An interesting proposal that has understandably attracted mixed responses.
Summary…
Personally i consider the team still getting its feet, so to ask for a significant raise is cheeky at best, also there have been numerous management/comms blunders that i feel have caused confidence issues for the chain.
For me to be comfortable accepting a significant spend proposal such as this I’d like to see the following points addressed.
Previous achievements
What was complete from Q1 that was in and out of scope, how effective was this, and what is left. Items incompleted what is the reasoning for this and the implications.
Communication
It appears we have a coc group, TGF, and a project manager yet there have been repeated PR blunders and members of the community attacked by the L1 team.
Whether those community members were right or wrong is irrelevant, the communication strategy from the team and its delivery has been amateur at best, and with a lot of technical jargon.
Consultation
Decisions appear to be made without Consultation with the community oversight committee and in instances even without them being informed. I’d like to know how the committee has consulted with the community and also how it has held the L1 team to account, and what the outcome of these ‘interactions’ have been.
Proposed tasks
In plain English without technical jargon, please explain all these suggested actions, what are the benefits of having them, or risks of not having them. There appears to be items in there that are ‘personal development’ type items that are not L1 scope specific.
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I am not against out of scope items if there is clear rationale for them which may even imply the L1 teams scope is too restrictive.
Management
We have senior devs, that should be able to interact as a team on their own on top of this Tobias often portrays himself as a ‘father figure / manager’ to the team. So could we explain to the community what the roles and responsibilities of each member are, and what they have actually done over the last three months, including PR submitted etc.
As a member of arguably the most active L2 group (TerraCVita) on the chain we’ve had virtually zero communication from the L1 team, yet it appears that with the Coc, Project manager and TGF team the majority of the L1 team are ‘admin/support’. So I’m intrigued who is being consulted and about what, and what these roles in the team are delivering. We often hear the words ‘lean and agile’ used yet from the outside it is unclear how these apply.
For price comparision, for 7k in the UK you can get a head of service full time risk / project manager on a contracted basis with years of experience. My reason for raising this is that if we are paying top quartile compensation i think its fair to expect top quartile behaviour and deliverables.
Value for money
It would be useful to see a breakdown of contributions from individuals mapped against their costs to the community.
Also it would be useful to see a breakdown of expense costs. There appears to have been a number of computers etc bought yet i find it difficult to understand why. As someone with extensive personal contractor experience, contractors equipment is in my experience self funded, and not expensed. If we are providing equipment that is starting to feel like the L1 team is employed, and if that is a case it opens up many more questions including management, conduct, and expectations etc.
AI chain and Ed
This feels like a seperate project, though posdibly of great benefit to the chain and is not within the scope of the L1 team and I’m content that any involvement with thd L1 team, or any other team is voluntary or funded seperately.
Otherwise thank you for the submission and the team for their efforts in Q1.