This topic aims to explore how the community might be able to allocate compensation in a fun, equitable and community centric way to support an amorphous team of decentralized contributors.
Summary
I think we can start by using the Ideation Pod as a safe and fun testing ground to explore new ways of Cabin contributors sharing compensation as the organization allocates resources from its multi-million dollar treasury.
My recommendation is to trial empowering small teams to share a fixed budget amongst themselves in a way where the team can transparently and dynamically adjust how the budget is allocated through a transparent process called: Gift Circles, made easy using the Coordinape app.
is this the perfect solution? Idk if there is one, but I think this could be a cool experiment to try, and am excited to hear about other models people might suggest.
Make sure to read the background section below if you’d not familiar with DAOs or crypto for some more context. This might read like a lot, but I think if we were all to jump on a call we’d see how easy it could be 
Ok lets dive in 
What are Gift Circles?
The following text in italics is from the Coordinape Discord FAQ channel with some minor wording edits to frame things in our context, with more info in their docs.
What is a circle? The Gift Circle allows a group of DAO contributors to decentralize the payment process, identifying each other’s value to the organization to create a compensation map.
What is an Epoch? An Epoch is a set period of time the group can perform the Gifting process.
How do the team/circle members get compensated? At the start of the epoch, each member of the Circle receives a number of non-divisible GIVE tokens (Determined by the Circle Admin.) When the Epoch ends, all allocated GIVE tokens become locked (now called GET tokens), and all unallocated GIVE tokens are burned. Budget distribution is then formulated according to the percentage of total GET tokens that each member of the circles has received.
Example
- Joe receives 10 Give tokens (GETs) over the epoch from his colleagues in recognition for his contributions
- 100 Total GETs are allocated to the team during the epoch time period
- 500 USDC is the total budget the contributor team is sharing
- Joe is sent 50 USDC (10% of the total budget)
(I edited the example text a bit to add more context)
How many contributors can be in a circle? There is no limit to circle member amounts however we recommend keeping circles below 20. You can create multiple circles within the same organization.
How do you determine who gets GIVE? Over the course of the epoch, each team member should allocate their GIVE tokens (GETs) to other members using whatever logic makes sense to them, with the goal of making sure valuable contributions are recognized and compensated as accurately as possible.
This might sound complicated, but I think if we were to see a demo it would feel quite manageable for an informed user. We also don’t necessarily have to use Coordinape’s app right away, as the team forming the circle could just go through the process on a call or offline before distributing rewards manually, but I think its worth exploring web3 tech that enables a transparent and scalable foundation.
Keep reading to join in the discussion around:
- how this could work for the Ideation Pod with some options & questions
- some background context about how Cabin allocates funding
- other alternatives with call for feedback & ideas
Ideation Pod Trial
The Ideation Pod is a draft 3-month proposal led by 3 stewards (@Dahveed, @Kat, @savkruger) and 1 sponsor (@KathiInPorto) with the objectives of:
As of me writing this, the pod is requesting a budget of:
(note - I hope to see the budget updated to include compensation for the sponsors and stewards time)
But back to Gift Circles… I think the following approaches could be taken:
OPTION A - small circle
- Team = Dahveed, Kat, Savannah, and Kathi are members of the Gift Circle as the proposal stewards & sponsors
- Epochs = 1 month long, and each month they share the 1500 ₡ABIN amongst themselves
- They can then each choose to allocate CABIN to other people outside of the circle who supported the Ideation Pod activities, keeping whatever feels right for themselves
OPTION B - big circle
- The gift circle team is made up of the stewards + sponsors + everyone showed up to help out in some way
- Epochs = 1 month long, and each month the 1500 ₡ABIN is shared amongst everyone who participated that given month
Some questions for the group:
1. Does 1-month feel like the right length for an Epoch, determining how frequently the reward is shared? I could see a case for weekly…
2. Do you prefer the small or big circle option? I think the small circle would be easiest, and that maybe exploring a larger circle if the team decides would be a nice way to take baby steps and try this out… what do you think?
3. What do you think about using Coordinape to facilitate the process? Technically we don’t need to use a tool, and the team could just have a meeting to align on a distribution, but the tech seems easy enough to use with a little onboarding support. And I think we could get some guided support as we start out from some of our friends on the Coordinape team. The pic below is from this past year’s ETH Denver collab with Cabin, Coordinape and the Hats Protocol community 
4. Would it be worthwhile to explore integrating Coordinape Gift Circles and Hats organizational trees into the Cabin.City app to offer a streamlined experience where users just need to log into the website to participate and build their onchain reputation within the community? I heard that the Hats team has some awesome new governance tooling coming out around Councils that would be cool to explore…
5. Do you understand why ₡ABIN is valuable and a form of compensation? If not, the background section below tries to provide more context, with some other ideas below.
