Thanks for starting this conversation Scott.
A few things come to mind:
We have a freshly appointed Steward council (elected by the workstreams) and Iâve advocated in the past for a council with more âteethâ, so giving them this voting power could be an option? This would address @ccerv1 valid feedback of not creating yet another governance body or mechanism.
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However, more important than who makes the decisions is imo how they come to these decisions, and I think this is the elephant in the room we keep avoiding. We are missing a clear strategic direction for our Grants Program. At some point I introduced the meme: âGrants Program should be the soul of Gitcoin.â I feel this got kind of diluted, but what I meant with this is: with the featured rounds (=Grants Program aka our Grants Rounds) we show the world How to Fund What Matters.
For the majority of people Gitcoin and twitter.com/gitcoin = Gitcoin Grant Rounds (GG) and we should not just honor but celebrate this.
The featured rounds can show the power of Gitcoin Grants Stack and just as important: they can and should be the embodiment of what the OG web3 community believes in. They should focus on the themes we started out with, open source being for many reasons at the heart of this. The grants program and its featured rounds should have very well-defined themes, values and eligibility criteria, both for the grantees as well as for the matching funding partners.
I cannot emphasize this enough, our Grants Program and its existing user base, the web3 community should be our Most Important Thing, at least when it comes to communications.
My personal opinion is that when it comes to featured rounds we would make it much easier for ourselves and focus at least for a few more years on crypto funding crypto, there is a LOT of money here and a LOT more is coming. Again, Iâm talking only about the Gitcoin Grants Rounds.
Why does this OG Web3 community matter so much some might ask? Well, next to the fact that none of this would exist without them (so they might be onto something), they are actually our core users. They are the people who donate to the grants, and they are the people who initiated this virtuous cycle - old grantees became funders: they created the magic of QF and everything Gitcoin stands for. Because of this community thousands of projects were founded, +50 million in funding was received and when it comes to true impact we are talking billions.. So we should listen very carefully to them instead of alienating them.
Note: I think we keep mixing up 3 levels at Gitcoin, especially in comms and also when it comes to justifying certain âstrategicâ directions & partnerships:
- Grants Program â not neutral, embodies core web3 community values, Gitcoinâs flagship program
- Grants Stack (Alloâs hosted version) â mostly neutral, but not permissionless (ao US compliant)
- Allo Protocol â fully neutral, permissionless & forkable protocol
I have no issue with Shell using our Grants stack, and I do not even have any issue with âusâ heavily promoting this, but this should be outside of the Gitcoin Grants rounds and extremely important: be promoted through the Grants Stack Twitter account, as @owocki points out here as well.
Of course Shell is greenwashing, and I donât care one bit, Iâm super happy this money will be going to web3 projects, but it should not erode our Grants Rounds reputation. Instead it could be used to show to the legacy world that big corp is getting into web 3, which is fantastic news indeed. To quote @azeem: âNot many orgs can say they work with UNICEF and Shell in the same breath.â We should be proud about this.
But: Gitcoin Grants is not Gitcoin Grants Stack is not Allo Protocol.
It took contributors a while to get this, let alone that our community gets this.
So attracting partners that are deeply misaligned value-wise for Gitcoin Grants in order to promote Grants Stack (in order to get revenue at some point) is a very dangerous and flawed strategy, and I hope some people internally are waking up to this reality. If not, please read some of the quote tweets mentioned above. If you work in comms, please read all 200+ quote tweets of the original announcement, all of them.
So imo what urgently needs to happen next:
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A clear strategy about what the grants program stands for, coming out of a deep and humble dialogue with our community, legacy stakeholders and stewards
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Definition of themes, values and eligibility criteria, both for the grantees as well as for the matching funding partners for the grants program
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A comms strategy coming out of this with our main Twitter account mainly focusing on the Gitcoin Grants rounds
The Grants Program lives 100% within the PGF Workstream, so I think this is where the work needs to be done. I think we are making great strides when it comes to the product itself, but we need to step up our game seriously when it comes to the Grants Program strategy.
FWIW this is very much not me pointing fingers at anyone, I think the PGF team did a great job with the resources available, and MMM also worked with what is available strategy-wise for the program (=not a lot). But itâs time to stop fucking up, seriously. We are/were in a unique position at the very epicenter of the Ethereum ecosystem and we are eroding this trust at lightspeed. If I wouldnât know the context, the people, the complexity and hard work everyone is putting into this, I would join others thinking people are purposefully sabotaging Gitcoin. . But I know this is not true. DAOing is hard, and believe me, been there, done that.
However, itâs time to be very, very humble, and to listen to what our own community is shouting in our ears. Combined with our poor dealing with the whole DEI controversy (we never even acknowledged where and how we failed) this is another serious strike, and we are losing all credibility with our user base. This is not okay.
But we can do this, and I would love to help in any way I can. Dms are open (discord, telegram & twitter).