Constructing a Mutual Grants Committee

[owocki]

Hey @ceresstation do you think that workstreams that resemble more of sub-daos or side-daos fall within the ‘mutual grants committee’ framework or scope of work?

Here’s why I’m asking the question.

The examples im thinking of primarily in asking the question here are

• KERNEL
• moonshot collective
• FDD
• dCompass
• MMM

At various times, each of these workstreams has flirted with going independent (or multi-DAO) and starting to seek governance tokens from multiple DAOs.

Current course & speed, there is no standard for what those deals look like. But a few recent examples:

• KERNEL was incubated at Gitcoin Holdings, and is becoming its own independently governed project. Vivek and I directly negotiated the terms of that departure such that he could be successful and that Gitcoin could make sure expectations were well defined of how Gitcoin was involved in the KERNEL project from now on.
• FDD (consuming 93.5k GTC/season) continues to flirt with spinning out a SDD (Sybil Dao).
• dCompass (consuming 38k GTC/season) continues to flirt with creating its own independently governed project.
• MMM (30k GTC/season)/MSC (130k GTC/quarter) has both had inconsistent discussion about becoming it’s own independently governed project.

One example Ill drill deeper on recently is dCompass. Specifically, the following has come up in discussion about dCompass:

@owocki

If GitcoinDAO continues to allocate GTC (governance rights) to dCompass, will it receive governance rights in an eventual dCompass DAO? What amount? Does this amount differ if dCompass is given more GTC in S14/S15?

To which @huxwell responded:

@Huxwell

Yes Gitcoin DAO should have a say in the governance of the dCompass DAO. Gitcoin is the biggest funder so far and it makes sense if it’s one of the main governing entity of the dCompass DAO.

I’m open to negotiate regarding the amount but we can offer 2 seats in our council, which is currently a 3/5 multisig that we can update to be 5/8 so by owning 2 seats, Gitcoin DAO would have 25% of the governance rights.

If Gitcoin DAO continues to fund us (through GTC or any other token), we’re open to make a mutual grant agreement to make a swap between GTC and the DCOMP token for a maximum of 5% of our total supply.

I guess another way of asking the question at the top (does this fit in the MGC scope) is:

1. Who should be the counter-party to negotiations with @Huxwell (dCompass) or @DisruptionJoe (SDD) or @Fred (MMM) or @emudoteth (MSC) in the creation of this workstream flavor of mutual-grants?
2. Is there a standard set of criteria/terms for when GitcoinDAO will/wont support these entities becoming independently governed? Is there a common understanding of these criteria of terms?

Of course, the default option is to do nothing (not include these types of deals in the MGC scope). There are a couple of problems with the current approach.

1. The primary one is there is no mutual understanding that there should be a correlation between the GTC governance rights that GitcoinDAO gives to these workstreams to get them off the ground + the eventual governance rights of their independently governed project that GitcoinDAO gets back.
2. This incentivizes the workstreams to keep requesting more GTC ad infinitum from GitcoinDAO. I would venture to say that if a workstream fails to meet its goals and thereby stays longer to consume more GTC, it should give up more governance rights in its eventual departure (or be shut down if its just not working). Not having this understood upfront increases the risk of misunderstandings + hurt feelings down the road.
3. Another problem is that GitcoinDAO has put a lot of work into being regulatory/legally compliant. Without a process for the creation of these independently governed sub-DAOs, there is no way to make sure the sub-DAOs are regulatory legally compliant too.

Open to feedback on the thinking here.