[GCP-005] PASSED Gitcoin Supporting Zuzalu, a first of its kind pop-up city

[kyle]

I love the support and great questions that are being posed here. I figured I would offer some of my thoughts, but I also recognize that this one has been tough to navigate given some of the precedent we have set (ie, we dont sponsor events). As usual, I am but one node and would love to engage in conversation if folks feel like I have blind spots.

Splitting this request into two:
1 - The matching pool funds - I am highly in favor of us hosting and supporting this round. This seems like a no brainer as it’s in a category we have historically supported, with a group that has given millions in funding to Gitcoin’s matching pool. This gives us the ability to run a QF round with folks outside our immediate community ahead of launching Allo and generally is a tremendous way for us to grow funding available for public goods.
It is highly aligned with our ”second most important thing” and speaks to why Gitcoin’s soul (our grants program) is thriving! There is no doubt that we can “make up” the funds in other ways (like with our RocketPool funding, or gtcETH funding, etc.). Yes please to running a round if we can support it. We have 13 rounds to knock out, and this is a great one to support! 13 5 5

2 - The sponsorship of the event. This is a bit tricky as I suspect Janine is going to run this event with or without our funding. It sounds like she already has a couple people in place supporting her, and the real question to me is… do we want to compensate those folks from Gitcoin’s treasury, or do we want them to seek payment from other places (or even further, should we do this retroactively if the value to Gitcoin is clear/measurable?)?
I have a couple other questions on where the 82k number came from and how it’s being allocated, which will hopefully make this an easier decision. I would love more clarity on this number and love the suggestion from @atris on reimbursing expenses with reasonable compensation figures for the work being performed.

As for a COI - I am torn on whether a COI actually exists here. Janine has already been running point and working to support Gitcoin’s participation agnostic of the vote here. If we decided not to approve the funding (either/both pools requested), I don’t think it would change the goodwill she has extended, or that the Zuzalu team has extended based largely on the stellar work Janine is doing. I am curious to get other people’s perspectives on this as I am planning to attend the event for a couple weeks at the onset of the pop up city. Inclusion of Gitcoiners was never a thing that was predicated on this vote, and candidly Janine decided she wanted to support this prior to knowing if funding was going to be available.

So - I would love to support the full initiative but I would like more details on the 82k being voting for that option. I am still mixed on us sponsoring an event like this (by paying for the resources/sponsoring as we don’t normally do this), but perhaps with more details on the 82k I can get to a yes.

The matching pool seems like a highly aligned way to spend our matching pool funds - I am here for this!

[shawn16400]

@kyle

As for a COI - I am torn on whether a COI actually exists here. Janine has already been running point and working to support Gitcoin’s participation agnostic of the vote here. If we decided not to approve the funding (either/both pools requested), I don’t think it would change the goodwill she has extended, or that the Zuzalu team has extended based largely on the stellar work Janine is doing. I am curious to get other people’s perspectives on this as I am planning to attend the event for a couple weeks at the onset of the pop up city. Inclusion of Gitcoiners was never a thing that was predicated on this vote, and candidly Janine decided she wanted to support this prior to knowing if funding was going to be available.

Hey @kyle thank for the input on the perception of a COI, these are a bit sticky and it is important to understand the nuance. Recall the perception of a COI is independent of good will, stellar work, prior knowledge of funding, or if the work would continue if the proposal failed. I suspect you agree with this sentiment, but I wanted to drive that point home. The perception of a COI is simply about personal benefit received, based on actions or decisions made in their official capacity, which is not available to others.

If the recipient stands to receive material benefit they would not normally receive, it could be perceived as a COI, and they should abstain from voting. A parallel could be drawn to our workstream budget process. Workstream contributors should abstain from voting on their own budget to avoid the perception of a COI.

Note that the perception of a COI is not a negative thing and it is no reflection on the strength or weakness of a proposal. In normal situations, abstaining from a vote for strong and universally supported proposals should not have an impact on the outcome.

Why this case might be different is that Janine has 1.68M GTC tokens allocated to her and a simple majority vote is normally around 5-6M tokens for high turn out votes, 3-4M for less active votes.

[Viriya]

I appreciate the comments here and the details surfacing do to the back and forth.

I like how @CoachJonathan outlined that this is really two proposals as it gives us more room to explore our reactions to this proposal. I hope this kind of delineation is exercised more in the future.

I also feel torn about this proposal. The narrative is strong but it leaves me wondering how much of it is based on intuition and historical context vs. strategic vision and our goals for the future. Some questions I have for the wider steward body (not only @J9leger) are:

• Are we committed to deepening our engagement with the web3 community OVER finding new playing fields (I know both are important so I’m positioning this as an even-over question)

• How much money is a reasonable amount for event spend this year? We’ve already produced the community retreat and Schelling Point (SP) at ETH Denver. We are also exploring another SP activation (likely a smaller pop up) in Paris. I think the DAO as a whole needs to get better at measuring ROI of IRL events.

