@J9leger I’m excited to build a small, temporal city with you! And appreciate the way you’ve laid out the pros and cons here. I do see resource direction (both financial and time/energy) towards Zuzalu being a potential distraction from Allo Protocol and planned workstream initiatives.
With that being said, I agree that there’s tremendous potential for Gitcoin to support this, technically yes but also from a brand/culture perspective. The alignment of values is stunning.
I am obviously biased as a participant, just want to share my thoughts broadly.
Will prob respond soon, but curious to hear some other thoughts first.
Just a quick note on this:
We measure steward participation on our health cards ao. by Snapshot votes. Not allowing people to abstain on-chain takes away their opportunity to indicate they are actually participating. So we hope you can add this 4th option, I am pretty sure this vote will not end in a majority for abstain.
Hey @J9leger, Vitalik has been a major supporter of Gitcoin from the early days so it seems that supporting this event and it’s outcomes is a great opportunity to payback the favor.
Not only is this an opportunity for Gitcoin to showcase Allo protocol at zuzalu, but it gives teams attending and hacking a real motivation to produce spectacular results.
I am in full support of Options #1 the grant round matching pool, and the budget for your team helping to execute the event.
Furthermore I would like to propose a matching budget from MetaCartel to add to this round of funding, in the hopes that we see even more high quality results.
Please let me know where to send the funds to join to pool and I’ll get this buttoned up
Thank you @J9leger for this proposal. I would like to start off by pointing out how awesome this experiment is and if successful, it can act as an inspiration for others!
While I am in favor of Protocol Support and funding a Matching Pool, I would like to request more clarity on allocation of budget under Resourcing. Is it possible to breakdown expenses vs contributor comp?
Can contributor team itself be eligible to be part of the QF round as opposed to upfront comp?
Is there a way to receive feedback on the actual Matching pool amount via a poll or other feedback mechanisms? Ideally we should have a predefined set of guidelines on initiative vs matching pool to better manage seasonal budgets.
Besides Vitalik and the local government supporting this initiative financially, are there any other orgs/DAOs who have pledged financial support?
This is a really exciting opportunity for @J9leger to bring, especially with @Yalor’s commitment from Metacartel.
I do have lots of questions that pop up that I’d like to have answered before I cast a decision. I’m hoping the answers to these questions will help guide me and other stewards on how to make this decision.
Please read these questions as genuine curiosities, not trying to drive toward any agenda. I am genuinely open to voting for any of the options presented (and then some).
Though this is a single GCP, I’m seeing two separate requests here:
100k from the matching pool
82k for Zuzalu event coordination
Matching Pool Funds Q’s
What does “other experiences” mean? Is this parties and dinners? Or other activities? Or is this more related to the hackathon that will be happening?
Coordination Sponsorship Q’s
82k seems like a very exact request, and it is for 3 or 4 people. Is it 3 people? Or is it 4? I’m unclear how our commitment to coordinate is being scoped.
If we gave less than 82k and only funded 1 or 2 people, would that give us less exposure than funding 3-4? Will funding 5-6 contributors give us more? I’m trying to understand the logic of this ask.
If we don’t take this opportunity, will someone else get it?
I echo @jengajojo’s questions for clarity around comp since I’m not fully understanding the connection between Gitcoin paying for coordinating Zuzalu & running a matching round. I’m also curious about what other orgs/DAOs have pledged financial support.
Governance
Mainly a question for @shawn16400 around potential conflict of interest. There are about a dozen Gitcoiners going to Zuzalu (several of them are large token holders) that will likely directly benefit from the passing of this proposal (both the coordination efforts AND the matching funds distribution). Are there any risks from a governance perspective that might have us setting a bad precedent? Just want to make sure we are covered here.
Marketing
I’d love to hear thoughts from some of our marketing-expert stewards (@ebransom, @dianarichter, @abigailcarlson). I personally see this as a sponsorship opportunity. In my 1-1/2 years at Gitcoin, I haven’t seen a sponsorship outside of a hackathon. Now we are being asked for an 82k sponsorship for this event and I’m not 100% sure how to approach it or its direct ROI. How would you all evaluate this opportunity? What would need to be true for it to be a “yes” to sponsor?
@J9leger thanks for this, this sounds like an amazing experiment and I hope this has lasting impact.
Secondary from the proposal, this is a good illustration of the Gitcoin budgeting gap. Outside of workstream budgeting process, we have no additional controls on how to budget for / allocate sources and uses of funds like this. Said another way, how many Zuzalu-type events can we afford in 2023? What about 2024? Who is responsible to create this auxiliary budget and who is going to ensure we stay within the bounds of this budget?
@krrisis is doing work on a plurality of budgeting options for S18, but the broader scope I am thinking of is not covered and will likely need to be done in S19.
Wow, great we have so many joining! And yes, that is a potential conflict of interest (COI). Recall a conflict of interest is any situation in which a person is in a position to derive personal benefit from actions or decisions made in their official capacity. So, if a token holder stands to receive material benefit (not available to others), this can be a perceived (or real) conflict of interest.
Best practices for managing a conflict of interest are to:
Declare you have a potential COI
Abstain from voting for the proposal -
It can be argued that you can vote against a COI, but best practice is abstain.
Recall the threshold is a “perceived” COI - not an “actual” COI. Said another way, if you have to argue “I don’t have a COI because of…” you should probably abstain.
Echoing @CoachJonathan 's questions regarding the compensation structure. I would be more in favour of retroactively expensing the associated costs and separating out the actual compensation (“pay”). Of course, having a rough idea of the budget for expenses would be great. Also am in favour of a smaller team, 1 or 2 people sounds like enough, given we have more Gitcoiners as attendees that can help out if necessary.
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!
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.
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?
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.
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.
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
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
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:
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.
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:
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.
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?
Would love to understand this better, is one of the outcomes that will be delivered an actual playbook?
Related to this:
Would be great to better understand what exactly the project team will commit to deliver to the team in return for this support.
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?
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:
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.
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!
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
I do feel that this will bring well more benefit in return than the $182k expense.
Vitalik has supported us. Let’s support him.
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:
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
"Why this" - There are questions around why “sponsor” this event, what makes it “most important things” aligned, and what precedent are we setting?
[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)
[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.
[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.
“Why Now” - There are questions around this event being a distraction, not something timing wise we should focus on, etc.
[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.
[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.
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