Interchain Support Group funding for Osmosis by Interbloc

Proposal Discussion
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Latest proposal found here: [revised] Osmosis Support Lab Funding Round September 2023 - March 2024

Introduction

This proposal aims to establish funding for the Interchain Support Group. This team would replace the OSL’s duties and responsibilities, shifting them to a support group run by Interbloc that would respond to the community. This will be delivered to Osmosis Governance as a service for the community, funded by the Community Pool.

Interbloc is a validator and service provider for the Cosmos Ecosystem, composed of individuals highly committed to the success of Osmosis and the Interchain at large. Interbloc also serves the community with our anti-scam brand, Cosmoshield. For more information about Interbloc, please visit our website or Discord.

OSL Scope

The Osmosis Support Lab has been funded to support the Osmosis community since 2021. Since then, it has undergone numerous changes to its structure, scope, and funding requests. The goal of the OSL, though, has never changed, and that has been to provide the best support possible to Osmosis’ users and community. In recent iterations, the OSL has provided infrastructure services to the community through relayers and RPC nodes, which Interbloc provided to the OSL. The OSL has been staffed until recently by 16 individuals in different roles, primarily support staff.

The funding of the OSL has historically been done in 3 and 6-month cycles, with the latest funding cycle amounting to $486,000 or ~600,000 OSMO for 6 months. Detailed is the budget shared at the start of this cycle in March 2023.

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OSL Shortcomings

1. Budget issues

After several decreases in funding each cycle, the OSL budget has failed to adapt to market conditions and is expensive to support, mainly caused by the high personnel count. Despite the decrease, the last budget was almost $500,000 for six months of operation.

2. Accountability

There is a continued lack of accountability from members of the OSL regarding time spent supporting the community, with several instances of support staff simply providing no support at all and maintaining their +$3,000/mo pay.

The structure of the OSL as a decentralized entity hinders the removal of these individuals, only acting after pressure from the community during a funding proposal. This allows individuals to take advantage of their employment and receive full pay during their time of no-contribution, up until the finality of the spend proposal.

This problem has been a constant issue for the OSL that no iteration has resolved.

3. Transparency

There is no transparency from the OSL regarding the performance of individuals or teams, no reports on the spending, and no information on the current staff composition. Since the start of their last funding prop in March 2023, members have been removed, and the OSL has experienced budget issues with no communication to the community.

Interbloc’s proposal - ISG (Interchain Support Group)

Interbloc proposes the ISG, a service to the Osmosis community to support users, developers, and service integrators by offering a set of streamlined support staff with oversight and management from Interbloc.

To ensure alignment of this proposal with the success of OSL, we are sharing our pay structure for the staff and the fee that Interbloc would charge for management. For this funding round, which provides twelve months of support services, Interbloc would request a total of $250,000 in $OSMO, with $40,000 of $OSMO $125,000 with $20,000 in OSMO reserved for self-staking to the Interbloc Validator. Interbloc would continue to provide RPC and relaying services while streamlining the support staff to the minimum required while maintaining 24/7 support shifts.

EDIT: The amount has been updated to reflect a 6 month funding period

The support staff will have clearly defined schedules and responsibilities, providing real-time support and performing several backend duties that the OSL currently delivers. These duties include blog posts, event coordination, design work and creation of promotional material, testing and QA, vulnerability/exploit triage, scam prevention, and more. The testing and QA will be limited to feedback on any new features that the dev team wants feedback from, this will not be a completely QA service as we believe this is outside of the scope of Support.

The team would be composed of five people. Four individuals would support users full-time, and one supervisor would schedule and cover shifts as needed. The costs of the team would be as follows and includes a 15% buffer that will be returned to the Community pool immediately after the conversion to USDC.

Role Monthly Per year Hourly People 6 months
Support Only $3,250 $39,000 $18.68/hr 4 $78,000
Supervisor + Support $4,500 $54,000 $25.86/hr 1 $27,000
Subtotal $210,000 $105,000
Interbloc Management Fee 15% OSMO to be staked $20,000
TOTAL $125,000
Buffer +15% $143,750

Staffing details

Support staff: The positions have not been filled and will be an open application, giving priority to current OSL members.

