[GCP-XXX] Gitcoin Partnerships Council

[essemharris]

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 Council’s decision. This GCP design should begin immediately after the partnership development process made transparent to the community.

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Hey all, it’s 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. Here’s 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, I’m excited this happened. We’re 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 doesn’t mean “no taxes ever.” It just means that taxes cannot be levied without the people’s consent. Sometimes, often even, democracy means decisions don’t 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. It’s not just that folks disagree with the partnership but that it’s something with significant and long-lasting implications for the Gitcoin platform and was executed without any community voice.

So Gitcoin simply cannot say: “trust us, we know what we’re doing.” Nor should it say: “round participants must be universally adored by all.” Instead, it must say: “we will change our decision-making process so that the community has greater voice in important decisions.”

@ceresstation has proposed one solution. I disagree with it. I don’t 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. Let’s 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 wouldn’t 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 don’t 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 what’s 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. I’m not sure how realistic that is, but it’s 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.

[ceresstation]

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.

[annika]

I’m engaging on the forum for the first time in a bit with a couple things to say:

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.

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 — 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 what’s going on & what’s important right now vs. what’s noise.

I tweeted about this earlier after spending a bunch of time thinking about the situation, and I’ll reiterate my two points here — I think the DAO needs to:

1. Define Governance Surface Area - if it’s 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 what’s happening today and codifying it.

2. Engage Stewards - I initially said something along the lines of Steward Engagement in my tweet, but I actually think it’s bigger than that: it’s crisply communicate what’s going on and what’s 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 it’s 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 — 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.

[shawn16400]

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 don’t 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.

[rohit]

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 doesn’t discriminate based on what beliefs we hold dear. On the contrary, the most vulnerable indigenous population, who had little to do with what’s 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 shouldn’t 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.

[kyle]

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.

[umarkhaneth]

I can’t 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 it’s not controversial (like the vast majority of our partnerships) there’s no need to put red tape over it or centralize power.

Can polls be an effective way to temp-check the community?

• Yes
• No

[vincentweisser]

100% - love a good old simple temperature check, like should we explore a partnership with X, and polling the community.

[ceresstation]

Very for a simple poll so long as we can bring it to where community is. To @annika’s 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?

[quaylawn]

@connor

I can’t 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 @M0nkeyFl0wer’s suggestions on how to approach the subject and how it was sensitive were not heeded. Taking this money is totally optional for grantees.

@connor I think it is essential for you to understand that @M0nkeyFl0wer approved all of the comms. The content was approved prior to my joining the organisation and I was advised specifically not to edit anything.

[Jag]

The optics of the Shell play appear to be more inflammatory than the underlying mechanics; @kyle has outlined the thought process which is worth a read. Contentious decisions will rarely please everyone, so I concur with temp-check polls proposed by @umarkhaneth. This way, we can better promote a favorable perception of the narrative as it aligns with the community’s values.

[M0nkeyFl0wer]

True, I did sign off on the document but I think there was some miscommunication about what else we could and should say. I never said we could not add our own context or explanation beyond what was in those documents and I also pushed back on everything that felt like greenwashing in our discussions about how to handle this partnership overall.

To be clear I don’t think anyone from MMM is to blame for this situation. Its largely the result of the contrast between building in public and the realities of trying to make a deal with any large company.

To me the bigger issues are systemic. How do we ensure that the communities vision of what is an appropriate partner for the rounds we run is reflected. How do we even define “the community” given we have a wide range of different communities using our tools.

Its really awful to see so many people upset about this. Its also really great to see how much people care about Gitcoin and about climate change and justice.

Lets focus on how processes can be improved instead of pointing fingers at each other.

[JR-OKX]

I’ve been working with The Nature Conservancy for almost four years. As their APAC leadership council member, I need to work with these types of controversies and companies ALL the time. so wanted to assure everyone that it is normal process we need to work our way through when it comes to important but controversial topic of climate change. It is a difficult conversation, but that’s every international organization, NGOs have to deal with in a nuanced, thoughtful, practically effective but also non-triggering manner.

