[GCP-011] - Support the Funding the Commons Hackathon, Residency and Conference Series

📜 Proposals
3

I want gitcoin to support this series of events. With this money they can ensure all the resources needed to run a proper long-term experiment of intentional public goods funding.

At Zuzalu’s public goods talks I saw how we can align all our current projects and new ideas to have a more welcoming space to try and evaluate them. There is still a lot to talk about. Funding the Commons will keep us focused and engaged during the rest of the year. I hope the result will be better integration of the tools and a more informed commitment from the builders and researchers.

Gitcoin is core infrastructure for public goods funding. We need it to be tested, showcased, and improved to support these events. It makes a lot of sense for the support to flow both ways, and see at the end of the year all the things it enabled.

4 Likes
4

I fully support this proposal, because there are many potentials from hackathons!
If we would like to coordinate with some great events like ETHSingapore on Sep 10-12 or DevConnect in Nov, it will be great.

If we need more builders, I could introduce the hackathon to more Chinese builders.
anything I can help, please let me know.

Go go go!

6 Likes
5

@bobjiang many thanks for your words and your offer. More builders are always welcome, especially those with diverse views and perspectives on issues around public goods funding - we’d greatly appreciate your support in outreach to the Chinese builder community.

3 Likes
6

Huge fan of this proposal and very much aligned.

So I can definitely vote yes on 60K on production support.
I see myself also voting yes on a matching pool if this matching is used 100% for a round run on Allo Protocol. We have never used matching pool funding for anything else than … matching pool funding - it is why sponsors have shared these funds with us in the past.

So I could votes yes on this if the full matching budget goes to matching on our platform (the $5K for impact assessments could be moved to production costs and the hackathon prizes are the actual round).

As a separate thought I would also recommend to open up this round in some way to more people than just the ‘winners’ of this initial hackathon, as this is quite a big amount for gitcoin, but maybe this would already be the case?

Hope this feedback helps and in any case a big fan of the initiative!

3 Likes
7

I’m a big fan of Funding the Commons and of David and the team behind it. Super aligned with Gitcoin’s mission. Very much hope Gitcoin decides to support.

2 Likes
8

I support this proposal but want to flag that I have a conflict of interest, so if this comes to a vote I will abstain.

That said, here’s what I think is great about this proposal:

  • Hackathons powered by QF feels like a no-brainer. This gives projects some additional upside beyond the hackathon prize PLUS it decentralizes much of the judging.

  • Gitcoin’s sweet spot (at least during current market conditions) is funding smaller, early stage teams. I could imagine projects launching at one of these events, gaining momentum through subsequent Gitcoin OSS/Infra rounds, and then becoming a whale project in the future. Take FundPG as an example of something that came out of ETH Denver and just appeared in the Beta Round. This is where the next Joke DAO will come from!

  • Let’s buidl the infra we need. Create implementations of these coordination mechanisms. Design new mechanisms. Integrate mechanisms. Make it easier to fork some of the existing protocols.

  • There are already strong synergies between Schelling Point and Funding the Commons. This proposal feels very relevant to the open thread about the future of Schelling Point.

  • Impact assessments. IMHO, this is what stands between QF being a cute Ethereum thing and an essential primitive in funding all of the world’s digital public goods. I’m glad to see funding earmarked for impact assessments and very curious to see what the community will come up with here.

Again, I will abstain from voting on this proposal, but offer my comments for the benefit of other stewards.

4 Likes
9

I would love for us to explore doing something related to these events as well!

1 Like
10

I’m so excited to see this proposal and want to openly share my full support!

This proposal fees very strategically aligned with the DAOs current goals and will give us a couple of really great ways to experiment with the protocol.

5 Likes
11

This seems like a solid initiative. I agree with Kris that we should use QF as opposed to direct grants for the hackathon, that would be a really cool experiment.