Running a Round at Zuzalu

Many members of the core team are pretty excited about this so I can get on board. One question I have is: what is the eligibility criteria for the round? As someone who isn’t attending, I would like this 100K of our matching pool funds to be spent on meaningful projects vs. parties…but that is for the community of Zuzalu to decide. The beauty of QF!

If we decide to contribute this money, is there a chance that our matching pool funds will be used for fancy & fun things or will they exclusively be used to fund experiments that might be replicable beyond Zuzalu?

Sponsorship of the Event

@J9leger - does this request include your salary for planning the event? Are you one of the 3-4 team members that you’re requesting funding for?

I appreciate you asking for what you need and I also appreciate that this opportunity is HUGE for you (and am happy you seized it!). That said, I’m still torn if the DAO should pay for any team members to run this event. I think I can come to a yes to paying your short sabbatical but to break precedent of “no event sponsorships ever” and jumping to an 82K engagement, this feels off to me.

My DMs are constantly flooded with less costly opportunities that will expose us to new markets. I get that this is a bit different than a traditional event sponsorship but I’ll say that because sponsorships are top top tippy top of funnel, they really should be used to break into new markets imo. That said, they can also be used to re-establish brand affinity with existing markets – do we as a DAO feel that we should use this opportunity to re-establish our brand with key players in the ETH ecosystem?

[kyle]

@shawn16400

If the recipient stands to receive material benefit they would not normally receive, it could be perceived as a COI, and they should abstain from voting.

hmm, would love to discus this in a different forum, but this is not often how American democracy works. Presidential candidates will (most likely) vote for themselves in an election… republican/democrat party members will vote for candidates that often are aligned to their values AND often have the perception of improving the lives of those voting for them (tax reform, free health care, student loan forgiveness)…

I wonder where the line is drawn and what type of democracy we would like to be. If my voting power is delegated, and I continually vote for things that have a CoI, my delegators would remove that delegation. Simply abstaining on a vote for something I believe in because of “perceived CoI” seems undemocratic. Now, also not stating where I might have a CoI is also a form of fraud IMO.

But, we can chat in another forum

[shawn16400]

@kyle

Presidential candidates will (most likely) vote for themselves in an election…

Great example, and parliamentarians might not classify these cases as a COIs. but let’s test it and see if the logic holds up:

Candidate voting for himself:
Q: Is the candidate in a position to derive personal benefit (self or family) not available to others?
A: yes if elected, the President would receive a salary.

Q: Are they voting in an official capacity?
A: No, they are voting as private citizens
net: Likely no COI.
The candidate does stand to receive material benefit not available to others, but when the candidate votes, they are voting as a private citizen, and have no more voting power than any other voter. If they mobilized the military to “protect” polling locations - that would be another story.

@kyle

republican/democrat party members will vote for candidates that often are aligned to their values AND often have the perception of improving the lives

Solid, lets test if a Republican has a COI when voting for other Republicans
Q: Is the candidate in a position to derive personal (self or family) benefit not available to others?
A: No, policy usually impacts classes of voters (benefit to many) not just the individuals.

Q: Are they voting in an official capacity?
A: No, they are voting as private citizens

An interesting variation might be the Index Fund managers. Blackrock might have the largest voting block of General Electric (given they retain the voting rights for their index fund investors) and they use that influence to benefit themselves (indirectly) and their shareholders. Any benefit received is spread over the entire class of shareholders, not just Blackrock, the firm itself. If Blackrock received a $50M bonus for helping to electing a specific board member to GE - again, that would be another story

@kyle

If my voting power is delegated, and I continually vote for things that have a CoI, my delegators would remove that delegation.

Makes sense, we would assume delegators look for solid character in voting performance. Although I am not sure how many DAO delegates watch that closely

@kyle

Simply abstaining on a vote for something I believe in because of “perceived CoI” seems undemocratic.

This is an interesting point and it has a very strong lineage. The basic interpretation of a COI in parliamentary procedure states that abstaining from vote due to a COI is recommended (best practice) but it cannot be compelled. (RONR 11th ed. pp 406-407). However it is very common that governing bodies modify this statute to be more restrictive. For example, in Gitcoin DAO Governance Process v3 it states:

Conflicts of Interest

In any case where a steward or community member votes on a proposal that directly benefits themselves (e.g. voting to pass their own workstream budget) that steward or community member’s vote will be considered invalid by default. Any steward may raise a claim of conflict to be addressed prior to a vote being finalized on Tally should this apply.

