2025 Delegate Nominations

[MathildaDV]

This nomination process is part of Gitcoin’s 2025 Governance Revamp, transitioning from our current steward model to a professional delegate system. We’re seeking delegates who can help drive ecosystem growth while maintaining high standards of governance participation.

TL;DR

There will be a total of 5 delegates selected for the 2025 council. The proposal is currently still under a vote. If not passed, we will re-evaluate, but due to the time constraints with GG23 coming up, we would like to give the opportunity for nominations in the meantime.

• Initial term: January - June 2025 (6 months)
• Performance review: End of Q2 2025
• Option to continue based on review and community feedback

Compensation

• Quarterly compensation: $2,500 in GTC per delegate

• Voting power: ~1M GTC delegated from treasury across the 5 delegates

• Performance reviews: Quarterly self-reported engagement evaluations

Delegate Responsibilities

Our delegates will carry three primary mandates:

1. Core Governance

• Active Participation: Must maintain 90% vote participation rate and provide written rationale for major decisions. Regular attendance at delegate coordination calls is required.
• Governance Innovation: Share insights and suggestions for governance improvements, with a goal of contributing meaningful enhancements to our processes and documentation each quarter.
• Budget Oversight: Review and approve community round budgets, providing detailed allocation rationales to ensure transparent fund management.
• Strategic Planning: Participate in quarterly governance reviews and help shape Gitcoin’s long-term vision through regular strategic input and ecosystem analysis.

2. Lead the GG Community Rounds Decision-making

• We have moved to a more decentralized future for Gitcoin Grants where we have begun to involve the community directly in vital decision-making when it comes to the community rounds that Gitcoin funds each quarter during GG rounds. The council’s responsibilities include:
  • Review and vote on GG community round proposals
  • Collaborate on GG community round retrospectives (optional)

The council will elect a ‘lead’ that will act as representative and report directly to the DAO with updates on a monthly basis.

Time Commitment:

• Core governance activities: at most 1-2 hours/week
• Community rounds review: 2 hours/week during GG rounds
• Partnership development: flexible, outcomes focused

Total: ~3 hours/week average

Nomination Eligibility Criteria

• Must not be a current full-time contributor at Gitcoin and be able to commit 2+ hours per week to delegate responsibilities.
• Must have been active in the Web3 ecosystem with demonstrable experience in governance, grants, or community management.
• Must complete security training with Gitcoin’s security consultant and maintain secure key management practices throughout the term.
• Must disclose any conflicts of interest during application and abstain from voting on any GG Community Rounds where conflicts exist.
• Must maintain 90% vote participation rate and provide written rationale for major decisions. Regular attendance at delegate coordination calls is required.

Desired:

• Professional DAO delegate experience in major DAOs
• Proven community leadership in values-aligned communities
• Established track record in public goods ecosystem

If you are interested in being a delegate, please reply to this post with the following:

1. Applicant Name:
2. Twitter:
3. Applicant Summary including why interested in applying to become a 2025 delegate:
4. Involvement in Gitcoin Grants community or prior initiatives:
5. Prior experience in either Grants or Delegate Programs, respectively:
6. Any anticipated conflicts of interest:

NOTE: We will run a full evaluation after Q2 to assess the effectiveness of the program as well as the value add. If deemed a success, we will continue for the remainder of the year.

Self-nomination period is open until 11pm UTC February 9th, 2025

Voting for the top 5 delegates will take place on Gitcoin’s Snapshot for 5 days from February 10 - 14, 2025.

Selection Process

1. Nomination Phase (1.5 weeks):

   • Self-nominations via this post
   • Community discussion and Q&A
   • Candidate introductions in community call

2. Election Phase (1 week):

   • Community vote using GTC tokens
   • Top 5 candidates selected
   • Minimum voting threshold required

For further questions, you can leave a comment here.

[omniharmonic]

gm gm, friends and allies.

I’m grateful for the opportunity to apply to be an official delegate of Gitcoin DAO. This community has a special place in my heart and my life’s work, and I would be honored to represent the community’s voice in decision-making processes. Below is my formal application.

@MathildaDV

• Applicant Name: Benjamin Life
• Twitter: @omniharmonic
• Applicant Summary including why interested in applying to become a 2025 delegate:

My first exposure to the notion of public goods occurred in 2020 when I first interacted with Gitcoin while doing research into DAOs and web3 coordination. Ever since, my entire theory of change for societal transformation has been rooted in an understanding that funding public goods is one of the most powerful strategies we can employ to create impact at scale. I believe in Gitcoin’s mission and I see this community as one of the foremost examples of the prosocial potential for web3 in the broader efforts to address climate change, support resilient local communities, and regenerate our planet.

My interest in supporting Gitcoin as a delegate is rooted in my sense of our shared potential to build upon Gitcoin’s early successes which have already established mindshare in the broader web3 narrative landscape and directed significant resources to open source software development and social impact causes. I sense that the next wave of Gitcoin’s success depends on our collective ability to expand into new mechanisms and new areas of impact. Onchain impact verification is one of the most promising use cases for web3 generally and I am devoted to on-boarding off-chain social impact communities to begin the process of allocating resources and reporting impact onchain.

Building bridges between communities has been a longstanding passion and skill I’ve cultivated as a weaver across web3, regenerative, bioregional, coordination tech, mutual aid, civic engagement, and community organizing cultural groups and organizations. As an advocate for Gitcoin’s next era, I bring a depth of relationships with aligned networks who could benefit from participatory resource allocation infrastructure and could also inform the design of new mechanisms to meet their needs. I believe I hold a clear vision for the future of public goods funding and the various social impact use cases that could expand the narrative of onchain resource allocation as a backbone in the future of philanthropy.