Supervisor: responsibilites are as follows:

  • Cover the shifts for sick time/vacation
  • Coordinate the shifts
  • Accounting and bookeeping
  • KPI/metric tracking and feedback to staff
  • Communication with foundation with whaterver ISG can help that falls in the support category
  • Coordination of events from product teams launching/launched on Osmosis
  • Organization of community channels, included but not limited to Telegram, Discord and Reddit.
  • Community activities organized by/for the community

Deliverables provided by ISG

  1. 24/7 support on Telegram, Discord, and Reddit

  2. Time allocated to each: TG support 60%, Discord 35%, Reddit 5%, and Support site widget as needed.

  3. Relaying services for top chains and RPC nodes

  4. Community activities and engagement

  5. Monthly and bi-annual reports of KPIs, results, and activity summaries.

Interbloc team responsible for ISG

Two individuals will be responsible for the management and oversight of the ISG.

Boobcactus

She has abundant experience in support roles from the call floor to the supervisor level. She would act as the supervisor of ISG, working alongside the team to ensure shifts and service levels are maintained throughout the support channels. She will also serve as a liaison between the Osmosis Foundation, dev teams, or any other group that wants to collaborate with the ISG.

Luisqa

Luisqa has been a passionate supporter of the OSL since its inception—however, the lack of transparency and accountability has made the OSL challenging to endorse as a community service. As the primary writer of this proposal and the creator of the ISG, my priorities rest on clear communication and frequent transparency reports relating to the ISG’s performance.

Timeline

If the community approves this proposal, we will initiate the transition from OSL to ISG to begin working on September 1st (the day the OSL’s funding proposal expires). Any current OSL members are welcome to apply, as well as Osmosis community members.

Expect discussion to last 2 weeks to have enough time to transition.

Fund management

Interbloc wallet will receive the totality of the funds to convert the corresponding amount to USDC with TWAP swap for the duration of a month. Considering the $150M volume per month of $OSMO this will reduce the sell pressure and will fund the support team for a year.

The process will entail sending to an Interbloc owned wallet, where we will execute the TWAP swap and the resulting USDC will be sent to a community/Interbloc 3 of 5 multisig that will do quarterly transfer of USDC to Interbloc to serve as a further check on the ISG performance. Multisig would be composed of 3 community members and 2 interbloc/ISG staff.

EDITS:

  • Added the fund management section.
  • Expanded on the QA aspect of the service.
  • Added a buffer to the requested amount to avoid any price variation issue.
  • Included details about staff and supervisor responsibilities.
  • Reduced funding period to 6 months.
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Disclaimsr: this is my personal statement alone and does not represent the OSL as an organizatikn.

I would like to address the accountability of members and mention that the current structure exists with an operating cost minus roughly 25,000-40,000 dollars per month because we demanded accountability from previous members that were in fact completely unaccountable.

No we are not perfect but we have consistently improved the cost-efficiency while also increasing service levels with each proposal, and are currently running the leanest budget in the history of OSL, while staying on track to further reduce the budget for the next funding ask.

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Hey Luis! A Few questions:

1 - Based on the budgeted line items, should we assume that all bot maintenance will be abandoned under this proposal? If so, how will we ensure the integrity of the scam deterrent bots in telegram or the proposal webhooking bot in discord? These were items previously paid by OSL.

Additionally, the support website chatbot is a subscription service. Who will pay for that? Will interbloc allow for that service to go down or will this also come out of the management fee? Blog posts (which are included in the deliverables) require that someone maintains the medium publication, which comes at a cost of $60 a year. Will this come out of the management fee?

What about community activities and engagement? Will there be any giveaways? Where will these funds come from? Event coordination, design work, promotional material creation all require additional costs. Where will this come from?

In general my feedback here is that the budget for expenses has not been thought through and / or is poorly documented in this proposal. It’d be good to flesh this out a bit more. Think clearly on all the expenses that would come with taking on this extremely important role and document them so that the community can understand where those expenses will come from.

I also think you significantly underestimate the work involved in “blog posts, event coordination, design work and creation of promotional material, testing and QA, vulnerability/exploit triage, scam prevention, and more,” and the 6 hours per day per staff member likely won’t cover all of these, but I can’t say this for sure.