If a conflict is found, any related vote must be redone and may be considered passed so long as the steward in conflict abstains and the quorum rules are met.

This Gitcoin statute might be a wee bit more restrictive than necessary, but it is a good reference point. There are often questions around COIs so I appreciate the chance to discuss this since it was raised in relation to this proposal. And, also based on the Gov Process v3 above, if a steward calls this vote into question due to a perceived COI with Zuzalu after the vote, we could have a real mess.

[krrisis]

Hey Janine, thanks so much for this proposal, and as always appreciating the very nuanced discussion that unfolded below, people seem to be asking all the right questions, so will try to not repeat those, but I’m curious about the answers to some of these as well. Some (other) things that came up for me, while reading:

@J9leger

Zuzalu is a new concept proposed by a core team of builders with the goal of building intentional community amongst like minded individuals in a location that offers those participating a positive social environment for learning, being healthy and coordination.

So, it took me a while to figure out what Zuzalu actually is, for anyone else, here is the link with more info. The first question that comes up for me - are participants paying to join this event? If so, is it possible to give some sort of percentage breakdown how much and what is covered by the local government, vitalik, participants, this round, and the 80k? This would probably help people to get a better view on how to vote on this proposal.

@J9leger

This QF round will support the collective funding of Zuzalu’s shared needs, which are shaping up to be quite expansive (basic necessities, OSS projects being developed, experiences, etc.)

How many projects do you expect to run on this QF round? The reason I’m asking is because although we of course massively should encourage any community to decide if they want to run a full round, I think the story is slightly different if this is funded with Gitcoin’s own matching funds or treasury. If we do this I would propose to open this up to a wider community and turn this into a full longevity round, i.e. open to other projects outside of Zuzalu too. If we would do this, this would 100% get a yes from me.

If this exclusively for Zuzalu I’m wondering why we would say yes here, where we recently saw a full-on grassroots initiative from Giveth fail to reach just $25K required to run a round to support the Turkey earthquake. This was an initiative that was covering way more ground than just one event and sponsorship by Gitcoin was not even discussed at any point afaik. Mentioning this point as an argument to at least turn this into a more open longevity round. Plus also to add to @Viriya’s points above on how do we decide on sponsorships?

@J9leger

It is our intention to support Zuzalu in a way that brings back learnings for how to apply funding models to local communities. Said differently, we want to build a playbook for how Allo protocol can be leveraged to fund shared needs.

Would love to understand this better, is one of the outcomes that will be delivered an actual playbook?

Related to this:

@J9leger

If the DAO agrees to support the grants round, our involvement will run throughout the course of Zuzalu and ideally help gather feedback and ideas for new features on grants stack or builds on the Allo protocol.

Would be great to better understand what exactly the project team will commit to deliver to the team in return for this support.

@J9leger

I am requesting $82,000 in funding to support myself and 3-4 other team members in coordinating, leading and executing the Zuzalu event in coordination with the core planners on the initiative. We will cover the following scope:

• Event Logistics and project (or city) management
• Team and volunteer building and management
• On-site Public Goods conference event

See earlier comments by others on a breakdown here, and one extra Q from me: if we are supporting already with 100k through matching, would it be an option to put this extra request up as one of the projects within the round?

@J9leger

In an effort to showcase Allo, and gather feedback from participants of Zuzalu and beyond we would like to run a Quadratic Funding round where Allo is used with support from our team (PGF, Allo Workstream, MMM, etc.). There is no direct cost associated with this request, but it would inject minor requirements to their seasonal commitments.

This makes total sense to me if this gets accepted as a featured round (covering zuzalo and hopefully other longevity initiatives), and if the team can commit to take this on on top of existing rounds. I would like to see this confirmed by them. It does seem to conflict with this sentence:

@J9leger

The Zuzalu team would love to run a Quadratic Funding round for Zuzalu, and Gitcoin has the ability to step up as a primary funder of this event.

If I understand it correctly it would be entirely on gitcoin to run this round and not the zuzalu team, correct? Or how would you see the work be divided? If this is already agreed upon with the PGF team feel free to ignore this question.

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To conclude, I am a fan and I love the listed benefits and they make total sense to me. The reason for these extra questions is the risk I briefly brought up during CSDO: how can we justify funding a separate matching round for this, when we just asked our community to select core rounds (here), and do we do the same if other teams who sponsored us previously ask us for matching rounds? What do we do for the many projects we deeply care for and believe in that do not have the name of Vitalik Buterin linked to them? Are we acting from first principles here?

As mentioned by Laura as well, to me this is not just a question for you, it’s also a question for the wider team (CSDO) that we do not seem to have answered just yet. Appreciate all that you do and excited to learn more!

[DisruptionJoe]

Janine, thank you for taking the time to share these details.

