I think this makes sense, given the bear market conditions and Gitcoin’s current state as a non-revenue-generating Impact DAO shifting into a Protocol DAO.
However in order for us to reach these numbers (~70% reductions in each workstream’s budget other than GPC) we need to envision what a lean Gitcoin DAO looks like, and I think this would require a pretty thorough restructuring of teams/roles/responsibilities and also a reframing of workstream autonomy. We are currently far from being lean, with each workstream designed to operate mostly self-sufficiently with their own ops/people ops/marketing/community “departments”. This allows workstreams to be more autonomous, but also means we have a lot of repitition of labour and working in silos. It’s painful to see, but there is very often a sense of unhealthy competition/almost animosity between workstreams (and even within workstreams, between “departments”) instead of a sense of collaboration, especially when the topics of budgeting are raised. Everyone thinks the work they’re doing is the most useful and should get the highest budget, because they often don’t even know what other workstreams are working on. There is very little interdependence.
Like Annika mentioned, I believe this also has a lot to do with our seasonal budget-approval process. These budgets are created collaboratively within each workstream, and briefly discussed across workstreams at CSDO, but there is so little context each workstream contributor has into what contributors at other workstreams are working on - at best, we’re just making guesses at what the DAO needs based on our own personal context and skillset, and at worst, we’re just creating work for ourselves regardless of the actual needs of the DAO.
I think we need less of a focus on workstream “autonomy” - we’re already a decentralized organization and have a fairly robust governance process - and more of a focus on interdependence and skills+context-sharing across the DAO. I think budgets should be applied for and decided on as a DAO, instead of as workstreams, and I think we need to do this less often than every season (something I’m glad we’re already having discussions on). We need to identify the distinct roles each contributor is playing and the unique value they are adding in service of the Purpose and Essential Intents together as a DAO instead of in our workstreams. And we need a process that conducts all of this in a truly unbiased/credibly-neutral way. Tall ask to do before Season 15, but I’m glad we’re starting the conversation.