It seems to me it would be good to have some kind of review for partnerships, like the proposal here.
I could be wrong, but the DEI and now Shell partnerships simply appeared as announcements on the Gitcoin Twitter. Thereâs no discussion on the forums I can find and perhaps that is because thereâs generally not much engagement on the forums.
So in the absence of this I think it would be sensible to have a group on call who can at least give a sanity check. I am 100% certain a sanity check would have at least proposed such a controversial partner needs open discussion or more details or more explanation/justification.
I think Shell is just the symptom. It speaks to what @owocki nails in his tweet: https://twitter.com/owocki/status/1691488210315288576 That with the new Gitcoin messaging becomes even more complex and needs attention. And I think the backlash is all the evidence you need that something is askew.
first off, let me state for the record that my first job was as an environmental activist, so please donât label me a big oil sympathizer!
deals with enterprises of this nature take months, if not years. thereâs usually one or more champions on the inside of the company pushing it through and lots of diligence done on the partner (gitcoin in this case). imho, i donât think itâs feasible to go through that kind of a process only to reveal at the end, ânow weâre going to have our community vet you and they might choose not to accept your moneyâ.
i would also assume that there was some kind of NDA in place that prevented either party from talking about the grant until it was finalized.
given these constraints, there are at least three important issues your post raises:
- what types of partnerships should gitcoin pursue? avoid entirely?
- should there be a process for vetting complex / potentially controversial partnerships early in the process? who should be privy to it?
- under what circumstances should gitcoin promote a donor partnership alongside its own brand?
i believe in what @owocki says in his tweet:
gitcoin only makes each mistake once.
in my own personal opinion, gitcoinâs mistake was NOT deciding to accept matching funds from an oil company, it was underestimating the importance of having a position on the three questions above.
hopefully this experience results in better answers to those questions.
Thanks for starting this @ceresstation â I appreciate you getting the ball rolling.
Iâm not sure another council is what the DAO needs. More red tape on partnerships with already lots of red tape (as @ccerv1 detailed) complicates things further and slows things down to unworkable paces.
I totally agree with @ccerv1 is pointing to, however.
We need pre-defined guardrails to guide our decision making. We donât have a codified purpose, vision or values to drive decision-making for the program. We donât have a business model for the grants program. We donât have guidelines on what kinds of partners align with these values or a sustainability plan.
I think itâs important to align on these things to be able to answer the questions Carl posed logically and thoroughly.
Fwiw, we have plans to create this after GG18 and we are now planning to involve the community in shaping this strategy.
That said, I think a proposal like this would be generally safe to try and is worth exploring to accompany a strategy for the program.
I think you nailed it @ccerv1
I would love to see a council of advisors draft guidelines or parameters for partnerships and invite input from the broader community.
There is always a fair amount of informal and formal discussion of partnerships internally and with partners but as Gitcoin attracts bigger and bigger potential partners now would be a good time to engage stakeholders and the community in a more proactive way on what they want to see prioritized or avoided.
Just wanted to retract some things from my original response because I just realized it totally undermines some of the hard work that the PGF team is doing to both run the grants program meaningfully and make it a sustainable project (which I very much appreciate).
I apologize if I pissed anyone off and recognize that although there are some unanswered questions for me personally, that team shares strategic vision each season with budget proposals.
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).
You wrote this while I was writing my response. Very happy to read this.
the concern about this particular partnership was brought up within our community - by someone working for the DAO - a very long time ago and yet we did not react. this to me feels no only a failure to âlisten to the communityâ but a shared failure to hear each other and a collective lack of coordination.
similarly, i know there were concerns raised prior to other past inflammatory events that ended up being scrutinized by the public/the broader community.
even personally i often feel unsure of the right place, time and process for raising an opinion or challenging a decision or practice. i dont really even understand what goes to the forum or to a vote vs. what doesnt, beyond our budgets.
Iâm wondering if this is a symptom of a larger problem which is lack of codified process around decision making and/or governance as well as when and how we align and engage the DAO in addition to the the wider community in those decisions.
i dont view this as a challenge for only the program, but for Gitcoin as a whole, which extends to all of our products/workstreams. im in no way expecting all of us to always agree, but some kind of codified process in which we all feel heard - and help the community feel heard - feels necessary. and this doesnt pertain to everything; i agree with @Viriya that clear criteria is essential and that there might be different criteria for different areas of the org/types of decisions.
to the point about allo and our permissionless technologies - if Shell wanted to fund an Allo hackathon I do wonder if weâd (Gitcoin, Allo, etc) wouldnât be equally scrutinized, even if we do say its credibly neutral. itâs still associated with Gitcoin (side note, i do think this reflects the right decision to separate the Gitcoin name/brand from the others, as otherwise theyâd all be subject to being under fire) - i make this point because once again, i dont think this is purely a grants program issue.
