Appreciate the proposal and the detail that’s gone into it! Though I’ve only been working in the grants space for a short time, but one of the things that’s impressed me the most about it is that it’s so new! Best practices are very nascent and the history of the discipline is only about 18 months old. Given this, I’m not sure that a report of this scope is necessary to communicate the state of grants. I’m also not sure that interviewing 50-75 individuals will yield many more insights than interviewing 10 individuals – since many of them are interacting with the same programs and likely have quite similar experiences and themes.
I’d be supportive of this in a scoped down format that focuses on operations/best practices for grant program managers and the experiences of grantees in Web3. A budget of 5-10k and a 4 week turnaround might be appropriate for that scope. In order to be confident in the proposed output, I think it would also be helpful for the authors to present examples of previous research work and their research credentials.
I appreciate the thoughtful approach of this proposal and find its comprehensive examination of grant programs in the web3 space very informative. Moreover, drawing insights from non-web3 grant programs could yield valuable best practices that could guide the refinement of our efforts in Gitcoin (specifically with the development of Grants Stack and Allo).
As someone who conducts similar research, as evidenced in my blog, I understand the complexities and challenges of this kind of study. I attempted to develop a similar understanding of grant programs, but it proved challenging due to the difficulty of data collection, so I instead pivoted my research to individual programs. By better understanding grant programs’ operations, challenges, and successes, we can adapt and implement more efficient, transparent, and impactful strategies.
@meglister I understand your comments and concerns about the scope. From my experience, the nature of data in the web3 space is unique, often nonstandard, dispersed across various sources, and not always easily accessible or understandable. The proposed budget reflects the time-intensive process of gathering, collating, and interpreting this scattered data. I do think if we want to scale down the number of interviews, this could have a meaningful impact on the hours in the scope.
@eleventh19 could you provide your perspective on scaling down the number of interviews and how that might impact the proposed budget?
Love the discussion that’s happening here – especially love @meglister’s comments as this work will directly tie into her work as a product manager for Grants Stack.
I’m also wondering what a slightly scoped-down, phased approach might look like.
I see you’ve listed interviews with at least 50-75 individuals. Will these interviews exclusively be done with grants program managers or grantees of those programs as well? I’m curious about this as only 25 grants programs are listed in the assessment list. Given that logic, it makes sense to conduct 25 interviews max? Maybe I’m missing something?
As a thought experiment, I wonder about the timing of this and what would have to be true to tighten up the proposed timeline.
On a completely other note
I think it’s important to reiterate that this proposal isn’t only going to benefit market analysis work for Grants Stack but also (and mainly) intends to be packaged as a public good in which the entire ecosystem can learn and benefit from (not just Gitcoin). I think considering this proposal from both lenses is important to consider here
From a brand perspective, I think that funding research like this and creating educational public goods for the wider ecosystem can help us continue to position ourselves as thought leaders in the space. MMM intends to use the results of this report for brand marketing content that aims to better position Gitcoin in this way. Beyond that, based on the results of this research, we will create a plan to use it to bolster a narrative that Gitcoin is a leading provider of OS grants solutions for web3 and beyond.
That’s an important concern and I appreciate you bringing it up. In terms of funding, to be totally transparent, and apologies if I forgot to mention this in the proposal, but I have already applied to a few grant programs and want to apply to a few others [Aave and ESP have rejected, waiting to hear from Solana, want to apply to Public Nouns, can set up some better reporting infrastructure and will share that]. The hope is that in making this a project that gets supported by multiple ecosystems, there can be enough funds to support the general research. I will be open with all parties about the funding size and scope of support.
There’s also the more general question of who funds research. Unfortunately, there aren’t any non web3 foundation/government grants that cover this kind of work, at least none that I could find. I think it’s better to try and get a group of orgs to support this work as the most realistic path towards getting this research going.
At the same time, for programs that do provide larger scale of support, I see it as reasonable to split research vs more consulting style work and to include both as in scope, drawing lines as much as possible about what work is happening for a public report vs happening specifically for an individual funder.