2 - It doesn’t appear that staff will have any days off as part of this proposal. Do you feel that this is sustainable? How do you plan to address staff members’ need for leave or sick time?

3 -

Which KPIs and results do you intend to track? Can you share a sample transparency report? I understand that the OSL doesn’t provide as many KPIs as you would like, but since you are proposing to replace them based on that fact, you should provide the community with what you feel are appropriate KPIs and metrics by which to measure your performance.

4 - I understand that you intend to ask for funding from multiple chains to establish similar programs. Will interbloc levy a $40k management fee for each chain? Will it be the same two interbloc members managing those programs? If so, how can Osmosis be assured of adequate performance if your time is split amongst several chains?

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There are several questions here so will address each individually:

  1. Bot mantainance
    We will reduce this expense to the minimum and cover whats needed from our side. Currently this amounts to $600 per month which we believe is more than it is needed. Bots that can’t be developed in-house will be covered internally if they are deemed needed as is the case with the TG bot.
  2. Support website chatbot expense
    We will migrate to Mava on discord as support tickets which that alone saves +$4000 for the community and offers in our opinion superior support capabilities.
  3. Blog posts will be done by the support staff and reviewed and posted by the manager. Blog fee is already being considered to be covered by us.
  4. We won’t be doing any giveaways in the short term, considering the current market conditions. However, activities will be coordinated by the manager as needed as is the case with spaces or discord events for new projects, products or groups to have a space to engage with the community.
  5. Design work and promotional material creation will be covered by Interbloc

A clear advantage of having an established organization vs one without income streams is that small expenses can be easily covered by our team.

Think this is answered adequately in the other responses but will gladly expand if you need me to.

There will be 4 support staff working 40 hours a week. That translates to 160 hours covered per week, remaining 8 hours will be covered by manager.

That gives everyone 5 days of work per week, hope this answers the questions. Don’t expect anyone to work more than the budgeted time. To answer the question of sick/vacation time, we will cover that internally at the rate of 18.68/hr as detailed above.

Will share an example transparency report in the coming days, the measures we would track would be:

Response time on social channels.
Number of support queries answered.
Satisfaction numbers from support requests.
Time to resolve tickets.
Active support time (measuring clocking in and out).

The helpdesk archive report shared by OSL here gives a good idea of the KPIs we would provide. Key difference here is that this would be updated continually and not only when asking for funding.

As you mentioned the idea is to request funding for more chains to make it:

  1. Sustainable
  2. Efficient
  3. Scalable

We are already in talks with other chains to offer support services, probably in a smaller scale than osmosis considering the volume and size of the chains. Each chain will have a % management fee that will cover our involvement to manage the support needs. This will allow us to eventually lower the costs to each individual chains leveraging the funding from different treasuries/chains. Each chain will in any case have their own supervisor as the sole point of contact to coordinate each chain’s needs. So to answer your questions specifically, at a minimum one additional person will join with each additional chain.

Osmosis community will have a clear picture of the performance and service levels of the ISG thanks to the clear and transparent service metrics. Thanks to the additional funding more support/management personal can be hired as is needed. We decided to approach this from an efficiency perspective instead of going big and then needing to reduce every time, as has been the case with OSL for years.

The different funding streams will also lower the burden on Osmosis community to fund what in essence has become a Cosmos support team funded solely by Osmosis community pool.

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Thanks Luis. Re: Mava, will this provide an in-website support application as well? I believe Mava does offer this but want to make sure. Replacing the support ticketing system that redirects from the app with something comparable is extremely important.

I also want to pull some other info you’ve stated in other chats that hasn’t been reflected here yet:

  • Interbloc plans to sell the entirety of the 1 year ask (in excess of 500k OSMO) on the open market over a one month period following passage of the proposal. To offset any reduction in OSMO value during that time (including from their own sales), interbloc plans to ask for additional funding with this proposal above and beyond the budgeted amount to act as a cushion, any excess of which will be returned to the community pool.

  • Funds for salary and staff to be held in a multisig, members not decided yet, but it will not be composed entirely of interbloc members. Interbloc’s share will be paid out 25% per quarter by this multisig as a check on the performance of the service.