I am fully in support of this. I have no desire to micromanage exactly how the funds are spent.

Why I am supporting this proposal

1. I do feel that this will bring well more benefit in return than the $182k expense.
2. Vitalik has supported us. Let’s support him.
3. This is a one of a kind opportunity to use our protocol IRL!

Good luck and you have my support.

For those considering voting against:

1. Governance is iterative. Sometimes we need to be flexible enough to do obvious good things. Ethereum rolled back for the DAO hack, but that would be next to impossible now. All of these governance decisions for fairness going forward are important, but not as important as executing this. I’d urge us to have faith in fixing our governance for next time, but being flexible with this if you believe it has value like I do.

2. Zuzalu will be an IRL example of why the Grants Program is our second most important thing. This feels like the “soul of Gitcoin”, “social enterprise”, “funding public goods”. If you are worried that this doesn’t fit with our most important things, I would argue that it clearly does. It keeps us at the cutting edge of the technology, processes, and culture of better funding what matters.

3. Decentralized funding means innovation & risk EVEN/OVER efficiency. If we are worried about every single $ being used perfectly, we are not exploring new ways of funding. I hear a little bit of worry that the people participating will have a good time - as though it won’t be “work”. To me, this is the future we are fighting for - a world where our incentives and interests are aligned! I’d urge stewards to vote FOR these representatives to have fun and trust them to deliver value. As a community, we can display vulnerability. This is not weakness. Yes, we know they could use the funds and not deliver value, but who would we trust more to execute on our behalf?

On Conflicts of Interest

Kyle brings up an interesting point that people who delegate to Janine (or a person with a potential COI) wouldn’t want their tokens to go unused. Well, we have a proposal process where if they cared, they could delegate to someone else!

It is my opinion that Gitcoin should be the shining example of good ethics for web 3. I don’t think I’m alone in this. Therefore, when there is even a potential COI, it should be called out and the voter should abstain.

[griff]

I am generally opposed to this proposal.

Honestly, it’s hard to say no to these fun networking opportunities… but at the same time, it’s all too easy to divide our focus as a team.

It seems like we should be putting all hands on deck on making the up coming grants round a success. I just went to ETHDenver and then ETHporto and can’t even think of doing any more conferences for the next few months… It’s time to buidl! I am surprised to see us volunteering resources to organize a tangentially related event.

If the funding came from Vitalik, in the first place, it makes sense to do a longevity round for a 100k I’m ok with that, but taking team resources away is a bad opinion from what i can tell… Giveth Devs were playing with passport and it still wasn’t really working to the surprise of the Passport team (in a call today) And I there was going to be a test round this month with the TEC but that got canceled… I don’t think we should be trying to take on other projects right now.

I am hoping everyone in Gitcoin this round can be testing the core product before launch… while it is fun and in many ways beneficial to go to events like this… Our launch in April should be the #1 priority. Losing leadership at this critical juncture seems like a mistake.

Not to mention… there is still no revenue, nor is there notable advances on token utility/demand… we should be looking for ways to spend less money not more.

I would vote for option 4 (No) or option 3 (100k matching pool only) if Vitalik is excited for a longevity round and will help promote it (even with just one tweet). V donated it and his support has been and always will be critical for Gitcoin’s continued success.

[shawn16400]

@DisruptionJoe

On Conflicts of Interest

Kyle brings up an interesting point that people who delegate to Janine (or a person with a potential COI) wouldn’t want their tokens to go unused. Well, we have a proposal process where if they cared, they could delegate to someone else!

Joe,
Thanks for highlighting this - changing delegation is super easy, and if you time it right, not very expensive either. You can adjust your delegation on the daostewards.xyz site built for us by karmahq.xyz.

While you are on our dedicated Gitcoin Delegation site, you can also see how your delegation is performing as compared to other potential delegates.

The intent is to make delegation and redelegation easy. In fact, if you forgot who you delegated to, or how to to delegate to a steward or to yourself - you can use this handy dandy tip sheet.

[bobjiang]

Good points, Griff.
I’d agree with you.

For this proposal, from my personal view, I’d like to support it.
But from the community view, I would NOT agree it now. (maybe change if we have more evidence/data for this proposals)

Hi @J9leger
For this proposal, I would go back the S17 objectives:

in the list of S17 OKRs, (maybe I am wrong, but) I didn’t find which projects the proposals are in. The possible ones are:

• Execute first-ever Gitcoin Community Gathering
• Business Development and Revenue Opportunities

If these are true, would you like to elicit more details in this proposal to align with our objectives.

If this is an emerged goals in S17, it would be nice.
But I would like to get more consensus from the communities and more transparency from Gitcoin if we have changed S17 goals.