Rather than see us form a council as a next step, Iâd encourage us to look inward to assess our internal DAO operations and simultaneously look at our counterparts in the space, using this to develop org standards, processes and tactics for dispute resolution as well as more process around how we handle things like this, which will just inevitably continue to come up as we grow.
you also wrote this while i was writing my response. appreciate a lot of this as well - but like i said, im not sure we wouldnât be criticized and questioned if the Shell partnership was with another Gitcoin product.
i agree that a lot of people still associate us with just the program - but i dont think that means it should be prioritized over the rest. but if we are saying its the soul of gitcoin then yes, we should take better care. but also if that is the case i dont believe that responsibility lies with just PGF as it impacts all of us, so i do think a reevaluation of decision making should involve the other workstreams.
but i do think weâre nearing a time when that might not be the case (although hard to say given we are still pretty much pre PMF for Passport, Allo and GS) and so we do need evaluation criteria across the board.
and i think that criteria can evolve as we become less known for the grants program only.
curious, who is responsible for the forum post to action plan pipeline? CSDO?
I am generally interested in testing out something like this, perhaps not this exact proposal, but something similar could be worth experimenting with.
However, @ceresstation I canât shake the feeling your position on this is unfair and disingenuous. Yes, you have now stepped away from the DAO, but when this deal originally came up, you were a PGF lead, and THE partnerships lead. This was debated extensively among many workstreams, CSDO, and across the DAO. Why didnât you speak up then?
I canât deny that I feel like half of this outrage is due to the way it was announced and positioned. The marketing and Twitter thread lacked a lot of context and was done in a poor manner. Many of @M0nkeyFl0werâs suggestions on how to approach the subject and how it was sensitive were not heeded. Taking this money is totally optional for grantees.
Shell is also one of 100âs of entities that have funded matching pools over the years. Itâs probably not feasible to have a vote for every single potential funder, but we also donât need to emphasize any 1 so much more than others. At the end of the day, itâs become extremely hard to raise matching pool funds in this bear market, and much of the loud criticism is coming from people who have benefited immensely from matching pool funds over the years. I think a lot of this outrage could have been avoided, but if we want to turn down Shellâs money (that would be going from Shell to open source and public good climate projects), we can, but any support with raising funds from other sources would be much appreciated.
I donât think we would if it wasnât during the Gitcoin Grants rounds. Plus everything depends ofc on how things are phrased. The announcement felt pretty tone deaf and I donât think everyone on the comms team realizes just yet how thoroughly this affects our brand equity.
Not only reading all the quoted tweets but also looking into who these people are will help a lot. Just to name a few of these influencers, we are talking the founders of ENS, Makerdao and other defi protocols, founders of investment funds, incl Hasu (!), the organizers of Ethdenver, Devcon, EthBerlin, Molly White (!), and well, about 200 more people, and counting, bringing us soon to 500K impressions.
I think 99% of our audience see gitcoin as the program and that makes sense, so for âmass marketâ comms, imo it really really should, because of all points mentioned above. For grants stack tailor-made and individual comms seem more appropriate, plus they have their own twitter accounts now, I assume for the reason of creating more (much needed) clarity. Allo & Grants stack is our most important thing resource-wise, but imo it should not be comms-wise, and it feels we are not making this distinction.
I only would applaud to (again) invest in DAO operations. You probably wonât be surprised to hear me say this.
TL;dr: We should design a GCP that formalizes (1) when the Stewards Council can intervene in a partnership opportunity, (2) the nature of that intervention, and (3) how, if at all, the partner or the Gitcoin Foundation can appeal the Steward Councilâs decision. This GCP design should begin immediately after the partnership development process made transparent to the community.
Hey all, itâs Essem, one of your newly-elected Steward Council members. I spent a good portion of the past two days carefully reviewing community feedback on this forum, our Discord, social media sites, and soliciting some directly from people in and around web3. Hereâs my perspective:
The Shell partnership represents a clear and energizing opportunity to improve upon our DAO governance principles, and we have a responsibility to do so given the importance of Gitcoin to the web3 community. We must recognize that when folks are out there tweeting their disappointment, they do it out of love. They want Gitcoin, and the values it embodies, to succeed; those same values were why I was so eager to join the Stewards Council when the opportunity arose! So, in many ways, Iâm excited this happened. Weâre being called on to do good work.
The community affected by a decision must feel they have a legitimate opportunity to voice their opinion and, if necessary, register their disapproval; this is the essence of democracy. No taxation without representation. The slogan doesnât mean âno taxes ever.â It just means that taxes cannot be levied without the peopleâs consent. Sometimes, often even, democracy means decisions donât go quite to your liking. As someone who cares quite deeply about environmental issues and renewable energy, I happen to agree with the broad swath of folks criticizing the Shell partnership. It feels like greenwashing to me too, and $500,000 does not even begin to address the tremendous violence Shell has, knowingly, inflicted on communities around the globe. Had it come up for a vote, I would have voted Against and actively campaigned for others to do so. I think that is part and parcel of the motivation that led @ceresstation to make this post. Itâs not just that folks disagree with the partnership but that itâs something with significant and long-lasting implications for the Gitcoin platform and was executed without any community voice.