I strongly feel that given this operating model is untested, the ask should be for a significantly shorter period than one year. 6 months might be preferable, or potentially even a trial run 3 month period. As mentioned above, I’m of the opinion you are significantly underestimating the scope of work you’re signing up for, and as a result either the quality of support offered under this proposal will fall short or you will have to come back to the community pool to request more funding before the termination of the service period.

Better to have you guys get a sense for what you are taking on before giving you all a years’ worth of funding (which not even the OSL has asked for to date). Additionally, if expanding to multiple chains will reduce the cost for Osmosis, why not opt for a shorter term so that you can get some of those other agreements in place and reduce the cost before the end of the 1 year period? This would also allow us to evaluate whether interbloc can adequately divide its time between multiple chains.

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Thank you, I’ve already added what you mentioned to the proposal.

We can consider reducing the time period to 6 months if other community members feel strongly about it.

EDIT: Re: MAVA, yes it offers website connectivity.

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Interesting proposal and certainly one worth considering; also looking at the fact that we are looking into methods to reduce sell pressure on OSMO so all expenses which potentially involve selling OSMO need to be considered.

@luisqa thanks for all answers in this thread already. I think you are doing a great job on trying to clear out the unclarities and / or gaps in the proposal to make it better and more complete.

One thing which kept me wondering though is where the gap from the expenses are coming from. I am very much aware that we have had requests for transparency on expenses/attendance reports/work being done in the past from the OSL and that until this day it has not been given in full or missing in general (small side note to make the picture complete; I write the governance updates for the OSL).

I do think @RoboMcGobo has a point regarding the required amount of work and the current estimation being made. I would expect that we will be seeing a proposal for renewal of the OSL funding very soon as well, where I am curious how these 2 proposals would pit together. It might just also be that your counterproposal results in a much better and much more transparent proposal from the OSL (which is also a good thing) and where maybe we have to bring them on-chain together and see which one wins?

Regarding staffing; the timeframe is already getting quite short for onboarding the support staff and train them properly. So timeframe wise it might need a revisit. Is there also a transition period foreseen where for example the OSL (if the ISG is the preferred option) is continued for a month or so as a backup option so we still have a fallback scenario in the ramp-up phase?

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Strong NO from me. Reasons:

1. Monopoly & centralization:
OSL is very diverse, while if support is handled purely by Interbloc - they will have the monopoly on recommending their own validator to people, or sending them to their own recovery service over all competing ones.
The proposal demonstrates the intention - demand to delegate 40k osmo to their validator, first step in this centralization plan.

2. Interbloc stabbed OSL in the back.
It is known in inner circles that OSL has been considering proposing interchain support. Interbloc has members in these inner circles, so they decided to stab OSL in the back and present it as their own idea, front-running OSL. I don’t support such people.

3. Costs are too high.
No explanation needed. It is too high for tiny amount of people with questionable knowledge of Osmosis.
Now, OSL costs are also high, but OSL provided top notch support for years, so I 100% choose to support them instead.
And OSL can cut costs for sure and have comparable level of funding (like do they really need a fulltime graphics designer?)

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The gap of expenses is mainly to focusing on having the minimum amount of people to still maintain good support. We decided to take an approach of proposing the minimum and start from there instead of proposing more and reduce every proposal as OSL has done. Even in this last proposal OSL shared recently they are still at +$400k per year.

Point taken on the transition times, depending on how the discussion goes and on-chain votes, we can request OSL extend its timeframe.

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Hi kirk, nice to meet you, let me address your points 1 by 1.

The way support works will continue to be the same it has always been, recommending options to users and allowing them to choose what is best for them. OSL already recommends cosmosrescue and cosmoshield. We can add a clause if you like that we won’t recommend delegating to Interbloc, it is not something we planned and can be a cause for removal of funding if it happened.

Our “demand” to delegate is simply showing long term alignment with Osmosis, currently OSL has to sell all of their allotted budget and there is no kind of vesting or long term alingment. 40,000 osmo would represent an increase of less than 10% of our VP, moving us up 3 spots in the validator rankings. Keep in mind that would be our compensation for ONE YEAR.

Indeed, OSL members did mention that they were thinking of funding elsewhere, I encourage them to share what attempts have been made to secure that funding. This idea however wasn’t born from them and it’s been mentioned several times in the past. We’ve been working on this for 2 months already, with the OSL funding time fast approaching there really wasn’t more time we could give to OSL to present their proposal without ourselves running out of time to have a proper transition, see @LeonoorsCryptoman post above.