And 60k to sponsor 2 very aligned conferences, a hackathon and an experimental residency makes a lot of sense, and seems reasonable.

Some sort of report after all the experiments would be nice to document the learnings of the experiments… even maybe add some money to the cost to cover the creation of a report/blog post so learnings can be captured after the fact.

I would love the report to highlight what went well and what could be improved, especially around using QF for hackathons.

5 Likes
12

Thank you @davidacasey for this proposal! Generally I agree that hackthons have been proven to be effective at increasing developer adoption and this is a great way to demonstrate the use case of Allo. Could you tell us a little about the teams’ background and experience in executing similar projects in the past? What were the results and what are the key improvements we can make moving forward?

1 Like
13

I’m a fan :slight_smile:

I would love to see this model used for hackathons at future Zuzalus. Both are great opportunities to share Allo and increase its usage.

1 Like
14

Want to voice my support here.

There is a lot of potential within this initiative that fundamentally aligns with what Gitcoin, and the public goods ecosystem need in order to flourish even more. IMO this effort will result in improved tool integration and a more informed commitment from builders and researchers.

Thanks David for putting effort into all of this!

3 Likes
15

Hugely supportive of this initiative!

I resonate with @CoachJonathan’s points on how this initiative would be a significant boost for the Allo Protocol strategy. I also feel that the residency will be a great way to further advance the stack for public goods funding across EVM– the public goods week at Zuzalu was a great case study for how useful it is to bring together key projects in the space to compound one other’s progress by building on shared standards and avoiding duplication of efforts.

2 Likes
16

I am excited to see this proposal. We have had a great relationship with PL and FTC in the past and I am really excited to see this opportunity.

FTC and Gitcoin have a great history on working together in putting on, supporting, and hosting stages at each other’s conferences. It would be great to see it happen again since we are often dealing with the same audience.

What really excites me is the QF hackathon, the Berlin Residency, and the Working groups. In Zuzalu we were able to work closely with the team from PL to put on Public Goods Week in Montenegro and the planning worked really well. One of the benefits of having both of us there was that we were able to not only brainstorm through common problems together but also build together as well. It really was having the best of both worlds and from what I got to witness engineers were able to go deeper into the actual problem because they had to spend less time knowledge sharing. And when they finally thought up a solution they were able to spin up a solution pretty fast and implement it right away. This was shown in the quickness of deploying hypercerts at Zuzalu.

And although the hackathon seems really exciting, I think the Berlin Residency is going to be the greatest opportunity to not only introduce new people to building on Allo but also create dedicated Allo engineers and more intermediate developers. It would also give the winners of the hackathon time to build out their project more after the hackathon and get to know the product better. I think a handful of skilled and trusted engineers building cool things on Gitcoin Protocols beyond our core team is just what’s needed to help Gitcoin grow and show us what is possible beyond what we are currently looking out for.

I fully support this proposal and look forward to seeing what comes from it.

3 Likes
17

This proposal has met the requirements for moving to a snapshot vote. The name of the post has been updated and the post has been moved to the “proposal” category.

you can vote on this proposal here:
https://snapshot.org/#/gitcoindao.eth/proposal/0x1bf4e07b5919f9fd92e2e08ddbcb681f5e84f16f2621aa0844690a7d9b73aff5

End date May 23, 2023, 11:00 AM EST>

18

@jengajojo Thank you for taking the time to read through this, and to post your questions.

