[GCP 017] Gitcoin Citizens Retroactive Funding Round

[Donny_Jerri]

Fantastic rundown and explanation. Gitcoin citizens are crucial in expanding the public goods funding into other chains and channels. Thank you for the opportunity to support those working in this direction for the good of all.

[meglister]

Thanks for posting this @umarkhaneth @krrisis @carlosjmelgar ! I’m noodling on our RPGF strategy this week and would love to jam with you all on how the citizen’s round can fit in or help advance that.

One immediate question I have is on the compensation for round operators. I know two of the operators have full-time, salaried contributor positions. Does this proposal aim to compensate them as well, or just the round operator who is not salaried? I know the workload of these rounds can be high and want to compensate everyone fairly, though am also conscious that multiple streams of comp can make accountability more difficult.

[carlosjmelgar]

That’s a great question. I opted to support this round as a volunteer and doing my part outside of fulltime commitments/ hours.

[CryptoReuMD]

I love this initiative, since we are covering the unmet needs of low voting and underrepresented communities. As long as we continue with Gitcoin Citizens, we are going to have more delegates and also more voices to achieve a better consensus and dilute centralized decisions.

“Education is an ornament in prosperity and a refuge in adversity.” Aristotle

[krrisis]

Hey Meg!

Yes, would love to chat more! In my dream scenario Citizens would also create pull requests for things that the core team cannot prioritize but seem useful according to the community.
And extra budget is always great ofc.

@meglister

Does this proposal aim to compensate them as well, or just the round operator who is not salaried? I know the workload of these rounds can be high and want to compensate everyone fairly, though am also conscious that multiple streams of comp can make accountability more difficult.

The proposal only compensates the non-salaried round operator, you can find more detail on this in the document linked here:

@krrisis

More detail here on round operations and the scope of work for community management.

Hope this helps & let’s chat soon!

[krrisis]

Thanks for the support Devansh!

@thedevanshmehta

I do wonder whether the 10k GTC signal boost fund can be used to increase decentralization in GitcoinDAO - for eg by delegating it as voting power to the citizen or awarding it with the expectation that it should be held for at least a year & used for identity staking or voting.

And this is an interesting one! Two things come to mind:

1. We really want to reward the Citizens with the full budget and not limit on how they use it. However we do hope they will hodl this and use it to participate in governance, that is one of the reasons we are donating GTC. At the same time governance at Gitcoin is evolving, so let’s see what comes out of this.

2. Our goal is to keep things simple & straightforward, at least for these upcoming 2 rounds. So the idea of asking for more funds that we then not give but just delegate adds complexity which I would prefer to not do at this point in time, and first focus on increasing awareness & impact of Citizens’ work. Also knowing that the DAO has not set up anything similar so far (the DAOs holdings are not delegated, individual token holders just delegate how they want to), I don’t think the core team will want to prioritize this. That said, I do think Citizens automatically have a higher chance of getting GTC delegated by key tokenholders if they do great work + get rewarded with extra signal boosting GTC.

All that said, very much taking note of these ideas for future rounds, exciting times for Citizens!

[umarkhaneth]

@meglister

I’m noodling on our RPGF strategy this week and would love to jam with you all on how the citizen’s round can fit in or help advance that.

Would love that too! I’ll look for a time and send an invite

[umarkhaneth]

@thedevanshmehta

I do wonder whether the 10k GTC signal boost fund can be used to increase decentralization in GitcoinDAO - for eg by delegating it as voting power to the citizen or awarding it with the expectation that it should be held for at least a year & used for identity staking or voting.

This is a super interesting idea – to put it differently: we could elect who GTC from a shared pool (e.g treasury) is delegated to for voting. I think this could be a great idea but I agree with @krrisis a separate conversation from the Citizens Round which aims to financially compensate people for work completed.

I wonder how it might tie in to @CoachJonathan & @deltajuliet’s governance plans tho

[KarlaGod]

Thank you @krrisis for this detailed proposal, it’s great to see the transparency and accountability for the past rounds and activities for the next Gitcoin Citizens Round.