In regards to the pharma example, 100% agree that we want to avoid that. I think a huge problem in those scenarios is also a lack of transparency. All of the research work (interviews, surveys, list of grants, final report as outlined) will be shared. In addition to that, some of the budgeted time is meant to support work informed by the public research that is intended to be more applicable to the Gitcoin community. We can also separate out the Gitcoin specific activities more clearly and into separate outputs to be more distinct with the division of the activities.
I’ll address the idea of what a lower budget, faster turnaround version could look like below. Let me know if I can share any more info on it and sorry for not providing better logic around the smaller version in the initial proposal.
Yes, definitely want to include Gitcoin as part of the research as well.
This is an interesting idea and I want to think more about what this could look like in terms of research operations. One of the challenges I imagine would be around reporting (survey vs just publish certain metadata). Especially if it’s the latter, that might be related to a working group that Metagov, Gitcoin, Nouns, and some others are working on with some metadata standardization for grant programs.
I personally think that creating an assessment is beyond what I was initially imagining but happy to rescope if that’s of particular interest to the community. I also just want to be upfront that I’m not a data scientist (see my bio below) and am more confident with data analysis vs proposing and validating assessment tools. We can always look to supplement the team appropriately if that is a desired output.
Point taken and I think it’s reasonable to rescope / do a first research output that can be produced on a shorter timeline. The idea of getting 50-75 interviews would be to talk to those who help structure grant programs, those who are running them, those who went through them, and those working in grant programs outside of web3. I do think there is value in getting a larger set of interviews as that would allow to explore the history of these programs and how they changed, which itself can shed some insights on what it’s like to scale programs.
We can definitely explore a more tapered down version that would focus on a smaller deliverable. As you mentioned, we can start with a smaller set of interviews and a shorter time window for surveys and produce a report based on that. If we do 10-12 interviews, we can focus 6 interviews on talking to individuals who were involved in building or operating multiple grant programs and 6 interviews with those who applied/were funded by multiple grant programs. In addition to that, we can run surveys for a week or so and incorporate that data. That can be synthesized into a report. We can also spend some time with Gitcoin stack team members to better understand the topics they’re most interested in and to think of how the research can inform relevant solutions. From there, I can propose a potential continuation if there’s interest from the Gitcoin community / other grant programs.
Sorry I forgot to include that in the proposal! The final team will depend on the size of the scope of the work that gets funded but I can provide the names of some potential collaborators if that’s helpful. Let me reach out to them to make sure they’re ok with my including them here as such and I’ll follow up on that.
In terms of my background - I’m currently the Head of Ops and Partnerships at Metagov, where I help lead our push on grant applications, both in web3 and beyond. I’m also the outgoing Executive Director at SCRF, where we issued grants, applied for grants, and explored scientific funding systems.
Prior to jumping into web3 full-time, I finished my masters and then worked at CMU, where I help apply for government and foundation funding and also helped run grant programs around blockchain and IoT research. Throughout my time there, I also helped research and launch a few podcasts (Heinz Radio first ~20 eps, Consequential first 3 seasons, History of Drugs in Society, On Meaning). You can check out my linkedin for more on my professional experience. This was a talk I gave on Decentralized Research Centers, an idea exploring the different networks needed to help accelerate web3 research. I admittedly haven’t done much dedicated research since grad school, this was independent study thesis on the state of blockchain regulation in 2019 - link. Let me know if I can share any other info on my background.
Thanks for sharing your insights and I really appreciate the materials you’ve created! Let me know if there’s any other info I can share with the shorter timeline scenario I wrote out above.
In the full scope of the research, I think it would be good to talk to a few people who were active in the formation of many programs, to some current operators who may be newer to the space, and to some grantees, ideally applying for different types of projects (e.g. dev vs community vs research). Additionally, I wanted to talk to at least a few people outside of web3 (large foundations, government grant giving agency, etc.) As mentioned above, definitely happy to rescope if something that can be achieved in 4-6 weeks works better to start.
Totally agree and do want to stress that the ultimate intention with this is to do research to better understand web3 grant programs for the interest of anyone wants to learn from it. Thanks for calling that out!