So Gitcoin simply cannot say: âtrust us, we know what weâre doing.â Nor should it say: âround participants must be universally adored by all.â Instead, it must say: âwe will change our decision-making process so that the community has greater voice in important decisions.â
@ceresstation has proposed one solution. I disagree with it. I donât think creating a new body to review partnership decisions is wise, and certainly not one drawn from a list of candidates hand-picked by one person. (But it also sounds like @ceresstation meant to stoke a debate more than to have that proposal carried out literally.) It may seem self-serving for me to say this but I think this is exactly the type of responsibility that should lie with the Stewards Council.
The PGF team does the laborious work of cold-calling brands and organizations to raise money for Featured Rounds. Letâs not forget how grueling and often thankless that work is and, as frustrating as it may be to accept, generally popular organizations would be unwilling to even tentatively explore a partnership if it meant doing so would subject them to widespread scrutiny. The risks for internal web3 evangelists at these organizations would become prohibitive. And I wouldnât agree with the idea that Gitcoin should, prima facie, reject partnership opportunities simply because they may be controversial. @ccerv1 was making a point similar to this.
First, to me, the question is when community intervention should occur; at what point do partnership discussions reach a mature enough stage that they should be reviewed by the Stewards Council? Truthfully, I donât know the answer to that question. But the process by which partnerships are developed should be laid transparent to the community so that we can have a healthy debate about it.
Then, the question is whatâs the nature of the community intervention. Obviously, this is going to be relative to the point at which the intervention occurs. The earlier in the process, the more confidential the intervention. Perhaps the Gitcoin Foundation could brief the Stewards Council in private, and the Stewards Council could vote to approve or disapprove the partnership; then, the community would be informed of the fact that the vote has taken place and the votes of each Stewards Council member without revealing the potential partner. Iâm not sure how realistic that is, but itâs a starting point for thought.
Finally, the question is by what process, if any, the partner or the Gitcoin Foundation could appeal the Stewards Council decision. I think the obvious venue is a Snapshot vote to all GTC holders. Most partners would probably abandon their efforts here but, regardless, any veto point has to have a paired appeal point.
Thanks all for the engagement on this so far I appreciate the discussion. Addressing a few of the key points I see so far:
deals with enterprises of this nature take months, if not years. thereâs usually one or more champions on the inside of the company pushing it through and lots of diligence done on the partner (gitcoin in this case). imho, i donât think itâs feasible to go through that kind of a process only to reveal at the end, ânow weâre going to have our community vet you and they might choose not to accept your moneyâ.
Firstly, I definitely agree with this and Iâve experienced first-hand the challenges with these processes as with the original UNICEF deal which took over a year to finalize. I think defining a framework rather than structuring a committee that vetos one-off partnerships is probably better and I would support that approach, so long as the strategy around this is defined and visible in advance of decisions. TL;DR, echoing @Viriya, maybe thereâs a way to do this without a committee as well and just with pre-defined guardrails.
That said, I also strongly resonate with what @krrisis said here:
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.
And would just stress again that any approach we take should consider the history Gitcoin has been built on and listen to the voices of some of the core Ethereum community.
the concern about this particular partnership was brought up within our community - by someone working for the DAO - a very long time ago and yet we did not react. this to me feels no only a failure to âlisten to the communityâ but a shared failure to hear each other and a collective lack of coordination.
@alexalombardo to your point and to @connor yours I alongside others (including you at times) have spoken up about controversial partnerships in the past and tried to emphasize (alongside @owocki) legitimacy as a key measure of a partnerâs potential. At one point I even (privately) rank ordered partners in this way and suggested it be adopted more broadly across the team (Iâm not saying this is sufficient just something that was done). Admittedly, to your point on groups like CSDO I have tended to eventually defer (although not always happily) to the broader consensus so as not to miss the forest for the trees when decisions became too controversial. This was one of those cases although I donât necessarily blame anyone for their thinking at the time nor do I in any way blame the current PGF team â this is an exercise in trying to find a path forward.
To be sure, I donât even necessarily want to insert my own value judgement on a specific partner into this conversation. The fundamental question is: how do we design a process around what partners fit our values and how do we ensure that this decision-making is surfaced to the community.
As @essemharris put it this is all about understanding community intervention and more generally how the community can feel heard in advance of potentially controversial choices.
Critically: I also donât want us to get trapped in âexactly what process we should put forward hereâ which is why I suggested the minimum viable path. We need something simple that allows relevant voices like Hudson / Lefteris / others above (who have done a lot for us historically) to learn about and engage on what is happening before itâs on Twitter.
