NEM Foundation - Funding Proposal 2019

Project Proposals
#159

Thank you for following me up… ( ^ ^ )

My name is Ayako, and I’ve been in blockchain tech. industry since late 2016. I used to work for Enterprise IT industry like Oracle, so basically middle ware/database are my field.

I lectured at mijin blockchain seminars and taught over 800 people when I used to work for Tech Bureau, and I did media correspondence for NEM.io Foundation with Alex and Jeff when Coin Check Hack happened.

I joined Engate, Inc. on May 2018. Engate provides Live Video Micro-sponsorship Platform for Sports Team and Athletes since October 2018.
Engate utilizes NEM mosaic technology to issue points.

It’s a fun use case of NEM, please watch video here: https://youtu.be/_P4inSwZE9M
And a nice article: https://medium.com/nemofficial/engate-uses-nem-blockchain-to-support-athletes-dreams-to-participate-in-tokyo-2020-olympic-games-c3f6882fd1e1

I joined NEM JAPAN on October 2018. I do PR & Marketing / blockchain introduction consultant.
I like everybody who I’ve met in NEM community.
I like to see that creativity makes NEM tech. more interesting and amazing!
Thank you for reading.

1 Like
#160

Why are you a newbie?
You are a newbie but you like the NEM community?
Are you wanting to become a CMO though you are a newbie? lol

I know that you do not respect the community.

#161

Creative solutions are a good way to brainstorm how to tackle problems but I don’t agree with using salaries as a bargaining chips. People’s livelihood depend on their salaries and due to serious issues of the Foundation before, many team members went without pay in the month of Dec… some in November. I’m not doing that under this new leadership. ROI and KPIs will be listed for each product team so everyone knows progress.

I’m not sure I understand what you mean on the “no” votes. Can you clarify?

#162

No more, please. This forum is for discussions on the proposal - not bickering about those interested in open positions. I’d rather we spend our time on problem solving how to move the NF forward.

#163

Hi Heiuchi,
RFP process will be clear and fair. There will be an audit in place. Some things to know:

1.) Proposals will be listed in the forums and on our website for all to see.
2.) We will be using RFP software (ex. Loopio) and have been actively doing demos/exploring various software that might work best for our needs. This takes time and is important for us to get right.
3.) As mentioned, some larger projects will be listed in forums and the NF would solicit feedback from community on the RFPs submitted. So community will be involved in the process.
4.) PM is one of 7 Product Leads. There is no one Product Lead to rule them all. There is an oversight committee to help ensure checks and balances.
5.) I’ll fix typo on page 30 - thanks.

Thanks for your questions.

#164

Hi GodTanu and also Takeuchi. We had many people in each region. Most were consultants and not full-time.

Here is breakdown of staff:

ANZ - 26 (includes 14 ambassadors)
SE Asia - 40
LATAM - 17
North America - 9
Russia - 3
Japan - 11
Europe - 15
China - 19
UAE - 5
Ukraine - 4

It’s gut-wrenching for me to have to suspend staff while we restructure NEM Foundation. Behind every number, there is a real person.

I won’t know final numbers for who remains until after we get funding because the staff has free will to look for new jobs. We will do the best we can to match talent with open roles.

3 Likes
How many locations
#165

Hi Greentea,
I want to specifically talk about the NEM Blockchain Centre in KL. The first week I started, I asked all Regional Heads to give me an audit of their regions. Then I matched the audit reports to the final spend/budget from Finance (since 2017!) This gave me a good understanding of ROI and opportunities in the regions based on spend, partnerships/MoUs and contributions.

The NEM Blockchain Center was a red flag for me because it has never been profitable. There’s many reasons for this which I won’t get into in the forums but I understand now why it’s struggled. One of the first things I did after the audit was ask Jasmine Ng to take over the KL Blockchain Centre. She’s well respected by teams/partners and has an impressive background. I also did 360-reviews of staff as well and this helped me understand how people liked working with various team members and also what concerns they had. Overall, Jasmine was hands-down a clear choice.

In the short time Jasmine has been working on the blockchain centre, she’s converted non-paying consulting projects over to paid consulting projects. We’ve discussed at length what the opportunities are with the current KL centre and how we can restructure it for sustainability and maxim outcome. A new mandate has been given to Jasmine to help empower the SE Asia teams to be tech focused and contribute code, training and revenue. It’s clear to me from working alongside Jasmine that she has the acumen needed for this role and challenge.

Clearly the Blockchain Centre would never have been sustainable if it had stayed as it. So we’re running a few pilots now and pivoting accordingly. I’ll keep the community posted once I have more data on the results.

8 Likes
#166

Thanks Gevs. I’ll say this much regarding NEM Labs, there is a place for both NEM Labs and NEM Foundation. Right now, we need as many independent contributors to NEM as possible. This means not just having one entity contribute code, tools or training – it means having many entities do so. The PMC exists for this very reason.