Background
Cabin as an organization rewards people who contribute by paying them $USDC, or by giving them Cabin’s governance token: ₡ABIN governance tokens.
₡ABIN is a digital token (ERC-20) that was created on the Ethereum blockchain with total a supply of 1,000,000 tokens.
While anyone can create their own ERC-20 with a little bit of know how, the ₡ABIN token is valuable to have as it represents voting rights over how the organization allocates its resources, which it holds in a shared crypto wallet: cabindao.eth
The DAO wallet still holds >57% of the token supply, with the remaining of the supply already distributed to:
- co-founders like @jon, @grin & @Zakk as the people who led Cabin, with specific token vesting periods, kinda like stocks in a startup but in the crypto way
- contributors for working under semi-formal contractor agreements with Cabin
- volunteers for showing up as great community members and helping out
- investors and venture capital organizations who traded something like >$4M of $USDC for the ₡abin governance tokens
You can see a list of every wallet that holds ₡ABIN here. There are 756 unique wallets, so we can assume there are about that many DAO members (technically one person could have their Cabin in multiple wallets).
Thanks to everyone who made the Cabin community project so awesome, investors decided trade millions of dollars for Cabin governance tokens. As of 2024-11-14, Cabin has >$2.5 Million in funds.
How did Cabin get so much funding? I’ve asked some questions here for more info the details of why investors invested, but as far as I know these haven’t been made public.
People who have ₡ABIN tokens are a part of the Cabin DAO as token holders, aka DAO Members, and they can vote on proposals to allocate funds from the shared wallet to Contributor Pods, which are established through proposals which require:
- a sponsor, someone who has > 1,000 Cabin governance
- steward(s) - the people who lead execution of the proposal
The sponsors and stewards usually align on how compensation will be split amongst themselves up front, while usually also having a budget to pay for related expenses and other contributors along the way.
The largest active funded proposal currently is Cabin Labs:
Fun fact, I was a contributor on this team for a while but quit due to values misalignment with @jon, you can read a retrospective here.
The 2nd largest funded proposal is: Meeting Cabin’s Technical Needs:
With @jon & @Grin also receiving 50,000 ₡ABIN tokens / year through this vesting proposal:
With the only other recently funded proposal being Rebooting Campfire for Season 3 and beyond:
In total, these proposals were allocated:
- $624,860 USDC
- 66,170 ₡ABIN
Over roughly a 1 year period, although it seems that Cabin Labs is extending with more runway in its budget.
How are contributors compensated now?
That’s up to the proposal sponsors and stewards to decide with anyone they bring onto their teams. Because Cabin uses crypto, all onchain transactions are public if you look at the cabindao.eth & cabinlabs.eth wallets, but Etherscan, the tool to view transactions isn’t the most user friendly, and no teams have provided a more detailed breakdown so far, but I’ve asked @jon if he can share any additional insight on how the funds have been used in this post about recent experiments:
I’d really be curious to see some graphs that easily visualized the flow of funds from Cabin DAO … but this is for another day 
What other models are there?
Are you aware of any other approaches or ways rewarded for contributing to an organization?
@Dahveed suggested an option for distributing Ideation Pod rewards in this post, where each month, all DAO members could vote on how to distribute the Ideation Pod reward tokens for example, but I think the Gift Circle approaches would:
- promote a culture of transparency around value added contributions as teams dynamically share resources
- foster a high context and involved group who is helping to allocate the rewards, instead of relying on the much larger pool of less involved DAO members to vote each month
Another example I’m aware of is the Respect Game, a more structured approach to awarding rewards amongst contributors. Chat GPT summarized it as: “The Respect Game is an on-chain social game that empowers communities by recognizing and rewarding valuable contributions through a consensus-driven reputation system. Participants gather in small groups to evaluate each other’s work, creating a collaborative environment that builds trust and promotes fair governance. This scalable approach uses soulbound Respect tokens, making it a flexible tool for democratic coordination, impact assessment, and collective decision-making across various organizations.”
The Respect Game sounds cool to me, but it requires a more collaborative process to assigning value and rewards, one that maybe we try later on… but the standard Coordinape Gift Circles seem like an easier first step by allowing teams to proportionally assign value instead of rank-order if I understand the way both games work right. Full transparency… I’ve never played the Respect Game, nor participated in a Gift Circle, so I’m going to ask some people from both of those communities to chime in, but I thought these were cool ideas to explore
I’m also curious to explore how using Hats Protocol might also support use cases around allocating compensation. I know they could help provide lots of onchain structure, but I’m not to familiar if they have any distribution mechanism yet… will see what I can find out
And look forward to hearing peoples thoughts and other ideas.