Iâm engaging on the forum for the first time in a bit with a couple things to say:
Critically: I also donât want us to get trapped in âexactly what process we should put forward hereâ which is why I suggested the minimum viable path. We need something simple that allows relevant voices like Hudson / Lefteris / others above (who have done a lot for us historically) to learn about and engage on what is happening before itâs on Twitter.
I think @ceresstation is spot on here. The DAO needs mechanisms to communicate with the delegates/community that are not the chaotic forums or Discord â I pop back in every so often and, even with this post, get so overwhelmed by the quantity of posts & replies that it is really, really hard to tell whatâs going on & whatâs important right now vs. whatâs noise.
I tweeted about this earlier after spending a bunch of time thinking about the situation, and Iâll reiterate my two points here â I think the DAO needs to:
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Define Governance Surface Area - if itâs made clear what gets decided on by whom, even in broad strokes, things will get much easier. Simple constructs like the council proposed here may help, but I think a lot of it can even be defined by just articulating whatâs happening today and codifying it.
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Engage Stewards - I initially said something along the lines of Steward Engagement in my tweet, but I actually think itâs bigger than that: itâs crisply communicate whatâs going on and whatâs most important at the top-line DAO level, not at the workstream level or at the team level. In current state, I have found it really hard as an external steward to get cohesive context, and I want to contribute but itâs not always abundantly clear where to step in without having a unified view of the overall picture.
In the long run, challenges like this will make the DAO better â these will likely be looked back on as having been important growing pains for Gitcoin, and will set precedent for other decentralized communities to learn from. Appreciate you all.
As I am not longer involved in governance at Gitcoin, I feel free to share my opinions openly. Also, given I worked with @ceresstation to attempt turn his vision for the Steward Council into reality, I do possess a bit of insight as to how this circumstance could have been mitigated using the existing body.
Gitcoin does not need another council - it just needs to use tools it has
The steward council was created to bring outside perspectives into Gitcoin. The issue is, although (most) Steward Council members dutifully showed up every couple weeks, Gitcoin workstream leaders could have done a much better job engaging in their expertise, insight and advocacy by bringing real topics to the council. Feel free to have a look, but aside from MMM and DAO Ops, I donât recall many topics brough to the council from the other workstreams.
The Steward Council is a mechanism designed to keep Gitcoin out of this kind of situation - by avoiding it, or building broader advocacy prior to release.
Gitcoin does not need more centralization - it just needs to use tools it has
The steward council has no hard power by design. If you want the council to have hard power, pull your delegation from Gitcoin insiders (btw helps decentralize) and delegate to those workstreams-nominated, tokenholder-elected individuals.
If we devise a mechanism to reflect the bottom-up preferences of the community in forming new partnerships, I propose that the voices in the community who have the most skin in the game in the context of the partnership should have disproportionately stronger weight over the rest.
Case in point - if we had a similar mechanism in place for a decision regarding Shell, the point-of-views of the grantees in the Climate Round should weigh over most other things. They are closest to the reality on the ground for what it takes to move a needle at a local level. Whether it is Lahaina in Hawaii or Shimla in the Himalayas, when nature strikes its fury, it doesnât discriminate based on what beliefs we hold dear. On the contrary, the most vulnerable indigenous population, who had little to do with whatâs happening with our climate and may not have the luxury of embracing ideologies that I might, are the most impacted.
As someone who has nothing to do with the Climate round, I might hold my opinion dear on the trail of bad blood in the money going in the pool, but it shouldnât count as much as, say, a grantee from the Global South fighting for the next dollar that can go a long way in making a difference in their world. Alternatively, if the grantee community believes their rounds are better off without similar alliances, the DAO should honor that as a signal in future partnerships.
One idea that comes to mind, perhaps we have sponsors listed as part of the eligibility criteria vote for the round. ie, we ratify eligibility criteria, and we also ratify sponsors who we market. Timing can be tricky as we usually have been working on raising funds for weeks in advance, but marketing we commit to with the partner can evolve.
Doing something any more complex seems out of line at this stage and will just add more red tape to a string of work that the community largely has never cared about.
I canât find where I saw it but one simple and effective proposal is to use more polls to gauge community opinion. Then more controversial topics could always turn into governance proposals. But if itâs not controversial (like the vast majority of our partnerships) thereâs no need to put red tape over it or centralize power.
Can polls be an effective way to temp-check the community?
- Yes
- No
0 voters
100% - love a good old simple temperature check, like should we explore a partnership with X, and polling the community.
Very for a simple poll so long as we can bring it to where community is. To @annikaâs point these forums can be a bit hard to follow, and to the points others made we want people to vote with skin-in-the-game. Maybe for those reasons a Snapshot vote is easier?