Following up with an updated proposal with a shorter scope of work after chatting with @meglister@Viriya@Sov and Ben West. Let me know if I can share any other info for now.
Summary (TL:DR):
The goal of this project is to do a review of and to produce a report on grant programs and their impact. The data collection and analysis will seek to capture information on the desired impact of grant programs, the way that impact is measured, the nature of operations of the grant program, and the mechanisms available to those structuring grant programs. The final output of this project will be a report that will be publicly available
Abstract:
This project would entail: selecting a list of around 10 grants programs, conducting interviews and running surveys with those who both structured/ran the programs or applied for/received grants from them. Gitcoin will definitely be included in the analysis while the other programs are TBD (potential programs to explore include: Ethereum Foundation, Aave, Uniswap, Web3 Foundation, NSF, Gates Foundation, Knight Foundation, and Experiment Foundation, amongst others).
Questions to explore and compare will include: desired impact of the grants program, how impact is measured, volume of grants (quantity, funds), team size, review process, number of reviewers, post issuance process, general operations structure, focus of grants, as well as the user experience of applying for and receiving the grants. It is important to explore the journey of users as part of this research to better understand the perceived desire and impact from the perspective of those applying for grants.
In order to gain the right level of insight, a series of surveys and interviews will be conducted with at least ~20 or so individuals. These interviews will explore how the grant programs were created, structured, managed, and what kind of impact they have had, or will focus on the user journey of applying for grants.
Budget & Milestones:
The requested budget for this report is $17,500 over 10 weeks, which will cover costs relating to:
Conducting ~20 interviews pertaining to grant programs
Conducting 8-10 interviews with Gitcoin stakeholders
Research, data collection, and analysis of data from grant programs in web2 and web3
Producing a report with the results
Marketing the results of the report, including presenting at a conference in mid-to-late 2023
Me too. BTW and FWIW - if ODC (acronym soup…) can support somehow, please let us know. We are particularly interested in whether the OpenData Community should play a role in helping to validate grant and grant validations… Right now we produce a beta level open source grants dashboard that can be of some help in grants screening - and our data scientists typically do analyze grant rounds to see which Grants are being disproportionality supported by questionable wallets.
Really appreciate your work here and looking forward to seeing the results.
Supportive of this proposal. Definitely work that not only needs to internally be done but just is something that our ecosystem as a whole needs to better understand!
This is a really exciting initiative! I have helped nurtured a lot of seed projects in this bear market, and can fully attest that this report can be both intellectual meaningful and practically useful for a lot of early stage founders.
Let me know if there’s anything OKX Ventures can help with. We can provide research manpower, PR support and translation into other languages without budget concerns. PMing @eleventh19@Viriya you guys separately as well.
I realized I forgot to share my collaborator’s (Mashal) info - we will be co-leading this project.
Mashal Waqar is a techie, entrepreneur, and researcher. Her recent projects including heading operations at a web3 product studio, researching token models for seed club, doing the UNICEF case study for Gitcoin, and researching protocols for Summer of Protocols (in affiliation with Ethereum Foundation). She previously co-founded an accelerator program for early stage female founders, and has co-authored a paper on challenges faced by them.
Excited to support this proposal – and to read the report too! (@eleventh19 let me know if you need any help regarding Protocol Labs grantmaking)
One idea, just to put it out there in response to @ale.k’s point, might be to fund the work from the treasury but then create an artifact (eg on Metalabel or Zora) that can be sold for a modest amount, with proceeds going back to the treasury. No need to act on this – it’s just a thought!
I love this idea Carl! I’m in favour of this proposal, and I love the idea of pulling in Metalabel or Zora.
Please also let me know if I can be of help at all during the process of this initiative @eleventh19. I have worked with Mashal Waqar on the UNICEF case study and it’s so exciting to see that she will also be involved in this! She’s amazing.
This is a great proposal and the team here is incredibly strong. Looking forward to your learnings and echo’ing Mathilda please let me know if I can be of ANY help. Great project!
