But it could also lead to rampant corruption, cronyism, and people just living off their reputation rather than doing the actual work. I think this is a question that must be considered carefully:
Who can be manager? And how can we incentivize managers to make right decision?
The new way is radically simple, the network hires managers, then managers hire employees. You guys will negotiate pay with the managers, then you're delegating much of the day-to-day operations to the project management team. As for stopping abuse, we're talking about having to get your primary and secondary manager to "sign off" on expenses. This means if you can't come to an agreement between the three of you, nothing gets paid. In the end it'll allow us to move really fast and keep abuse down to a minimum. So managers are responsible for reviewing and approving expenses, if the employee and two managers pay for something the network doesn't like, the network can talk to the management team and voice the concerns. These are going to be the primary point of contact for the network, so that's how we direct the ship.
The employees are agreeing to do a specific amount of work with their manager, so they can't just live off of the system. You have to work to get paid for it under this model. The budget system money is a scarce resource that we need to be careful about to avoid the situations you're talking about.
The nice thing is that we're going to be moving to sentinel, which is the "brain", so every part of this can be tested with trial and error. We can roll out test implementations, then revert them or tweak them. I imagine we'll be pivoting pretty quickly as we realize different goals.
Thanks for the answer. Its the managers just living off the system that I would worry about rather than the employees. Managers keep the employees in check, but structuring it like that seems to encourage coin holders to delegate the task to keeping check on employees to the managers - so the question remains of who will keep a check on the managers? I think its a recipe for having less oversight from MN owners on projects, but with nothing to make sure that managers are actually doing their job properly.
I don't think we need more than 2 tiers of management at this point. There's probably about 20-30 people that will be in the current system. Research shows that communication starts to break down when there's more than 8-10 people reporting to one, after that people do a really poor job. The obvious choice to keep managers in check is to allow the network to talk to them and part of their job is making sure communication isn't breaking down and that the network knows exactly what's going on and why... they need to keep you guys happy in order to continue working the network.
Eventually this model won't be big enough. At that point we'll move to the next phase of the system, with some sort of elected board, which is responsible for hiring the managers and directing the project. Centralized control, but the network again will have control over the elected board. So control always comes back to the network.
Evan,
We are already at the next stage with the elected board. The board members are the masternodes. They have a stake in the company(investment in Dash) so they make the best decision for Dash. I see the only way this works efficiently is to keep the masternodes in control of voting for how funds are allocated to which projects, which is really the only driver to make people work anyway.
There is no need to worry about expansion. We pay a company/person directly to do a job - they internally manage themselves. They know that if they are not productive they will not be paid. And if any of their employees fail they can be replaced as an internal decision. I suggested that we could add the option to split this payment up into several dash addresses with a ratio determined by the proposal owner. This would allow the funds to go directly to all company personnel at once without needing additional involvement from the proposal owner.
A typical company will have a board of directors, but many are inside directors with stock options or a share in the company. This encourages them to act in the best interest of the company. If we have the employers/project managers/elected board the only worry they have is not getting their salary. If there are 10 members of this proxy voting party, each one would have the equivalent to the vote of 360 masternodes(total risk of $2.3 Million) - their risk is only losing future income.
I also see an issue with the concept of a consensus with a management decision to determine if an expense is covered. The entire premise of this cool voting system that we have now is that the masternodes vote on what we fund. If managers start making decisions, no doubt the 'budget' they need to pay these expenses will keep increasing and expenses will always be paid...because managers don't have any collateral on the line. And who would make the decision to buy something in advance if the expense could be rejected. All potential expenses and projects should be voted in upfront so there is no question about if they will be paid or not. The entire reason we vote is because some projects or expenses will not be paid.
And the last point, if you have set of managers/employers hiring all the 'employees' what traits do we look for in these people? Isn't this a total guess? If we fund a solar farm powering X11 ASICs to donate to the foundation, would any of them have a clue where to start. Do we now need to hire a manager expert to manage that project? It seems crazy right? It would make more sense to take bids from several companies - they all submit projects to the budget system. Look at the past history, pricing, and products they propose installing. Then masternodes vote on the best option and leave the micromanaging to the company experts that are paid for doing the work.