Therefore, I agree with @umarkhaneth on a simple temperature check with the community to gauge the potential repercussions when the collaboration comes out, and agree with @kyle on having the basic ESG principles listed as selecting the sponsors.

At the end of the day, for controversial topics like this, it is not something that can be solved by one community. Political elections play around this narrative all the time and fights ensue. As a decentralized, open-source and technology-driven community, I urge us to think if we actually want to exclude the so-called “bad actors” in the game and opt for the safe easy route of not instigating any public rages. This could well be an opportunity to advocate for both the power of Gitcoin products/QF to make unfair things fairer, and how QF is leveling out the playing field.

Some interesting food for thoughts, as the newly elected steward council member who’s based in Asia, I do notice some differences in terms of how this news is perceived elsewhere. Two themes that arise from Asian audience’s response:

1. Gitcoin is leading the RWA narrative, and more real life use cases are showing up
2. merge of web3 and “real” world

Of course, there’re some cultural differences here as “greenwashing” is not so much an instilled concept in people’s minds, and practicality probably dominates much of the thinking process. It’s food for thoughts as in there are a lot of audience other than our usual audience on Twitter, who view this as an opportunity (btw, Linkedin reaction is also in a whole different world). Therefore, I agree that the way it conveys on Twitter can be double checked and more sensitive to the potential backlash.

Lastly, just my two cents of working in sustainability at an organization for quite some time. What follows after this partnership is ultra-important. And it will affect Gitcoin branding if no proper disclosure of fund allocation, continued support for the projects involved in Shell’s round, impact reporting from Shell, more commitment from both sides for fuller disclosure. If done well, it will show a monumental step against so-called “green-washing” from both Shell’s perspective, and our response to the community.

[PaigeDAO]

@JR-OKX

merge of web3 and “real” world

Couldn’t agree more. For (the many) people who are still not part of our inner world here at Gitcoin+QF, this partnership actually struts ‘real world’ legitimacy.

‘Steal from the rich, give to the poor.’

But in this case the rich are just giving us this award, so what are we to do, simply not make it available to our grantees (to choose / not choose the matching funds)?
Because?

I can def think of worse matching funders but will hold my tongue here. (The one I’m thinking of rhymes with ‘mizer’).

[ccerv1]

There seems to be convergence around the idea of polling the community / getting buy-in earlier in the process. Sounds great in principle, but who are we actually talking about?

@M0nkeyFl0wer is spot on:

How do we even define “the community” given we have a wide range of different communities using our tools.

I’ll take a wager at this. There are two types of communities (not mutually exclusive collectively exhaustive yada yada) but distinct enough to hopefully make my point:

• There’s an old guard that has been with Gitcoin since the last bear market, is highly influential on CT + in crypto funding circles, has lots of context / experience, holds big bags of GTC, doesn’t rely much if at all on Gitcoin Grants for funding

• And there’s a new guard that came more recently, bring experience and legitimacy mostly from non-crypto domains, hold little or no GTC, see Gitcoin Grants as an important income stream

Who is Gitcoin building for? Is it the community who was critical in the early days? Or the newer ones that are just getting settled or haven’t even arrived yet?

If the answer is “both” or “everyone”, then it’s not working. The early community is not active in governance anymore – and the newer communities don’t have any voting power. All the talk about decentralization completely misses the point if you’re not explicitly building for the people you want to feel like owners.

Both paths are honorable. Both paths have their land mines. But pick a path and be proud of it.

[ceresstation]

@ccerv1 I worry about going too deep on this given the length of the thread so I’m sorry in advance, but I do think the idea of choosing between the old guard and new frontiers is worth addressing.

The Business Blockchain™. The first point that’s important to remember is that each cycle there is a surge of interest from mainstream organizations, many of which the old guard were active participants in working with. Almost every large fortune 500 you can imagine has been pitched on and in many cases implemented blockchain related prototypes and trials often through specialized teams.

