Thank you for your interest in my further insights. I’ll do my best here to share thoughts and feelings to, hopefully, further this exploratory discussion.
Firstly, I’d like to say that I feel it is a privilege to be selected as a Gitcoin steward. I’m always proud to say that I have this role. It’s one of the great communities of this space and certainly one of the most dynamic.
Now for the steward sync calls - TBH I do look forward to these. It’s fun to get a sort of inside scoop on the inner workings of the Gitcoin machine. But… (said with utmost respect) I hardly feel that hearing the 7 minute reports from each workstream during the calls serves us optimally. 1) I don’t feel I’m in a position to offer any oversight. I know that this is the process used to justify the budget requests, but I can usually read through those and approve on the governance forum. 2) I can only imagine that this puts considerable pressure on the teams to summarize significant workloads into 7 minutes in a sort of ‘evaluation’ type of atmosphere. Not sure how much fun that is for the teams?
I’m more of the mind that it would be time well spent if we, as stewards, were used more as your eyes and ears on the ground as to what the community might want or need. We have a vocal community - another positive attribute and evidence for the healthy dynamic here - but each steward may have exposure to supra-Gitcoin tribes that could perhaps inform our overall productivity and addressable market.
By supra-Gitcoin I mean (since I just made that up) that as stewards some of us may be inclined to broaden our horizons or even perhaps laser target other sectors but don’t really feel that there’s an appropriate place to hash this out. It’s sort of BD but it’s also sort of just brainstorming amongst the trusted brain trust.
If Gitcoin would want us to sign some sort of confidentiality agreement to engage in such a way, I’d be open to doing so. With that last statement I just want to assure that this is more about having the lever to be a more engaged team player and not about using steward status to get privileged alpha in an extractive way.
Ok, so hope this isn’t too TL;DR. Just some off-the-top thoughts. Bottom line, I’d love the opportunity to get to know the workstream teams a bit better as people and not just worker bees. I participate in other communities, crypto and otherwise, where small breakout sessions of 2- 6 people, integrated during the larger group meeting, is a common format. This seems to facilitate more relaxed conversation and more human-to-human exchange and trust building. This is something I greatly appreciate and feel personally enriched by after such encounters.
In any case, thank you Team Gitcoin, for all that you do and keep doing for all of us.