[krrisis]

@bobjiang

Hi @J9leger
For this proposal, I would go back the S17 objectives:

in the list of S17 OKRs, (maybe I am wrong, but) I didn’t find which projects the proposals are in. The possible ones are:

• Execute first-ever Gitcoin Community Gathering
• Business Development and Revenue Opportunities

If these are true, would you like to elicit more details in this proposal to align with our objectives.

If this is an emerged goals in S17, it would be nice.
But I would like to get more consensus from the communities and more transparency from Gitcoin if we have changed S17 goals.

Hey Bob,

Great to see you here! Thanks for this feedback - just as a clarification, this is indeed not part of S18 objectives, this is a separate funding request, following the GCP template, which you can find here.

[kyle]

I know Janine has been off of work last week, and I thought i might try to summarize where we are.

It sounds like there a couple of tactical requests open:
1 - Can she breakout the 80k funding request into a bit more detail and also add thoughts on what will actually be accomplished while supporting Zuzalu
2 - Can we split this into more options (fund $80k, fund the $100k round, fund both, etc.)

The next bit of feedback from folks is around “why this” or “why now.” Perhaps I can summarize what I am seeing here too and offer a light perspective as someone who has been plugged into some of the work underway.

1. "Why this" - There are questions around why “sponsor” this event, what makes it “most important things” aligned, and what precedent are we setting?

   1. [New Market] Zuzalu has a Public Goods week where lots of Public Goods focused participants will be hacking on new tech, and exploring new and novel ways to fund public goods. Prior to Janine getting involved, Gitcoin was not invited or introduced to the conversation. It was mostly going to be OP leading those convos (which is a great brand to have at the helm too!). Janine exposed Allo to the group and has encouraged they use Allo to fund what matter to the Zuzalu community. It will be the first time we run a QF round for a local pop up city/group (yes we have done QF rounds for the City of Oakland and others, but not one for “network states”, which is a killer long term use case to try out)
   2. [Supporting what matters to US] The round we would support and run is core to our ethos of wanting to support public goods. I mentioned this before, but I am certainly keen to support novel uses of the matching pool fund to ensure the soul of Gitcoin is thriving. While Vitalik has donated millions to our cause, I don’t see this about “repaying” him so much of us using those funds to showcase whats possible with Allo and an aligned community. This is the first we have explored doing this and I would love to see how it goes and if we should do more of this.
   3. [Sponsoring] We have historically said we wont sponsor events, which I have been a stickler of myself. But we have explored funding in the past that was for novel software development, moonshot ideas and things that were adjacent, but valuable to our cause. The $80k for 3 months of work for a handful of people with the outcome of seeding Gitcoin, encouraging Allo adoption and testing QF outcomes for local communities seems high upside.

2. “Why Now” - There are questions around this event being a distraction, not something timing wise we should focus on, etc.

   1. [Distraction] The public goods week, and the proposed round would run during the April rounds, if I am not mistaken, timing seems highly aligned as we would slot it in as a featured round.
   2. [Bear market] Given the bear market, the spend of the DAO, etc. should we fund this now or continue to have the hatches battened down? While we are reducing the number of workstreams, we are also trying to introduce funding for things that are more fun and bring good will to the communities and people who have supported us. I believe we should take on more adjacent, ahead of the protocol launch, to continue to showcase the interest Gitcoin has in being a dominant player in the space. Gitcoin had very little involvement in curating or participating in the core Eth Denver event (outside of our own great event). Had there had been a GCP to support people who wanted to grow Gitcoin’s presence at EthDenver, I would have (likely) supported that as well. Now is the time to get the marketing drum out and showcase who we are, and what we stand for, ahead of the protocol launch!

I look forward to Janine plugging back in and adding her comments on a couple of the open threads.

[bobjiang]

Thank @kyle for your summary!

I got the thoughts and causes behind this proposal, so I would vote “for” the proposal because:

1. this is public goods experiment
2. we could try Allo protocol in this experiment, maybe Passport protocol as well

anyway, we could adjust OKRs to align with the changes, and it is worth to have a try.

[Viriya]

Appreciate you giving us some more perspective here @kyle

I like the idea of splitting the vote into more options. I think that will give stewards some flexibility on choosing what to fund as this proposal is a biggie.

