rehrar help out the project
Who, what, when, where?
Hi, I'm Diego "rehrar" Salazar. I run Cypher Stack, and me and my team make Stack Wallet. I also did work for the core team once upon a time.
I was recently approached my luigi, of the current core team about retaking on some of my old duties. There's a lot of opportunity for improvement in the non-dev areas of the project, and not always enough hands to get it done. It was agreed upon that, were this to happen, this would be done through the CCS rather than through Core as before. This moves me from being accountable to core, to accountable to the community.
A quick summary of what I'd be working on (requested by luigi):
- Presiding over and helping along a Monero Website Workgroup to merge requests, keep it up to date, and do odds and ends of design and development
- Facilitating moderator relationships and fostering community in relevant social platforms
- Being a leader in the Monero Community workgroup and helping that along as needed
- Keeping a finger on the "pulse of the community" in the various chat rooms and platforms (Telegram, Discord, IRC, Matrix, Reddit, etc.)
- Assisting plowsof as needed in CCS work (working under him for various tasks if needed)
- Aiding and assisting in event work as needed
- Utilizing my "soft skills" as needed elsewhere on the project.
Why?
There's lots of non-dev stuff to do, and not so many people to do it. I am capable and willing.
How long? How much?
75 XMR for three months for half time work. Possibility of renewal depending on community sentiment.
Deliverables
I will do all of the above in the beginning section, and give a monthly report to the community on what's been done, and tasks accomplished. The primary metric I will rate myself on though, is how big of a help I am to luigi in terms of taking workload off of his shoulders.
COI
My company Cypher Stack does occasional work for Monero in the form of the following:
- Dan "pigeons" Miller who helps with infrastructure work is employed by Cypher Stack. We typically do anywhere from 5-10 hours a month for Monero here. We are currently doing this work pro bono.
- Cypher Stack's cryptographer, Aaron Feickert, does occasional research work for Monero. This is funded either by the CCS, or the new Research Fund that has been funded by the CCS.
- I own and operate Stack Wallet, an open-source, multicoin wallet, of which Monero is supported.
- I and all of my employees do occasional work for other clients, many of them in the privacy or crypto sphere. Several of them privacy coins themselves.
Merge request reports
Activity
Have you completely lost your mind?
"Did Luigi recently get hit in the head and lost all memory, sense of decency and ethics? It's the only explanation i can think of"
https://old.reddit.com/r/Monero/comments/1dsgcfz/rehrar_help_out_the_project_ccs/lb939m9/ https://old.reddit.com/r/Monero/comments/1dsgcfz/rehrar_help_out_the_project_ccs/lb793dp/
Just 1 issue.. The title should be: "Help rehrar take over the world"
This is, in practice, identical to my previous proposal, and I support this for the same reasons Diego (and others) supported mine.
There's a lot of opportunity for improvement in the non-dev areas of the project
Though I'd change this line:
how big of a help I am to luigi in terms of taking workload off of his shoulders.
To clarify that it means:
how big of a help I am to plowsof & community by taking workload off of luigi's shoulders.
Which reiterates:
This moves me from being accountable to core, to accountable to the community.
Definitely interested by this proposal. I've some questions:
Being a leader in the Monero Community workgroup and helping that along as needed
What do you mean exactly by being a leader? in the sense of a general coordinator?
Assisting plowsof as needed in CCS work (working under him for various tasks if needed)
Unrelated to your statement, but could we expect weekly CCS meeting? There are some CCS around here that were open 2 months ago and it is just very slow
Presiding over and helping along a Monero Website Workgroup to merge requests, keep it up to date, and do odds and ends of design and development
Should we expect you to work on design with janaka on the New monero website proposal?
There's lots of non-dev stuff to do, and not so many people to do it. I am capable and willing.
Otherwise I'm feeling this and It would definitely be great to see you helping. Not anyone could do this job in the community, and you're from the one that are in a good position to do so.
