First off, I’m very excited about the Beta Round being just around the corner. Congrats!
I’d like to see eligibility criteria become more transparent and independently verifiable. Some of the things I would advocate for:
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A consistent wallet address for receiving donations. I’d like to see projects receive donations via a wallet (ideally multisig) that resolves to a project ENS and has name tags on Etherscan. Anyone can verify these things in one click – and get a good sense for how much money the project has flowing through it. I think Rotki is exemplary in this regard.
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Active OSS / Github repo. I’m glad that @koday is proposing that Github activity continue to be a requirement for OSS projects. I’d like this criterion extended for any other projects that are building software.
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One-click proof of work / impact. For education, community, media, climate-related public goods (ie, basically anything that isn’t OSS), I’d like there to be a “proof of work” that’s accessible in one click. Ideally, it’s dated and has some basic metric for reach / engagement. A newsletter, podcast feed, Discourse forum, project dashboard all serve this function. Make it easy to prove that you or your project is doing something that matters to people.
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Snapshot / voting history for DAOs. If you’re a DAO, prove you have a community. Snapshot is one of several good tools for signaling you are more than one person and capable of managing a budget.
I’d like to move away from arbitrary requirements like “not have prior external funding of over $500k USD”. Per @tjayrush’s comment, there are incredible projects that have multiple people working full-time for multiple years on them. This criterion feels arbitrary, hard to enforce without insider info or “honor code”, and unfair to long-standing projects.
I’d like to see the projects within a round empowered and given tools to self-police against quid pro quos, advertising, Sybil attacks and other practices intended to manipulate the QF. I’m not sure how best to orchestrate this but want to see QF rounds among projects embody the Ultimate Frisbee style “spirit of the game”. This is especially important given the sunsetting of FDD, the part of the DAO that was most vigilant in rooting out such behavior.
Regarding round dynamics, I also have the following thoughts:
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Rounds shouldn’t be too big. Generally, I’d like to see a ratio of at least $10K in matching funding per project within a round. So a matching pool of at least $200K for a round with 20 projects in it.
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One project:round only. Projects (and teams) should not be able to participate in more than one round. The recommendation about having a consistent wallet address can mitigate this.
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Projects should be established. I agree with @koday’s proposal of at least a 3 month track record. I would extend that by giving the grants more of a retrospective bent: the descriptions should focus on what the projects have accomplished in the recent pass (eg, between grants rounds), not what they plan to do with more money. I don’t want grants to have prospective “deliverables” but I do want them to have proof of work/impact.
Finally, it’s in bear market conditions like we face today that Gitcoin’s mission is most important. I’d like to see every marginal dollar go towards teams that are buidling through the bear – and setting clear, consistent eligibility requirements is one of the best ways we can do that!