[J9leger]

Thanks all for the discussion, it’s been fun reading through and hearing everyone’s perspectives! I’ve both summarized my response, included the change I will make in what I post for everyone to vote on (I will put this and included details for each of your thoughtful answers below:

Summary:

• Clarifying the ~$80K budget:

  • $20K to Gitcoin and Supermodular for grants round and bounties
  • ~$60K for 4 people (1 FT (me) and 3 PT - not current Gitcoin contributors to avoid taking anyones attention beside my own away from running the round)
  • Listed areas of focus and outcomes at a high level

• The round: $100K from Gitcoin matching pool would go to Zuzalu Public Goods aka open source tools and projects that help push the idea of CoordiNations and “network states” forward and show cases our software. This does not include IRL events at Zuzalu. In addition, to the question of additional funds from different sources, we haven’t promoted funding this round as we don’t want to detract from partners funding other rounds but we could source the $100K funds from multiple sources if we as Gitcoin do not want to fund it all ourselves however I would like us to commit to a $100K round.

• Sponsorship: I’m not convinced the funds are necessarily comparable to sponsorship. I see this as a new market for Gitcoin that is aligned with our purpose. We’ve discussed at length the idea of Gitcoin supporting local communities and helping them fund their shared needs and this feels like an investment in creating a real use case for other communities to model.

• COI: I think the broader participants coming to Zuzalu from Gitcoin won’t necessarily gain anything by voting yes on this. I have always planned on abstaining from this vote.

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Changes to the options for vote:

1 - Vote yes to completing funding the initiative with the requested resources and matching pool funds:

• $100k in Matching Pool funds
• $82K in remuneration for the team working to deliver Zuzalu

2 - Vote yes to funding the initiative, but not offering the matching pool funds for the event.

• $82K in remuneration for the working team and events at Zuzalu

3 - Vote yes to funding the matching pool, but not offering remuneration for the team work:

• $100k in Matching Pool funds

4 - Vote yes on funding the Matching Pool and partially supporting team work ($50K)

• $100k in Matching Pool funds
• $50k in remuneration for the team working to deliver Zuzalu

5 - Vote No on financially supporting the event in any capacity.

6 - abstain

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Detailed responses:

@Yalor - a match from Metacartel is a generous offer! This could align well to some of the thinking I share in response to @krrisis questions.

Clarity on budget for $82K (in response to @jengajojo, @CoachJonathan, @kyle and @krrisis ):

• Expenses: $20K to Gitcoin and Super Modular for running the round and hackathon bounties
• Compensation: $62K for 4 people’s comp (1 FT (me), 3 PT). Zuzalu wants to be a community project and not an event that gets sponsored whereby there is a central org that has a P&L and receives sponsorship to cover expenses and sponsorship gets an org their logo added to all things PR related. Gitcoin will be one of few making this step to help compensate volunteers who are dedicated their time. Given Allo protocol could be the mode to collect and allocate funds to future Zuzalu villages, supporting this experiment feels aligned not only to supporting the broader Ethereum community in BEING in community and buidling in person together. All while also supporting a potential large user of Allo protocol in the future.

The three additional PT contributors are supporting with 3 months of time dedicated to:

• Operational support and SOPs that Gitcoin and Zuzalu can partner on around open sourcing all processes and tools used to easily build similar social infrastructure and use tools like Allo protocol to fund their shared needs
• Hackathon and Grants round support and understanding the Zuzalu community’s shared needs to help shape the requirements for the grants round and projects to support / encourage and identify people to build
• Grants round results to showcase to local communities how they can fund their shared needs and the value of using Allo protocol to do so
• Public Goods week support and write up of outcomes and results to share as content
• Involvement and facilitation during the final event around future activations of Zuzalu villages and how to use allo protocol to help allocate funds for future communities

With regards to compensation, I have added an option to vote on a lower compensation request of $50K - I’d likely forego my own compensation and still have funds for the Hackathon and to support other PT contributors.

Other Orgs/DAOs pledging financial support: the EF and 0xparc have given significant time from devs to build tech for the project thus far, VitaDAO has invested funds to cover longevity experiments and covered compensation for 3 of the Zuzalu Longevity team members. A number of orgs have given time and finances to support the weekly conferences.

@CoachJonathan responding to your questions and thoughts below:

• Other experiences refers events that will be related to the hackathon, the Zuzalu Public Goods QF round and to fund people helping run Zuzalu. This will not be funds that go to dinners or parties as that doesn’t make sense for Gitcoin to fund.
• Supporting 4 people’s comp vs less or more. We’re keeping the team extremely lean for Zuzalu and we’d be supporting some of the core team along with VitaDAO and two other independents. We’d be covering 1/4 of the core team with these funds, which feels both like an investment in the success of Zuzalu but also a recognition that this is a community based initiative with other orgs or people to support.

If we don’t take this opportunity, will someone else get it?