I’m excited to see how this round further expands Public Goods impact in web3 ecosystems.

And oh, I vote ‘Yes’

[bestape]

Many value-adds being in the prior Citizens Round, thank you!

It’s a great motivation to continue kicking tires to see where I can get great ROIs like connecting Hats Protocol with Gitcoin Passport.

It’s lovely self-promotion while also engendering a sense of cohort.

I hope you keep this tradition.

[Jag]

Sincerely appreciate the hard work @krrisis @umarkhaneth @carlosjmelgar you have put in!

These transparent disclosures are a signal of integrity and do not go unnoticed:

@krrisis

*Note: This is a maximum amount, which will be documented in detail similarly to the timesheets for round 1-2. As a Citizen the round operator will also raise funds for this part: whatever is community funded is not paid from the treasury.

I’m intrigued, and looking forward to seeing how Signal Boosting plays out:

@krrisis

We’re introducing a signal boosting mechanism, allocating an additional 10K/round for projects deemed impactful by our inner community. Key stakeholders will be airdropped the funding to divide this amount among projects of their choice, helping Citizens focus and inspiring stakeholders to communicate on future tasks more regularly.

I’m absolutely in favor of passing this proposal, and this is yet another reason for support (not that we need more reasons, but certainly worth highlighting that such efforts are not always directly measurable):

@krrisis

Kris, as driving round operator, has been a dedicated ‘meta Citizen,’ bridging gaps between Citizens, product teams, and support. In the last two seasons, he has contributed around 180-250 hours to support Gitcoin without remuneration. He has been logging tickets, reviewing strategic documents and reading up and engaging on the forum and in discord, wherever and whenever relevant. This work, while not always directly measurable, enhances the efficiency and impact of Citizens.

Keep up the great work team and let the Non-Zero Sum Games continue

[PaulBurg]

Thank you guys for the work Gitcoin community is one of the strongest with warm community feeling! I appreciate it more and more

It’s not easy to run rounds and evaluate them aiming to improve every time

[jengajojo]

Thanks to this team for enabling more external contributors to participate in the DAO.

@krrisis

However we do hope they will hodl this and use it to participate in governance,

I personally think this is really an important goal here. If you all are interested, we can work on a delegation strategy which sends tokens to a Franchiser contract, and this contract can match the donation signal with delegated voting weight for non DAO employees. I know @carlosjmelgar has been thinking of ways to enchance community participation in governance and this can be a clear way to reward governance power without actually paying in governance power.

[CoachJonathan]

I’m glad to see this proposal up on the forum - it is one of my favourite initiatives that Gitcoin runs.

Before I land on any opinions, I have a few questions that I’d like to have addressed:

Costs (of course)

• Right now I’m seeing that operational costs make up almost 25% of the entire ask
• I’m curious to hear from @sejalrekhan and/or @M0nkeyFl0wer about their experience either running rounds or working with others running rounds (particularly of this size) and what kind of lift that requires
• I’d also like to hear from someone like @meglister about a fee switch, since that would be an added cost and would mean that a fund of about $150k would see almost 35% go toward running the round. I remember lots of talks about “anyone can run a QF round” and as true as that might still be, it seems much less likely if it takes so much work.
• I’m also look at the $36k request and thinking that is about 3 months of FT work for myself. I don’t know what it takes to run a round but 1-1/2 months of FT work seems like a lot of time to have people apply, promote the round, and then do the calcs (again I don’t know what it takes to run a round, would love to hear multiple perspectives on this)
• Costs staying the same, I would like to see the matching pool amount increase so that operational costs take less of a % of $ that could go toward Citizens

Strategy

• I know that there is a lot of discussion internally about the grants vertical and how Gitcoin wants to continue to position itself within the world of Web3 grants
• I would like to see some of those thoughts articulated to see 1) how the Citizen round fits in and 2) how we might want to see the Citizen round run moving forward (ex: What features do we want to dogfood beyond a QF round? Should we continue with QF? What about QV? What about direct? What about experimenting with conviction voting? etc.)
• I believe @meglister is driving this in partnership with @Sov and @Viriya with feedback from others at CSDO

EIs

One last Q was around Essential Intent #3 of Financial Sustainability. I didn’t see anything in the learnings about ROI and how that was calculated/measured. If someone can point that out to me that would be great appreciated

[wasabi]

@CoachJonathan

I remember lots of talks about “anyone can run a QF round”

What if the Citizen Rounds are run by Gitcoin Citizens? 100% of the match goes to the citizens, and you could apply the 10% service fee as any other community operated round.