Orinayo Ayodele, Filecoin Green Program Manager, has led two Sustainable Blockchain Summit hackathons in the past year. She comes from a social impact background leading hackathons and projects focused on social impact entrepreneurs growing and scaling across the world. She has worked with the likes of Ikea, Google and many governmental institutions like the USAID, European Union, and GIZ to deliver solutions to real world problems.
The first hackathon in partnership with Gitcoin, focused on building environmental projects on the Filecoin Network and bringing attention to Filecoin Green and its mission of “turning sustainability into a Web3 superpower”. Partners for this hackathon included Fluence, Chainlink, and Hedera. 260 participants were involved with the hackathon, with a total of 52 work projects submitted. The total prize amount was $50,000 USD.
The second hackathon focused on bringing together sustainability gurus and developers to build new solutions at the intersection of web3 and the environment. We wanted to widen the scope of people who could participate in the hackathon, and specifically targeted university students on the East Coast interested in sustainability. We then held several matchmaking sessions for different interest groups to team up and work on tackling real world sustainability challenges. Partners for this hackathon included Climate Collective, Hyphen, and The Hbar Foundation. With 437 participants, 39 projects submitted and over $43,500 in prizes, these projects dived deeper into using the tools that Filecoin Green and its partners were building. This hackathon had less submissions than the first hackathons, but the participants were not only more familiar with the protocols but they actually built useful projects on top of the tech stack that was missing in the first hackathon. The success of the 2nd hackathon can be attributed to more marketing and awareness of Filecoin Green, casting a wider net for participants to get involved, and better documentation for participants to follow as they hacked.

David Casey (myself) has produced a spectrum of events and built numerous global communities over the past 15 years, from leading the organization of multi-thousand person music festivals, to producing blockchain conferences, and supporting the production of corporate tech conferences and hackathons in San Francisco, to organizing curated retreats from 20 to 200. David has managed 30-person event production staff teams and 100+ person volunteer crews, and led logistics, communications, marketing, project management, budgeting, staff recruiting, and government relations for large events. From 2013-2020 David built out the NuMundo (www.numundo.org) community, a global community of 100k+ sustainable living enthusiasts and 800+ property owners developing intentional communities. David ran and led the Impact Leaders Club, a network of entrepreneurs, investors, mentors, and human beings dedicated to creating a world that works for everyone. David is also a Celo Scout, and has contributed significantly to the development of the Celo startup ecosystem by attracting numerous companies and protocols to build on Celo. The Celo Scout Program enables the discovery of pre-seed and seed stage startups that leverage web 3 technology for impact. Since 2014, David has been innovating at the interface of crypto and real-world use cases, including founding a blockchain protocol for mutual credit in 2020 (http://resource.finance) and advising a number of crypto startups.

2 Likes
19

Hi - great proposal. I’m supportive and will be voting in favor of the $60k.

Offline perhaps I’d be interested in whether and how the OpenData Community can assist.

Our mission is to help defend web3 - while building algorithms, tools, and Regen Rangers (oath taking data analysts for good).

I’m particularly thinking about:

  • Sybil identification -
  • Grants screening -
  • Grants reputation analysis
  • ODC members participating directly in hacker houses and hackathons

However there may be other ways that make more sense.

TL;DR - great proposal from afaik a proven and values-aligned team. I’m epowell101 on Telegram and would love to find a little time to discuss how or whether the OpenData Community can assist.

2 Likes
21

Thank you for sharing. Sounds fantastic! Looking forward to seeing more awesome work from you all :rocket:

22

For those interested in learning more details about how this project is going, feel free to listen back to the Twitter Spaces about these upcoming activations: https://twitter.com/gitcoin/status/1671232478483451907

23

Thanks for this update, Jonathan. Excited to see how the Paris and Berlin activation unwraps. And wanted to ping @davidacasey @bobjiang @0xZakk to potentially replicate the success of this first series in Singapore or SEA during September (EthSingapore and Token2049).

OKX Ventures and Web3 worked with Gitcoin in HK on HK University hackathon back in April with minimal costs, and we would love to explore options and help find partners/sponsors to do a Public Goods Funding hackathon using Allo protocol. The goal would be to strengthen Gitcoin’s legitimacy and positioning as a thought leader in public goods funding movement and also attract more developers in Asia to the Ethereum community.

A Schelling Point in Singapore, or residency in Vietnam are all options we’d like to bring to the table and discuss after this first series.

2 Likes