Right now, there is also technically no NEM Labs. There is the EU team working to make NEM Labs a reality by doing a funding proposal but the work they do is still done under NEM Foundation and paid for by NEM Foundation. The NF has been working with the EU team on communicating the kinds of projects we plan to do so we can find a way to not overlap too much and to both push Catapult forward. I absolutely want their team to be recognized for their hard work but I also want there to be an understanding that there’s more to this process than the community knows.

Even now as the NEM Foundation struggles with financing the 2019 operational funds based on the 2018 Foundation, I have been working to ensure the EU team has budget to continue their contributions to Catapult documentation and building out an SDK. I set aside ~3M XEM to help the EU team work through debts, severances and projected spend over the next few months during this transition.. Considering we have less than 20M XEM left, this is a huge deal. I’ve been working with the EU team since December 21st to negotiate how to best and fairly separate out their team from the NF. There are legal issues around how things have to be done so it takes time and care to do it right. But look, I want them to succeed. My expectation in all of this is that we remove past toxic working conditions and that NF and NEM Labs communicate and independently collaborate on shared goals/outcomes that best will move the tech forward.

The reality is that the NEM Foundation has established global partnerships across many different verticals that are important to maintain and nurture – from the United Nations to the Ukraine Government to the Dubai Government. We need to have people and resources dedicated to ensuring our partners have the support they need. This is not the focus for NEM Labs and it never will be.

The biggest feedback I heard from the community was around lack of technical contribution from the NEM Foundation. There’s many reasons for this - from lack of policies to lack of communication/organization done in 2018. I don’t see NEM Labs as the one size fits all for development for Catapult nor do I see NEM Foundation being the single point of contribution to the platform. And the community should not want that either. The community should want to see many entities contributing independently to the best of their ability. That is what is NEEDED for Catapult to thrive.

To be frank, we had projects going on last year that stopped due to lack of organization, funding, management, and/or commitment. I’m talking about technical projects. We had people leave and as result we had gaps in expertise. This crippled those projects. This is why it’s important to have more than one entity working on contributions and code.

3 Likes
#167

Apologies but I will be voting against the foundation and for nem labs until the catapult budget is taken out of the nem foundation proposal. The funds are obviously limited and I haven’t seen any explanation yet as to why to allocate two budgets for the same catapult development. I think nem labs is a better proposal since they can bring catapult and a tested business model and do it with more experience and less bloat.

IMV we should either be choosing nem labs + a lean foundation, or else chose only the foundation (because labs would be largely redundant). Somehow NL and NF are both supporting both organisations receiving full funding with no explanation as to what the excess funding would be used for. It’s not right.

I will vote for Labs only and hope the community will force the foundation to revise their budget request.

4 Likes
#168

Do you have POI newbie? :wink:

Just kidding.

NF has fantastic staff and people who can take NEM to another level. I can guarantee that NEM Labs cannot do it.

You think tech development is everything. I hear a lot of catapult news. I have a question for everyone. Who will use Catapult? Any multinational companies? Any unicorn startups? As of now, we do not know the ROI.

NF is planning to package entire software in such a way that we generate revenue. I do not think just by releasing catapult will end NEM’s misery. We need a strong team who can take the project to another level.

I hope you understand.

3 Likes
#169

I’m pretty sure that both the NEM Foundation and NEM Labs are supporting each other because they both want to see NEM very successful and know that adding these two budgets coming together is still only about half of what the foundation got before in fiat. So basically even with two orgs, this is a very leaned down proposal already with much more focus on development both from the EU team and the NEM Foundation team.

This is also really NEM’s last shot. We need to make Catapult as great as possible with as much development as possible and as much documentation, tooling, and education as possible so it becomes widely adopted. Now that we are in a crypto winter and some chains are going out of business, this is our chance to double down and gain back the market share we lost, and fundamental to this at this point is development.

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#170

Thank you. We are working together and working overtime to make sure that NEM will be great.

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#171

Hi,

Thank you for detailed explanation!
It is a really good idea that everyone can check proposals on your website.

I hope we have successful projects with this new schema.

1 Like
#172

Going to the next level will have to be a joint effort. NEM Labs and NEM Foundation can work both as a contributor to the ecosystem. In terms of who will use Catapult, the doors are open for teams to apply Catapult based on the local partner network. We have existing relationships with governments, enterprise, startups - that is why the proposal is key to ensure that we have talent people working on this.

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#173

Thanks, we will still need to have the continuous support even after the entire proposal process, the community play an important role in the ongoing development of NEM Foundation moving forward.

1 Like
#174

Hi Alexandra, thank you again for the work put in this.

Gambling ones livelihood away does not seem like a good idea to me either, although that choice of words is a bit too dramatic for what I was thinking.

I’m from the Netherlands (that country that invented the stock market). The following graph may help translate the intention of my words.

CV63xpoWwAQCKzq
CV63xpoWwAQCKzq.png850×758 91.1 KB

We have a good social system in the Netherlands. Compared to the US, low and medium wages are higher, and high wages are lower. The government calculated that “a livelihood” for a family of 3 is € 1,525 ($ 1,725) per month. When I see an average management position budgetted for ~$4,150 ($50,000/yr), I hardly think that paying $2,075 in fiat - and another $2,075 (x1.5? x3?, x10?) as a delayed smart contract bonus quite literally attached to how well the team performs - is synonymous for bargaining/gambling ones livelihood. In a way it’s similar to ISOs and NSOs or time delayed incentive plans.