Questionable knowledge? All of us have been involved with osmosis for a long time, as validators, community members, support, marketing, relaying, infrastructure, wallet recoveries, osmosis tip bot and as investors. This argument is completely baseless and makes me question the motivations of your post.

Costs are clear and not only are they lower by 75% of OSL’s latest proposal, but they are also 50% of the proposal for their next period (this was shared in a discord space). The organization has failed to reduce costs significantly for a while despite market conditions, justifying them as necessary.

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All the comments I’m writing below are my own opinions, my comments do not speak for the Osmosis Foundation or any other individuals on the Core Dev Team.

General Comments or Questions

  • Luisqa was one of the largest supporters of the OSL around 2 months back, when and why did this sentiment take a 180 degree turn?

  • Agree with shortcomings of OSL this prop discussion lists

    • Budget Issues
    • Accountability
    • Transparency

Feedback for Interbloc’s Prop

  • Interbloc’s management fee of $40,000. This comes off high, the OSL stopped this equivalent back around November 2022? (which was really just the Signer base pay of $25,000 a month)
    • I imagine this would be more in line with the duties of reviewers/signers on multisigs, around $500-1000/mo, with likely 10h/month or high end of 20h/month
  • 12 month funding period is high for an untested team, imo this should be 3 months trial, then 6 months repeating.
  • Does the RPC and Relaying service that Interbloc promises to ‘continue’ need to be conflated with this prop?
  • 24/7 support is not necessary, support demand has been dead since June 2022. An average of 14-18 tickets a day over the last 14 months, of which many are ‘refresh’ and ‘wait and try again later’ fixes.
    • I would suggest a 25% uptime, of 30 minutes every 2 hours. While of course, factoring in edge cases that may require support to spend additional time on a ticket (these scenarios should warrant a premium, the $18.68 proposed, I’d suggest this actually go to $25/hour. The median hourly customer support pay in the USA is $18.16, OSL was around $4000 for 84 hours a month, or roughly $47 an hour, unsure of their current rate during the month of August 2023)
  • I recommend removing entirely from this prop “Blog posts, event coordination, design work and creation of promotional materials”… These efforts by the OSL over the last 20 months have not resulted in much traction, costs were around $15,000/mo - $7000/mo (depending on time frame in question)
  • Testing and QA has both the Osmosis Core Dev team and Osmosis community members coordinating on this together, though additional support should always be welcome, this probably should not be mixed into the prop.
  • Who are the 4 individuals that would support users full time? Are these random new members that the community has never worked with?
  • Supervisor ‘scheduling and covering shifts’ for $4500/mo is high. Scheduling shifts is less than an hour a month of work. Covering shifts, this person should simply be paid for those shifts and not have a retainer of $4500 (factoring in the $25/hour suggestion above)
  • 24/7 across TG, Discord, Reddit
    • TG is largely dead, Discord is dead, Reddit is dead. Doesn’t need 24/7 support (commented above, 25% up time. 30min every 2 hours

  • Don’t think relaying services should be mixed with this prop.

  • Community activities and engagement have been unsuccessful from the OSL with a much larger team of 16 (formerly up to 30). Not confident that interbloc can do better.

  • Monthly and bi-annual reports of KPIs, results, and activity summaries… If sticking to the bare basics, that really would just involve how many support issues are resolved, which should be many 2-3 hours of tracking a month max.

Boobcactus

  • “Serve as a liaison between the osmosis foundation, dev teams, and any other groups that want to collaborate with the ISG”
  • It is not clear what sort of collaboration would be needed here.

Luisqa

  • Likely only the need for 1 person as ‘supervisor’ and ‘management’, these roles should be combined, and there are plans to have a multisig team… That multisig should act as the review team of this initiative.

Funding Management

  • I think 4 / 5, community / Interbloc makes more sense.