I support diego becoming more involved in the community again, in a stewardship role, but it's not really clear what the tasks are here that deserve the requested rate.
As I understand it, rehrar is asking for the equivalent of ~$100k a year.
For that sort of money, i think it should be clear what the community can expect, including clear objectives and milestones (of at least some description).
There has been mention of rehrar including design work, website management and maintenance, and also work at, and on, Monero related events. If this is the offer, it should be clearly stated.
As it stands, this is a wage level similar to a coder or a cryptographer, in return for "soft skills", which is not such a good deal for the community.
mentioned in merge request !471 (closed)
Since there is now a pool of candidates being CCS'd for the same role functions, I would probably put weight behind rehrar due to having the existing side channel comms with Core, disappeared and still active, and pigeons.
I do agree with midipoet that the asking rate is rather steep for the tasks listed in the brief summary. At ~$4,225 / month for part time work, if it translated to full time work would mean a monthly salary of ~$8,450 and the $100K a year number reached by midipoet. The proposal would run into less resistance though as it gets more filled out before the next -community meeting
+1 From me, Diego was very helpful back when my ways with ANONERO got split, offered a helpful hand even back when all I had to offer was a unfinished wallet with WIP library. He helped me by giving a work opportunity at stack (regarding what was in my CCS), contacted cake to share his plans (which is a huge thing in my opinion, considering the fact that it is a competition), and helped establish relationship between me and cake, causing much improvement to the work I was doing, and finally helped me to adjust my CCS so it can get merged.
I can't say a single bad word about my interactions with Diego, I fully believe that he is the right person for the job.
I think getting @rehrar back to work inside the Monero community is a good thing. He was doing his "soft skills" thing when I first came into contact with Monero and I have no doubt that a big part of my good experience contributing with my own skills (not being a dev) are due to Diego's comms between workgroups. I'm sure I'm not the only one who experienced that back in the day.
That said, I understand @midipoet's point that for such fuzzy tasks, it looks as too much money for it in comparison. It's hard to value these kind of jobs, or measure how effective they were.
These points I find we're in need for various reasons:
- CCS assistance
- Website workgroup
This point could either I see as optional or fulfilled by someone else:
- Matrix and IRC mod
The rest are either not very interesting to me, or super hard to verify/discuss:
- Aiding and assisting
- Keeping a pulse
- Being a leader
- Using soft skills
I think a good compromise would be to have a lower XMR amount for these first 3 months, reduce the non-essential tasks if needed, and later evaluate how it went. That said, even without changes I think I'd vote yes and give him the chance to prove his usefulness to the community.
My current CCS @ 40eur/hr 20~hrs/week (on paper) experienced the same criticisms about rates. I am very grateful to have been put forward and funded by the community, 23xmr/month usually but my current one happened to request 26.69xmr/month. it does contain a large proportion of 'soft skills', granted, i am able to utilise scripting when the opportunity presents itself (wallet rpc to test certain pull requests, CI workflows, irc bots here and there).
Historically, the website coordinator role was at 20hrs a week, and is/should be heavily intertwined with another role, translations coordinator (again, 20hrs/week).
I would argue that if only one person is available for the job, then it's him who will impose his rate on the community. But if the rates are too high, other peoples will come to put offers on a lower rate that is already good for them. That's what set the right price and the fact that monerobull suggest to do it himself for a lower rate is showing that the rate in this proposal is too high for the market.
The community should take the lower rate if the proposal offer the same service. Else, it's just a waste of money. What we should focus now is does the proposal of monerobull (if he confirms he was serious) brings the same service than this one.
monerobull definitely doesn't offer the same service. If he wants to join/help form a website workgroup, that's great. It can be a CCS, but wouldn't necessarily need to be.
As for cost, Diego has expressed willingness to adjust a bit, approximately in line with @plowsofff I believe.
Full support for this proposal. I see 'sane thinking' as with luigi1111 and rehrar also.
