A world where QF Enhances *Every* Income

🤖 DAO Governance and Vision
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In the 90s, Microsoft had a goal to have a PC on every desk.
I think that GitcoinDAO’s goal is to have QF enhance every income.

(Of course, I am one node in the network - Feel free to give feedback on the above statement or propose a different goal)

After thinking this eventuality through, I wrote A Vision for A Pluralistic Civilizational Scale Infrastructure for funding Public Goods , and @lthrift & @kevin.olsen have published Gitcoin Grants 2.0 , a vision of a credibly neutral protocol that anyone can deploy in order to run their own QF rounds, slated to be built this year.

There is a high order bit in this vision that I want to focus on in this post. We have an important phase change coming up in Grants 2.0, which will allow the DAO to scale much faster.

  1. Grants 1.0 was Gitcoin Holdings (or GitcoinDAO) fishing for you. :fish:
  2. Grants 2.0 is GitcoinDAO teaching you to fish. :fishing_pole_and_fish::fish::fish::fish::fish:

Grants 2.0 could allow us to exponentially scale Grants because were not the ones administering the QF rounds anymore. As we scale, it is important to decouple the resources the DAO spends from the impact it creates. Doing so enables more impact. Checkout this graph from Grants 2.0 is how we scale our impact 📈 to see what I mean:

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Which leads me to the prompt:

  1. What would have to be true to pull the world towards an outcome where QF enhances every income?
  2. What would have to be true for GitcoinDAO’s matching partners to be ready to operate their own rounds?
  3. What would have to be true from a technology, design, marketing, communications perspective?
  4. What can we leverage about the behaviour of the matching partners now to be prepared to make them successful when Grants 2.0 launches?
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Here is how I think about this problem visually.

  1. How can Gitcoin enable Ecosystem Builders to build their ecosystem?
  2. By enabling the Ecosystem Builders to enable their best Grant Owners to raise more $$$. How do they do that?
  3. By enabling the contributors to give more $$$. How do they do that?
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Awesome post - that graph is such a great visual representation as to why the move to Grants 2.0 is critically important.

I love the vision of a world where QF enhances every income. In my depiction of that vision, Gitcoin Grants is certainly a staple - and the vision also includes other manisfestations of QF like pay.party and probably many others we haven’t begun to think of.

From my Grants Ops perspective, I think the biggest thing is an ownership mindset.

Within our grants program today, we already see a wide spectrum of ecosystem rounds - we have some that seem to be super eager to fish for themselves and are coming up with innovations/structures on top of our platform that we couldn’t have imagined, and on the flip side, we have others whose behaviour suggests they want Gitcoin to do most of the fishing for them.

If we want partners to increasingly run their own rounds, we at Gitcoin should be making it clear to those potential round owners what a successful grants round looks like and how to run one themselves. We are gaining more evidence round-by-round on what works & what doesn’t, and while we’ve started on these efforts, we can certainly do a better job providing playbooks to partners.

You could also imagine a world in which, without Gitcoin in the loop, grants program leads across DAOs are sharing best practices & teaching one another how to run rounds.

I am excited for this future and can’t wait to see how Grants 2.0 begins to enable it :slightly_smiling_face:

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