• I took this opportunity with a verbal commitment from Gitcoin to support my efforts at the very least (if the DAO votes no on supporting - I plan to continue supporting Zuzalu and would still extend my goodwill to Gitcoin and the amount I’ve worked to involve Gitcoin in this effort from including Gitcoin team members who wanted to join and in having a much broader Public Goods week, when it was going to be an Optimism only event). Initially we had a very small presence and just with my involvement alone, Gitcoin has become a core DAO participating.

conflict of interest

Interesting question, I hope the Gitcoin team benefits from Zuzalu as this should become a market for us in the future whereby communities that pop up, Zuzalu or others, should use Allo protocol both to fund the infrastructure and community shared needs. By running a grants round for Zuzalu and helping support with compensating some of the team, we’re creating a partnership that ideally should be mutually beneficial. To clarify we also only have 4 (maybe 5) full-time Gitcoin residents and the rest of the Gitcoin team are coming during the Public Goods week “conference” that we are co-hosting and was previously going to be an Optimism only event. The funds themselves shouldn’t necessarily benefit any Gitcoiners, unless they submit projects to the Zuzalu Public Goods round.

I personally see this as a sponsorship opportunity

This feels misaligned as I see this as a new market opportunity. In addition this feels misaligned with the idea of GCP’s unless we’re seeing GCPs as sponsorship opportunities. In the spirit of funding projects that have high potential long term value for Gitcoin, this falls squarely in that camp.

@Viriya response to your questions and thoughts below

Are we committed to deepening our engagement with the web3 community OVER finding new playing fields (I know both are important so I’m positioning this as an even-over question)

If the question is if we’re committed to deepening our engagement in Web3, the answer would be yes this is a priority and Zuzalu is a phenomenal opportunity to do this. Potentially one of the best. It’s also exploring new playing fields at the same time.

How much money is a reasonable amount for event spend this year?

I think we may be missing the mark if we see this as just a large event. Yes there are many sub-events and conferences as part of Zuzalu but the larger vision of Zuzalu is a new way of living and being in community surrounded by people with shared interests and pushing new ideas of what it means to build your own city and experience the value of proximity.

matching pool funds to be spent on meaningful projects vs. parties

I’m not sure where the ideas of parties came in to the QF round for Zuzalu. Maybe there are open source projects related to a community building idea but it would have to be open source. Ideally the round is focused on building tooling that makes living in an environment like Zuzalu feasible for many more people at a significantly lower cost and with less time investment upfront than this first experiment. As a start, the EF and 0xparc have volunteered their team’s time to build relevant applications and hopefully we can have more people build open source tools with the incentive of this round.

“Fancy” apps that make living in community and building new projects that push Ethereum and the broader ecosystem forward - yes. Fancy events - ideally no.

Zuzalu is not about building a large scale conference with fancy events. It’s about building a community that has a high concentration of people interested and with deep expertise in the same topics at its core.

I appreciate you asking for what you need and I also appreciate that this opportunity is HUGE for you (and am happy you seized it!). That said, I’m still torn if the DAO should pay for any team members to run this event.

Appreciate your perspective. See above around the reason I think there is value in us supporting the team’s time. This is one of the most values aligned opportunities for Gitcoin and building a partnership seems like a strategic initiative for long term value.

My DMs are constantly flooded with less costly opportunities that will expose us to new markets

Less costly doesn’t always = higher quality. I think for the quality of this opportunity it’s a reasonable cost.

@Kris response to your questions and thoughts below

I’ve answered more about funding above. I won’t go through disclosing all other contributions in public.

How many projects do you expect to run on this QF round? The reason I’m asking is because although we of course massively should encourage any community to decide if they want to run a full round, I think the story is slightly different if this is funded with Gitcoin’s own matching funds or treasury

I hear your point and I think this is a different situation to the Turkey Earthquake round. I agree with Kyle that this is a novel use case and I also think there is a side where we’re supporting a big next step for the Ethereum community (this is broader than Longevity). One that Vitalik happens to be playing a large part in and I think it important for Gitcoin to support if we say that OSS and Eth Infrastructure are two of our core causes. This is also one way for Gitcoin to support as a small gesture of appreciation ALL while showcasing our new protocol. This is not a core round and would be a featured round this April round so it doesn’t impact the vote for core rounds. We intentionally discussed not making a huge effort to fundraise from other projects for this round so as to not outsize or take away from other rounds this coming April round. However, if Gitcoin chooses not to support this round, we will look for support from others.

Would love to understand this better, is one of the outcomes that will be delivered an actual playbook?

Yes. It takes significant effort to build a community and maintain it over a longer period plus receive significant / impactful outcomes. We hope to capture learnings in a playbook. See above for additional initiatives.

If I understand it correctly it would be entirely on gitcoin to run this round and not the zuzalu team, correct? Or how would you see the work be divided?

No, the Zuzalu team (me included) will help run this round.