In this scenario, 10% would be 15k GTC; if executed, this could be used as baseline to measure ROI and sustainability of the program

[krrisis]

Hey Jonathan, thanks so much for your questions! Here are some initial thoughts, but very curious to hear other tagged people chime in.

Costs:

@CoachJonathan

• Right now I’m seeing that operational costs make up almost 25% of the entire ask

So I think it’s important to specify here that our total operational costs of only running the round itself is 8K/round, meaning 16K in total, or a total of something closer to 12% overhead.
We hope to lower this even more in future rounds.

This is not counting community engagement, a new request, which we separated out under that header in the proposal. The reason for this ‘supplement’ is because the Citizens Round differs considerably from a standard round: with this additional budget we’d love to continue to connect Citizens, product teams, and support on a level that other rounds cannot or do not require. You can read more about this above:

@krrisis

Goals:

1. Increase impact by directly supporting an ‘insider’ to educate and bridge between key stakeholders and Citizens.
2. Showcase transition: Demonstrate how a high-impact Citizen can shift from a retainer fee to full community funding.

Initially we had two separate lines for these budgets but then decided this is an inextricable part of the whole proposal. We believe that what makes the Citizens Rounds special is that we go the extra mile with this audience, they are pretty ‘pampered’, and this is by design, as we’ve been learning so much from them. Plus, they are our ambassadors, they represent us, so we want to keep them close.

At the same time it’s important to be deeply aligned with the Gitcoin team and be able to take the time to brainstorm on experimentation, give thorough product feedback etc. We find ourselves in a unique position but this does require some extra time.

@CoachJonathan

• I’m also look at the $36k request and thinking that is about 3 months of FT work for myself. I don’t know what it takes to run a round but 1-1/2 months of FT work seems like a lot of time to have people apply, promote the round, and then do the calcs (again I don’t know what it takes to run a round, would love to hear multiple perspectives on this)

I hope the linked document on the hours for community engagement & operations (here) can bring some more clarity, as it goes into what the scope of work is and will be here. For the two previous rounds, you can also check the timesheets that give you a better view onto what goes into running this specific round, although this is not the full picture, a lot more time was spent on this in reality.

There is also the difference between an FTE (with stability and benefits) and a part time role spread out over a period of +6 months, so not sure if the comparison is entirely possible.

Also highlighting that this is a maximum amount, which will be documented in timesheets, and as a Citizen the round operator will also raise funds for this part. This counts for both operations as well as community engagement.

@CoachJonathan

• Costs staying the same, I would like to see the matching pool amount increase so that operational costs take less of a % of $ that could go toward Citizens

This is a great point, and we definitely looked into this, it’s why we already increased the matching pool amount considerably (going from $20K to $50K round-over-round, and $70K after this). We could increase the round amounts even more, but we think we’re still in a phase of building more awareness and momentum for this initiative. So our recommendation is to not grow too much too fast, and not weigh on the Gitcoin treasury more before we can fine tune our program and get to a higher impact for Gitcoin itself.

Strategy:

@CoachJonathan

• I would like to see some of those thoughts articulated to see 1) how the Citizen round fits in and 2) how we might want to see the Citizen round run moving forward (ex: What features do we want to dogfood beyond a QF round? Should we continue with QF? What about QV? What about direct? What about experimenting with conviction voting? etc.)
• I believe @meglister is driving this in partnership with @Sov and @Viriya with feedback from others at CSDO

We just had a great chat on this with Meg and Laura. We definitely need to find a balance between impact and experimentation and we’d love to continue this discussion, with product & marketing on dogfooding, and with you on how we can inform Citizens more effectively to support on Gitcoin’s various essential intents.

