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. there’s 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 don’t think it’s feasible to go through that kind of a process only to reveal at the end, “now we’re going to have our community vet you and they might choose not to accept your money”.
Firstly, I definitely agree with this and I’ve 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 there’s 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 “listen to the community” 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 partner’s potential. At one point I even (privately) rank ordered partners in this way and suggested it be adopted more broadly across the team (I’m 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 don’t necessarily blame anyone for their thinking at the time nor do I in any way blame the current PGF team – this is an exercise in trying to find a path forward.
To be sure, I don’t 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 don’t want us to get trapped in “exactly what process we should put forward here” 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 it’s on Twitter.