Compensation framework

Organization circle
25

Feedback Compensation Framework

Thanks a lot for the contributions to the compensation framework. Things start to get shape and many good points are being made. Nevertheless, we still see some points worth discussing. We want to mention some critical points and propose a slightly different approach:

Criticism on proposal:

  1. Sales is treated differently than other circles.

Treating sales work differently then other work circles inherits a problematic concept from regular capitalist business. It leads to sales being disconnected from the common vision. An incentive based on new user members can lead to sales circle thinking mainly in new sales rather than sustainable customer relationships. And, as mentioned above by benhylau, is difficult to calculate.

  1. A money-based bounty in combination with expected working hours leads again to a fixed hour loan

For a single worker the benefits of the collective project is disconnected from their own benefits. No matter how well meet.coop performs they get their (low) hourly rate. The success is not distributed to the workers, while in case of failure the member collectives need to rebudget meet.coop to pay the bounties. It brings a lot of calculation, which in the end is just transferring money from one side to the other and back.

  1. A money-based bounty system is hard to handle in terms of budgeting, speculation and accounting.

As already discussed above every circle needs to do accounting. The budget needs to be there and agreed in advance. There is even the problem of dynamic exchange rates as we all work in different national economies.

Collocall proposal:

  1. Take sales provision out of compensation framework discussion. Sales provision for member organizations etc. should be discussed independently and the Product circle is already responsible for sales.

  2. Tasks should be estimated in hours and not have a money bounty, as we see multiple problems here:

  • Changing exchange rates

  • Disconnection from actual success and available money

  • Value of a money bounty can be very differently depending on location

  • very similar to “cloud work” concepts

  1. We would like to add to the " Calculation of Compensations" part: " Members can decide if they want to get their benefit paid out or if they want to do solidarity transfers to other members/circles. Members can also apply for higher compensation."

  2. The fixed costs include services that are connected to server hosting. If (paid) services are provided by members the hours worked on them are not tracked within the meet.coop system. If inequalities appear at this point, they can be addressed as mentioned in point 3).

We’ve also thought about proposing the use of story points instead of time estimates/tracking, but didn’t want to make this discussion even more complex so we stayed with time estimates/tracking. (https://www.scrum.org/resources/blog/why-do-we-use-story-points-estimating) We’ve also discussed combined with this step to drop time tracking and do calculations on achieved story points alone.

Main Advantages of story points:

  • easier estimating of work, because everybody works on different speeds

  • w/o the use of time tracking there would be more incentive to improve processes

In further discussion we have to find a solution to different currencies and dynamic exchange rates. We need to have a compensation system with as little money exchange as possible and risk distribution of dynamic exchange rates.

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