn:

  I’m still struggling to understand the material difference between Operations Workstream Leader and Operations Coordinator. I’m sorry if I’m being dense.

I have cut the Operations Coordinator role from the budget, If the need for a coordinator arises it will be presented at the end of the proposed timeline when renewal/changes discussions happen.

Beorn:

It sounds like you’re suggesting we should approve the large budget to create more roles so that the community can get paid by the DAO. Let me know if I’m misinterpreting that?

Not suggesting this at all. I was trying to state that a majority of the other workstreams will still be primarily centralized for some time. Operations has the opportunity to lead by example in being more diverse and decentralized than the other currently proposed streams. Additionally, a full team of 24/7 testing would allow a decentralized dev team to push more often than a Denver based team would. The Operations assistant role also serves as a great explainer in the ShapeShift ecosystem if an interested party wanted to explore our stack before deciding where to contribute. Those were my ideas behind the decentralized vessel thought. Not commenting about free rides, deserved income, or handouts from the DAO. We’re here to create the wake, not ride in it.

Thank you for your feedback and comments and everyone else. This process has been extremely helpful in both understanding the workstream and the DAO a lot better.

There will be a new version of the budget posted here as well as the updated version of the proposal. It will then be going to official vote.

[Neverwas]

I appreciate the openness of discussion and respect the willingness to allow the DAO to see the thought going into this transition. I will support this proposal, but do understand concerns outlined in the above posts. I can see this as a precurser to new set of challanges and will be a large part of the learning curve.

[TylerShapeShift]

Here is the new proposed budget: $136,400

Test Funds, roles, amount of new hires, time of hires, and misc. funding have all been tweaked to a more conservative and need based approach.

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The total budget of $136,400 would be a max limit if Operations saw the need for all the projected hires and exhausted all budget items to their limit like test funds.

There are two Operations team members that are interested in continuing on as Operations assistants and their handles have been added to the budget respectively. ( and /lych They like myself, have a final wave date of Oct 31. No additional salary will be assumed or asked for until we are fully transition to working in the workstream under the DAO on Nov. 1st.

The budget then has a limited scale of new hires, one a month through January. If Operations finds in their new discovery of needs in the DAO to hire out additional team members, the salary, test funds, and potential technical needs are budgeted for a maximum of a team of 7 (including the workstream leader) come January.

It is my hope to hire at least one more assistant in October, and reassess the needs each month to address hiring another team member if the DAO and workstream require. This gives the floor of the budget if no new hires are ever added to the workstream of $75,600.

Any and all unused FOX for this proposal will be returned to the DAO at the end of January 2022. This gives a budget range of ~$75k-$136.4k max.