@griff responses to your thoughts below

I just went to ETHDenver and then ETHporto and can’t even think of doing any more conferences for the next few months… It’s time to buidl

I couldnt agree more with you and that’s a huge reason why Zuzalu is being created, to actually have people in one place for an extended period to buidl. Many universities run on quarter systems that are 10 weeks long, this 8 week long experiment is similar to that length of time and completely changes the quick 1 week long conference mentality.

taking team resources away is a bad opinion from what i can tell

I agree with you and that is why I am the only resource being “taken away” is me and it’s a core reason I’m asking for additional funding to support 3 more part-time contributors that are not already supported by Gitcoin.

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I wanted to be thorough in my responses given my time away, while also provide a summary of why I think this is a really valuable opportunity for Gitcoin to align with early.

This is a great opportunity for us to both partner to support those who are helping bring this new concept to life, showcase our technology for a new market opportunity, while having many participants in the round be our current market (given the core Ethereum community who will be in attendance and aware of Zuzalu).

[shawn16400]

Thanks to everyone for their input and for participating in the dialogue. This proposal has been moved to snapshot for vote!

Please help us by taking the next step and voting on this proposal here:
https://snapshot.org/#/gitcoindao.eth/proposal/0xe0f6373f6c95575ddf273fcf2fc194edf096ff2fc5e4e9f8ef8e1405b51a0653

The vote will close on April 10th.

[krrisis]

Thanks so much Janine for your thoughtful responses!

I’m inclined to vote yes on the funding of the team, and would consider this as a regular GCP that deserves our support.

For the matching pool I’m happy to hear the idea is that it is about more than just this event, but I’m not entirely sure I get what the elegibility criteria for the round are. I read:

@J9leger

Ideally the round is focused on building tooling that makes living in an environment like Zuzalu feasible for many more people at a significantly lower cost and with less time investment upfront than this first experiment. As a start, the EF and 0xparc have volunteered their team’s time to build relevant applications and hopefully we can have more people build open source tools with the incentive of this round.

So the round is not about the Zuzalu event specificallly, nor is it about longevity, but it is about tooling that makes community events more successful? Could you maybe give some examples of what some projects could be this round would fund?

@J9leger

Zuzalu is not about building a large scale conference with fancy events. It’s about building a community that has a high concentration of people interested and with deep expertise in the same topics at its core.

@J9leger

the larger vision of Zuzalu is a new way of living and being in community surrounded by people with shared interests and pushing new ideas of what it means to build your own city and experience the value of proximity.

@J9leger

I couldnt agree more with you and that’s a huge reason why Zuzalu is being created, to actually have people in one place for an extended period to buidl. Many universities run on quarter systems that are 10 weeks long, this 8 week long experiment is similar to that length of time and completely changes the quick 1 week long conference mentality.

@J9leger

I also think there is a side where we’re supporting a big next step for the Ethereum community (this is broader than Longevity)

@J9leger

matching pool would go to Zuzalu Public Goods aka open source tools and projects that help push the idea of CoordiNations and “network states” forward and show cases our software.

I’m personally a huge fan of having more in-person events and co-living, for a longer period of time, so a huge fan of the round in and by itself (if I’m reading this definition correctly). So for me the question remains here, could other initiatives also benefit from this round, I’m thinking of events like the Giveth House, Cabin DAO, DAO Camp, Regens Unite, Chinwags, Metafest, Crypto Commons Hub, … IF they also showcase our software? (would be good to know how you define this and how this will happen in Montenegro) … all these initiatives are struggling to find funding and I hope they could also apply for this round. Following the above definition I think they could, as they are in-person events that definitely create forms of ‘network states’. So I hope we can define/open this up a bit more.

So tl;dr for me it’s for now a yes on the 80K, as a GCP Gitcoin wants to support in resources to promote Allo and an exciting new use case, and it could be a yes on the round if it’s a wider community-on-the-ground initiatives round. If it’s only to support the Zuzalu event this makes less sense to me, as this is just one project, and in this case I would say this could be a project (or a few) in the web3 community & education round.

I will vote yes on the team funding for now but very happy to change my vote once I understand the elegibility criteria for the Zuzalu round a bit better and they are opened up to more initiatives.

Again, super appreciate you doing this, the detailed answers and even offering to do this without any compensation for you personally, it shows how passionate you are about this.

[connor]

I appreciate all the lively and detailed discussion happening in this thread. I am fully in support and voted yes on snapshot

[carlosjmelgar]

Is it possible to volunteer with Gitcoin at Zuzalu? Asking for a friend

[Viriya]

@J9leger appreciate your responses here. I have a MUCH MUCH clearer view of the ROI and the intent of this proposal, so thank you for taking the time to detail that out.

It was really difficult for me as an outsider to understand what Zuzalu entailed and how Gitcoin could benefit but after reading your responses and speaking to people currently at the event, I’m going to vote yes on this proposal.