I would personally recommend the break down in the screenshot below, this covers

  • bare bones necessities
  • premium pay for support staff
  • 25% up time, instead of 24/7 support
  • consolidating ‘supervisor + manager’ roles and starting reasonable (but likely pretty accurate or even generous) at 40h/month
    image
    image1120×393 16 KB

(forgive any formatting issues, copied and pasted from a google doc)

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1. OSL is not diverse. However, I agree that Interbloc running support alone could have issues… There are still plans for there to be a community weighted multisig that should hold interbloc accountable

2. I don’t think Interbloc is backstabbing OSL. At any point in time, any competitor should feel free to compete with any entity or team that is funded by the Osmosis DAO.

I think these items [community activities, engagement, giveaways] have all been ineffective and OSL has had around 20 months (with around $14,000/mo - $7000/mo roughly, depending on the time frame in question) to build these up.
If anything, a separate team that specializes in this should compete here.

Event coordination, what kind? online? in person? Don’t believe OSL does this currently, unless we are talking about the discord spaces held?
Does not seem like there has been a large enough audience to warrant significant funding here. In person event coordination seems unrealistic while online event coordination

Design work, promotional material creation… These also have historically cost quite a bit (around $6500/mo) and the reach/audience has been very low. I don’t think any support team should focus on this in their scope.

I agree in Interbloc’s current proposal, it shows Interbloc is not fully thought through. Fleshing it out a bit more would make this more clear.

I disagree with the assumption that Interbloc or any support team should be owning ‘blog posts, event coordination, design work and creation of promo materials’

  • Blog posts have historically gotten very little traction
  • event coordination, also virtually no turnout
  • design work and promo material, no audience for this material

This has never been funded by the OSL, there are members on the OSL that happen to do this for free. However, historically they have not been compensated for this. Other OSL members receive the same compensation for zero contribution on this front.
The testing and QA efforts should separate here, given it has never been under compensated scope.

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Like Aaron, I’m speaking personally here rather than as a representative of the Foundation.

At first glance, this seems like a substantial saving with very few services cut.

Luisqa was, in fact, one of the most prominent critics of the initial funding round last time, and many of these discussions devolve into “Put up a competing proposal then,” which I am glad to see someone do for once. Competition of this nature can only improve the service as long as we aren’t just looking at the price point.

Are the five slots up for recruitment, or are seats promised already?

I think that four staff members will need substantial cover from the Supervisor to maintain a 24/7 shift pattern, taking into account leave and illness, and this should be accounted for in the workload. I’d assume the Supervisor would also be doing an entire 40-hour shift to cover, but this would likely vary weekly. Generally, I think 20% buffer for sickness/absence.

I see Aaron’s point about 24/7 uptime not being essential right now, but having a structure in place for if it is needed in the future is necessary and helps to fight scammers. With other activities, such as blog creation, nobody should be sitting just waiting on a message but have notifications enabled to respond while doing other work.

I also second that this should be for a shorter period to start with as an untested structure.

The $40,000 Interbloc management fee is a black box budget line since it depends on the additional services and expense funding Interbloc provides.

I’d also directly disagree with Kirk here. OSL has the monopoly already, and members/ex-members run several validators across various chains. There have also been concerns recently about OSL’s control of chats, even if I disagree with this post: [design stage] allow validators to discuss their work in telegram
Stabbing in the back also makes this sound personal rather than a business decision.
I appreciate OSL hugely, but the inflated ask during the bull market still hasn’t adjusted proportionately.

History of OSL monthly spending asks:
Months 1-3: $108k
Months 4-6: $330k (Peak Bull Market)
Months 7-9: $240k (Post-Terra)
Months 10-12: $163
Months 13-15: $90k
Months 16-21: $83k

This proposal looks to be for $21k a month, which seems very reasonable as long as standards do not drop too much.

In Summary:

  • In favour
  • Define the Supervisor role more to ensure they do a full shift with just scheduling on top, or add a fifth support adding for fewer base hours with overtime availability for cover.
  • Clarification on what it is expected Interbloc’s management fee will cover the costs for
  • Shorter funding period
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I wish there was this much attention given to other fiscal items like incentive spending, fees (pool creation, tx, taker, proposal deposit), burning OSMO, etc. :innocent:

UPDATE:
Just to put things in perspective, according to the current regular incentive adjustment spreadsheet, we will be spending $116,844 on liquidity incentives for the upcoming 7 day period.