In our proposal we outlined to work on signal boosting through ‘airdrops’ to key stakeholders, but if we can find other or additional ways to signal boost using QV, we’d love to explore this together. So our proposal would be to request the full budget as is, but to not pin ourselves down on how exactly we do the signal boosting just yet.

EIs:

@CoachJonathan

I didn’t see anything in the learnings about ROI and how that was calculated/measured. If someone can point that out to me that would be great appreciated

It is difficult for now to measure this in-depth, especially because this is a bottom-up initiative, but by just browsing through the various projects of round 1 and 2, the enormous impact to us seems undeniable, with a total spent budget of less than $50K.

We requested input by the core team on a few occasions on what they would like to see built, but this was very limited for now, due to time constraints on both sides. Through the additional hours (as described under community engagement) we could actually have more time and space to make this happen. We’re also very excited by projects like @mmurthy’s experimentation with impact reporting, in itself a (future) Citizens Round project.

Hope this helps & happy to discuss more!

[robioreefeco]

@krrisis

Yes: Fund the Citizens Rounds for 153K GTC

My response:

Yes, Fund the Citizens Rounds for 153K GTC

[sophia]

@carlosjmelgar

This could be an opportunity to introduce impact certs into the round. They’re still early, so this could be a way to allocate the signal boosting amounts.

Yes agreed. Think this is an interesting use case for Hypercerts. Would love to explore this further - DM me!

[Viriya]

Appreciate the work and partnership you’ve put into this proposal @krrisis

I’ll be voting yes on this in good faith that you will continue to work closely with product and support both the impact of the program and experimentation on the strategic variables to help further build out Gitcoin’s expertise beyond running QF rounds. To me, this is one of the most important secondary goals of this program beyond funding community engagement.

I would love to see themed categories that incorporate Allo and Passport. I think the Citizen’s round could be an AWESOME avenue for dev rel and I’d love to see an experiment beyond more marketing/community oriented projects (which I still love obviously).

One thing that I did notice is that it’s costing $80/hr to mostly do admin tasks listed on the timesheet. Given your efforts to align with our product strategy, your work to maintain a dialogue of feedback on our product and your efforts to engage with community this may be warranted. That said, in honesty, this is a bit of a black box for me. I absolutely do not want to devalue your hard work! What I think will help bolster the ask would be to document and share your plans for community engagement and the experiments you’re planning to run with product’s buy-in. You could share this upfront and charge your time back or you could promise to share these once the proposal has passed (just spitballing here)

Given we’re currently building out a training program for round operators and the fact that i’m your friend and I care about you, I’m not sure how this rate will hold up over time unless you continue to level up strategically. Making yourself an indispensable strategic consultant for programming like this at the org will be important for your own longevity and the longevity of the program.

That said, I’ve been loving your progress on this and I am bullish to see how this initiative progresses as I think it’s an important program and playground for us atm.

[krrisis]

Thanks so much for the vote of confidence Laura!

With the potential increase in available hours for impact and community engagement the goal is definitely to be more closely engaged with the core team and aligned with the product strategy.

@Viriya

What I think will help bolster the ask would be to document and share your plans for community engagement and the experiments you’re planning to run with product’s buy-in.

Just in case you didn’t see this, there is some more detail in this doc on what this represents, but the goal is really to develop this further with the team. In that sense this document is already outdated. The call with you and Meg was very inspiring here, totally onboard now with the mix between impact & showcasing our platform capabilities - the signal boosting will be a great opportunity here. Just coming off another call with Meg and hope this is a first of many - goal is really to build these next rounds alongside you, and think through what makes most sense for us to do next.

@Viriya

I would love to see themed categories that incorporate Allo and Passport. I think the Citizen’s round could be an AWESOME avenue for dev rel and I’d love to see an experiment beyond more marketing/community oriented projects (which I still love obviously).

Very curious to hear more on this and talk this through. We’re definitely very open to more themes & categories!