Yes you’ve hit the bullseye on what I believe is the largest limitation. There are many things for which we can’t easily put a price on, I see it happen all the time with dev work where lay people are willing to overpay for unknowingly trivial tasks.
That is done by active members allocating more votes to those who do better work. It’s the sum of qualitative judgements of those closer to the work.
This is also kept in check by the performance-based tranche of compensation, which btw, is already very similar to bounties: every area sets goals at the start of every month and the more goals are achieved, the higher the compensation for the area.
I think the RAW coordinape system already presents a nice balance of bounty-based and regular compensation, specially considering the Honors system too (where the DAO can award exceptional acts of contribution with honors + one-off bonuses).
This creates an incentive for members to not automate or simplify their recurring tasks, otherwise they’d lose the bounty and their compensation would decrease.
Using bounties for everything incentivizes people coming up with and charging for anything, even in the presence of a budget cap.
Bounties also generate additional complication when a specific goal can only be achieved through the collaboration of many members: how to split the bounty?
There is little incentive to collaborate with other members for bounties when the split isn’t clear. If it’s going to be split equally, then it incentivizes free-riding. If it’s left for members to decide, then a negotiation must ensue prior to tackling any bounty.
Adding it retroactively is problematic, as we’d owe for something which we didn’t agree on the cost of. Adding it on the spot, specially when it requires a decentralized consensus-formation, might slow down our operations. This can easily become a mess.
Only if people’s relative perceptions of the importance of that work versus other work being undertaken shifts, in which case, the value of the work performed really changed.
But members who remain top performers can eventually pledge to join staff and obtain fixed compensation, which can be easily benchmarked against average compensation obtained in the previous rounds of Coordinape.
Another thing that merely introducing bounties doesn’t address: staff roles. What’s the basis for their existance and for the current salaries? As of now, it’s very centralized around @luiz and it doesn’t have to be.
I’d prefer having everything be governed by a single system of rules.
We can try to have everything revolve around bounties, but I think it’ll take more work to develop, more work to run and will be needlessly riskier in the end. It will also not be scalable.