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The original proposal sounds like it states that OSL will continue to exist as an entity, under the oversight of ISG. Does that mean that there has been some discussion already between OSL members and ISG about being onboarded under a new watchdog?

My initial understanding of your proposal is that it attempts to accomplish a couple things: 1) reduce OSL’s massive overhead (likely personnel cuts), 2) act as a small oversight committee for OSL that answers directly to the Osmosis community. It didn’t read like ISG was asking for a complete dissolution of OSL, but rather budget cuts and appointment as an independent (Interchain-centric) watchdog.

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The draft proposal is to replace the OSL, not to play as an oversight.
The spots for supervisors have not been filled yet (as far as I can read in this thread), but it was noted that OSL members could apply as well; so maybe that is where the confusion comes in.

I appreciate the insights shared by @aaronxkong and @JohnnyWyles from their own point of view, stepping out of the role they have within the Osmosis project.

I agree with the trial period and I am very much a fan of “pitting” the proposal from the OSL and that from Interbloc together to see what the community prefers. In the end competition can make the whole concept better and sharper in the end; we have seen countless times in the “real-world” that a monopoly in the end leads to an inferior product. Competition forces players to keep improving and listening to what the users want otherwise they are put out of the game. So I very much welcome the competition.

I am a bit searching for the reasoning on the blog posts / event coordination / promo material. I recognize we are in a bear market and people want to cut costs all over the place, but in the end we also should offer as much information as we can to take people along with us on the journey to a new future. That is only done by creating content (in whatever form). I would really hate to see Osmosis go towards a future where information is only shared if asked for. A project (or a supporting organisation for that matter) should also actively send information to the world, even if it is received by a small amount of people at this stage. Then the challenge is to find out what other means we can use to make the audience bigger, but cutting it completely would be a wrong decision imo.

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Answering the need for 24/7 first since it’s an important difference.

24/7 support is extremely important because it minimizes scams the most. If you are not very active in the social channels or in other chain channels you might not notice this, but scam links or scammers dont appear every 3 hours. There is a constant stream of messages with scam links or users disguising themselves as support that lure users into DMs to extract their seed phrases or tricking them into sending funds. As the chain with the most volume, users and liquidity, our users are the most vulnerable and attractive targets for scammers.

The downtime is addressed by, among other things, using that time to write blog/social posts (this includes things like the Updates from the Lab, that has no written summary) to make consumption of important information more accesible. I would personally like to see a monthly newsletter summarizing Osmosis’ activities and features to maintain the community informed on the happenings on Osmosis.

Regarding your suggestion, I see no way of implementing a system that has people working for 30 minutes every 2 hours. What individuals would you hire for this that have the knowledge, are available at those schedules and are most importantly, trustworthy. These individuals wouldn’t have an incentive to remain doing this unless they have another full-time job, in which case it would be unethical from them to be doing something else for 30 minutes every 2 hours.

Regarding the other questions:
We will update and expand on the roles and responsibilities of the supervisor since it appears its not clear. Shift scheduling and support are just a few of the things the supervisor would do, including things like, accounting, event scheduling, coordinating with the designer for material, managing the relaying infrastructure, being the point of contact for the foundation, product teams, etc.

OSL currently hosts discord spaces (would probably expand/move to twitter spaces as well) for teams that are launching on osmosis,

Which brings me to another topic mentioned, relaying. The need for relaying arose because users often have stuck txs on different relayers and come to support for help, considering this we consider that we should continue with this.

The $40,000 is a fee per year that also covers the miscellaneous expenses that are needed for a support group like this as well as the incentive for our company to manage and work in this project. Although you’ve said most of those expenses aren’t necessary, like blog, events and other community activities, we believe they are crucial to continue building the osmosis community.

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Appreciate the comments, will add some more information to the original post.

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@LeonoorsCryptoman kindly responded but wanted to confirm. Yes, this would replace the OSL structure as it exists today by a structure managed by Interbloc. The support team would still have independent oversight from my part, and I won’t be part of the organizational structure. We don’t think this could be accomplished while still maintaining the OSL’s current structure and costs.

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As requested, we have expanded explaining the staffing questions (no positions are reserved or guaranteed to anyone, open applications will be live after proposal passes giving priority to OSL members), also on the supervisor responsibilities.

Funding period has been adjusted to 6 months.

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