One of my key strategic goals as a delegate would be to advocate for and engage with these potential new partners where they are, helping to develop storytelling that expands Gitcoin’s position in these spaces by making visible the power and potential of participatory budgeting and onchain impact reporting. Having already accomplished a small win towards this broader goal within the context of the BioFi Pathfinders Round, I feel confident in my ability to bring traditional funders and grassroots impact organizations alike into the Gitcoin ecosystem.

As someone who has spent the last two years building a DAO for public goods builders, I know the challenges and potential of distributed governance firsthand. As we engage in our own “progressive protocolization roadmap,” I’m excited to contribute what we’re learning to the Gitcoin governance methodologies while simultaneously bringing what I’m learning from Gitcoin’s DAO governance into OpenCivics. One of our key outcomes this year will be the decentralization of our Community Round proposal process, utilizing onchain mechanisms to empower the community to govern the themes and criteria for our grant rounds. While our participation as Community Round operators presents potential conflicts of interest (and thus abstention from voting), we’re committed to decentralizing our own internal processes and will be sharing our methodology with the Gitcoin community as an “open protocol” or playbook for other Community Round Operators. I believe that with the appropriate transparency and abstention from some Community Round deliberations, this potential conflict of interest could actually be transformed into a value add for the community by ensuring that Gitcoin’s internal processes reflect the needs and perspectives of Round Operators.

Gitcoin’s developer community has been incredibly generous to us as Community Round Operators, responding actively to feature requests and bug reports. I hope to extend this advocacy in the role of delegate by leveraging my experiences as a Round Operator to ensure Gitcoin’s processes are supportive to the flourishing of the Community Round Operator ecosystem. To date, I have operated four community rounds and have learned through experience what it takes to run a successful community-driven grants program. I hope to bring that experience and expertise in service of all Community Round Operators as the program evolves. Utilizing the Gitcoin brand to help activate new capital flows into matching funds for Community Rounds is another high level strategic goal I would hope to achieve as a delegate.

Overall, I’m a ride-or-die Gitcoin community member who would be playing these roles naturally without any formal engagement. If elected, I would bring my own deep well of motivation, passion, and care for this community into a more operational and decision-making role that I feel would be even more impactful than if I engaged in that advocacy and strategic support on my own.

Thank you for your consideration.
Fund What Matters In Us We Trust

• Involvement in Gitcoin Grants community or prior initiatives:

I began my participation in the Gitcoin Grants Community through an early Community Round funded personally by Owocki himself, focused on projects addressing the ‘meta-crisis.’ Since then, OpenCivics has participated in three rounds as a grantee and I have personally operated three rounds for OpenCivics and one round for the BioFi Project’s first foray into web3 grants.

• Prior experience in either Grants or Delegate Programs, respectively:

Through the context of OpenCivics, I have both designed grant round criteria and impact reporting schemas for our civic-focused grant rounds. We have also been designing our own Delegate program to help streamline our hybrid governance transition into further onchain decision-making which will be formally launched in the OpenCivics Consortium DAO structure later this year.

• Any anticipated conflicts of interest:

OpenCivics plans to continue our onchain grants program through Community Rounds and other mechanisms for the foreseeable future. To mitigate this conflict of interest, I would personally abstain from any decisions regarding OpenCivics. Additionally, I co-founded a community co-working space in Boulder, CO with Gitcoin founder, Owocki. To mitigate this conflict of interest, I would actively create a barrier in our friendship regarding any DAO decisions to avoid his undue influence on DAO matters.

[PGov]

Applicant Name: PGov

Twitter: @PGovTeam

Applicant Summary including why interested in applying to become a 2025 delegate:

Hello everyone! We are a team of dedicated governance enthusiasts who have been in the governance space for over four years. Our team was some of the first members involved in defi governance and we want to apply what we have learned over the years to Gitcoin. Having worked and chatted with many members of the core teams for months now, we would love to get more involved with Gitcoin. As a delegate, our goals are:

• Growth: Our decisions are primarily focused on the growth of the protocol. This often results in how to spend money efficiently, but even more importantly and objecting for unreasonable spends and knowing when to vote no.
• Transparency: Clear communication with votes and explanations of reasoning, and an equivalent demand for proposals to do the same. Too often we see thousands, if not millions, being rolled up together and glossed over during proposals.
• Accountability: Too often once a decision is done, having proper accountability becomes an afterthought. Whether it’s a DAO promise or a grant or a new program, once a DAO votes something in, we forget about it. Our goal with PGov is to both continue to check in on these decisions as well as ensure that there are proper channels set up to ensure accountability.

Involvement in Gitcoin Grants community or prior initiatives: We partook in GG20 grants as part of the governance ecosystem delegates initiative and have been an active Gitcoin delegate since the end of last year! Additionally, we have been active in the governance space for over four years and have been involved across many well known DAOs.

Prior experience in either Grants or Delegate Programs: Some relevant grants and delegate programs that we’ve helped out on include:

• Optimism: S5/S6 Grants Council, S7 Milestones and Metrics Council
• Compound: Compound Grants Program, Governance Working Group
• Uniswap: Accountability Program, Metagov Team

Any anticipated conflicts of interest: If situations arise, we will abstain from a vote, and clearly state the conflict on the forums.

[MathildaDV]

Thank you for those who have nominated themselves! Love seeing such strong candidates already coming through.

One update I would like to highlight is that after some reflection and feedback, we have lightened the scope of work for the delegates, removing the “ecosystem growth” piece, ensuring that the expectations outlined for the delegates and compensation may balance out more.