Soft-skills / hard-skill non-sense, this is a man who is have great track record of coordinating 10-20s of people that works for benefit of Monero community for long-time, provide them salary, safety for their families and also manages to create great value for Monero community.
With very much respect to Monero project, Diego "rehrar" Salazar with it's expertise and years of experience, not 1-2 years but 6-7-8 years deserves 4k a month for half-time job.
I see many benefits, where some cypher dev have 1-2 hours free to use to to trim, optimize some monero stuff and similar stuff, not to sit bored around.
Also he seems to have great way around irc/matrix discussion.
+10
The proposal for a new website with modern design using Astro has been closed by luigi saying: "Closing in favor of constructing a functioning website workgroup. (it could be reopened/modified given output of said group)". !450 (comment 25232)
In my first proposal with three milestones, I was basically proposing to manage everything, coordinating everybody, answering every requests so that the web project is realised properly. But it was rejected saying that I am asking too much money. Now we have a new "Website Workgroup" proposal, which sounds very professional, and Rehrar proposing to put its soft skills to contribution.
I would like more explanation on what this workgroup is and what is the general direction. Keeking Jekyll, the same design, the same translation platform?
Having a web developer in the Website Workgroup is probably a good idea. Happy to join if the goal is to be innovative, regarding the tech, the design, the translation. If things stay the same, basically dead and afraid of any innovation, I will pass.
Edited by janaka-
Why did you downvote this proposal instead of pursuing a positive outcome as you allude to here?
We are not handing the website off to someone virtually unknown to manage everything. There must be more process than "someone showed up and had an idea and offered to take care of everything for a certain price."
The goal of the Website Workgroup is to steward the website. What that ultimately looks like is close to wide open.
IF such a venture cannot be successful, it is possible we could just somehow elect a benevolent dictator-maintainer, I just hope for a more thorough process than "the first CCS that offered" (not that that's a negative at all--the initiative is appreciated--but the general community is not well-equipped to judge such a thing).
Because the proposal has been written in 2 minutes and doesn't look serious to me. And ultimately I believe the services he offers are not necessary. Looks like having a manager that doesn't touch the code.
Edited by janaka-
I asked him to make this proposal to more or less be an assistant to me, as well as working towards decentralizing some project things. I find him reasonable, level-headed, technical enough, and resistant to "temperature elevation". Most importantly, I know him well.
If the services he provides are not worth it, well it didn't cost that much after 3 months (yes monerobull's is cheaper and will probably be merged, but I don't view them as the same scope really).
added 1 commit
- 3700f5a3 - Update mod portion as discussed in the Monero Community meeting
mentioned in commit 1e6f132b
Hi, it's me.
I ran a bit behind on hours because I went to defcon, which is why my milestone completion is a couple of days late.
What I've been up to:
- Sorting out and setting new expectations for the Matrix mods.
- Helping plowsof and luigi with a few CCS related tasks (summarization, discussion)
- Website workgroup stuff (this was by far the majority of hours, so I'll go into more detail below)
Website work took the lion's share of my time this month. There was the odd meeting here and there where a few things were decided. Two things in particular needed special attention.
- Which software to use when building out the new site redesign. There was disagreement within the workgroup, and I took it on myself to thoroughly research and try the available options (Huge, Astro, Jekyll), as well as tinker with a couple of other ones not mentioned for comparison's sake (namely Zola and Eleventy). After this exploration and further discussion with the workgroup, we have decided to move forward with Astro. I took some time to further learn Astro as a result.
- Which redesign will be implemented. Janaka will be the primary developer once a design is in place, and he has an open CCS to do so, but the proposed design has many flaws. As a UI/UX designer, and one of the things I noted I could do in my proposal, I am taking a stab at the redesign of the website. Through a workgroup meeting we've established a sort of stylistic direction, and I've started on the design process. This design effort will probably be the majority of my next milestone completion as well.
Onward to the next month!