In fact, imagine a mandatory incentive XEM pay of 25%, there could be a secondary tax incentive for the incentive plan. Ask anyone - managers to hired hands - if they are interested in increasing the percentage of XEM pay to any amount between 25% and 75%, and they would only have to either pay tax over the difference between the grant date and the exercise date or consider the spread as taxable income, you might be surprised. It might be worth looking into the possibilities. Or not. Just want to point out the sincerity of the idea.

Although only slightly related, I would also like to point out the holding incentive plan (not for employees but for customers) of the (formerly Monaco) crypto dot com MCO holders. They need MCO at a steady price during the marketing period of their visa cards, so they are distributing CRO airdrops for MCO holders. You see them accumulate in the crypto dot com wallet. However, they are locked for 12 months, and only valid for the percentage of your original amount of MCO that you are still holding 12 months after the airdrop. This way you are free to spend, but incentivized to hold.

If the proposal is rejected, what does that mean effectively for future activity and money burn rate? For example, if the proposal is rejected, does that mean that no money is allowed to be spent until a proposal is accepted? Does it mean no one can be hired? Is there a limited number of operations that continue, analogous to a US government shutdown? Or is the vote just a formality?

Edit: Changed “.com” to “dot com” so it won’t unintentionally be considered spam.

1 Like
#175

Thanks Alex for clarifying alot of the questions people have been asking, from what ive seen, im pretty happy with the funding proposal and also look forward to you working alongside NEMLabs if their proposal gets approved.

I highly encourage the whole community to go through the business plan for both the NF and NEM Labs proposals.

Going forward, we will have a much more robust model to go forward with the 3 entities comprised of NEM Ventures, NF and NEM Labs :slight_smile:

4 Likes
#176

I don’t know if you understand the traditional incentive or stock process. Since you are from the country that invented the stock market, I’m assuming that you know what I’m going to state in my reply.

  1. People need to buy food or medicines for an emergency. Back in the '60s when companies understood the importance of incentivizing the employee, they started rolling out stock incentives. Enter ESOP aka Employee Stock Options Plans. They didn’t cut the salaries because these employees had motivations. They added on top of ESOP to increase the performance.
    If you cut the salary or hold it in an account for 12 months, history shows that it hurts employees. That’s probably the dumbest thing you can do.

  2. Vested Shares - The ESOP will only vest in 4 years with a 1-year cliff. That means every four years, the employees will get 100% of the vested stock. The employee now has a vision and power to envision the future. He gets some cookie from the jar every year but to get the full amount; he/she need to work hard and perform four years.

I think your post has many loose ends. The financial part is a 50% motivator in any job. People need to find happiness and excitement. We need to structure a process and fill the company with people who will think out of the box. People who can find happiness in what they do.

Thank You

#177

Hi Pedro, could you please provide any proof that these people are real, for example their NEM wallets without specifying names and locations.

Thanks in advance

1 Like
#178

Quoted for irony. I think it’s possible that you are focused entirely on the trial balloon of paying less salary. Let’s ignore that for now. Let’s pay full salaries, and on top of that, how about figuring out a novelty incentive scheme that is at least partially related to the performance of the team? In my idea, which is much more interesting to discuss and improve, there will be a set bonus payout in XEM 12 months later. It’s a bonus whose value is at least partially related to the success of the team. I like that idea. Feel free to expand on that if you’re willing to consider an outside of the box system. I hardly think the world is the same as 60 years ago.

Also, I’m being asked for a vote. I say with this considerable bonus package, salaries can be cut in half. Let’s not kid ourselves. If a CTO earns USD 10,000/mo in FIAT in stead of USD 20,000/mo, it’s not like they suddenly cannot buy bread and medicine. Perhaps attracting people who see a big opportunity in XEM rather than getting rich now and walk away make for a better team.

Initially 50% seemed like a good idea since I understand the realism of capitalist life, but let’s not forget where we came from. “The Chancellor will decide within weeks whether to pump billions more into the economy as evidence mounts that the £37 billion part-nationalisation last year has failed to keep credit flowing.” The problems caused by the supposedly liberal capitalist system is what ruined millions of lives. This is what inspired a new economic model in the first place. I’m guessing the people who believe in an economy free of banks and those that turn out to be classic capitalists are as true as radical believers of Open Source software versus those that swear by closed source proprietary software. We could at least unify realism and idealism in a 50/50 ratio.

I don’t want to hear “I cannot buy bread with my thousands of dollars”. This is not a charity. I’m simply pointing out what I’m missing in this proposal to the people that requested my feedback in their quest to win over my accumulated importance for a vote on their proposal. Feel free to alter, amend or expand on ideas proposed. But if I can’t see even a hint of actionable sympathy for this viewpoint by people who matter, I guess it’s fair that I allocate my vote in this new PoI-based democracy accordingly.

1 Like