The prior interest from fortune 500s is in a way good news: it means that people see the value of Ethereum and the value of the technology being built here. The bad news is that chasing down many of these organizations is like hunting whales, and hunting whales is not an easy task – many organizations like Coinbase, ConsenSys, or the Ethereum Foundation have seen this in their own way. Eventually, I genuinely believe we will be able to bring all of these organizations on board. But it won’t be in a vacuum, and it won’t be overnight, it will be an effort that takes (and has taken) the entire Ethereum community. Maybe rather than cutting ties there is an opportunity to remind them of this.

Core and Periphery. The old guard a kind of first boss: they are crypto-native, and they can and will use tools that help make their digital homestead better because they truly believe in it. But for the average person, crypto is hard, and the process of new networks and bridges doesn’t necessarily make it easier. We should strive to build for those new to the space, but it will always be a longer and harder fought battle – one that perfecting our work with the old guard can help us and other Ethereum-based projects fight. This is the most business-y thing I’ll say here, but to be explicit compounding effects don’t occur from new acquisition but from retention.

Collaboration Across Difference. Finally, and this is more of a philosophical point: Gitcoin is fundamentally building open permissionless tools for coordination; for cooperation across difference. That on its own requires a kind of credible neutrality, which is what Viktor is criticizing here. But that also means we have to avoid picking favorites when we choose who to promote, even when we move towards a new frontier.

For what it’s worth, I do think it’s worth noting that people will always have different views, and that there will be times that we have to choose between those views. I don’t, however, think there’s a world where we succeed without the Ethereum community.

If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.

[ccerv1]

Thanks for this – and agree this is exactly the type of relationship I’d like to see between the old and new guard. The reality is that the old guard is becoming less engaged in governance and more openly critical of gitcoin’s missteps. How do you swing the pendulum back in the other direction? and when there are hard choices that come down to values / strategy, you’re able to make them in a way that the both sides respect?

(And also agree this convo is way too deep in a gov thread to be impactful )

[ceresstation]

I think the reason the old guard™ is becoming less engaged and more openly critical is because they have provided a lot of feedback that they don’t feel has been implemented; they don’t feel like they’ve been heard (in some cases over years). At the end of the day we don’t necessarily have to agree with them on everything, but just engage with them – not just through a brand and public statements but consistently and earnestly as individuals. I think over time this will go a long way.

I see a lot of camaraderie in the team (and camaraderie is great) in various channels after this event – people talking about how we can’t be fighting with each other and need to work together against a harsh outside world. But if we believe in this distinction and view the people making these statements as enemies rather than allies we are doing ourselves a disservice and creating even more distance between ourselves and an Ethereum community that is fighting a greater battle against a larger, harsher outside world.

Anyway, I’ll leave space for others to continue the discussion on potential paths forward, I’m really glad to see how productive the discussion has been so far. Really appreciate all of you, both for what you’re doing here and as individual people.

[JoePadawan1]

I am from the “new guard” and also 100% against this…

I don’t agree with the narrative of “Lets focus on how processes can be improved”.
This was knowingly pushed through, because you know that any vote would have lost,
and you wanted to get the money first and deal with any consequences later.

Yes we have to improve processes but first THIS situation has to be dealt with, put it to a vote and kick Shell out to save the Gitcoin brand.

[shawn16400]

@Viriya

We need pre-defined guardrails to guide our decision making. We don’t have a codified purpose, vision or values to drive decision-making for the program. We don’t have a business model for the grants program. We don’t have guidelines on what kinds of partners align with these values or a sustainability plan.

@Viriya thank you for mentioning this, and driving it forward. I know you attempted to build these guardrails in the past in an attempt to anticipate issues like “what do we do if (insert whatever-group-makes-you-choke-here) wants to run a round?” and related issues, but but those efforts died due to lack of interest/priority.

I understand the reluctance for the org to do this kind of work. This is hard, it is not on any WS season seasonal plans, it does not hit any of the top priorities, and there was no support for those who championed work that might have prevented this.

To put it bluntly, Gitcoin insiders may not have the capacity/breadth/foresight to prioritize this kind of work, or the stamina to see it through once the headlines fade.

I might humbly suggest you take this outside of CSDO to a group of highly capable and externally focused leaders (who have been appointed/elected), and asked for their help to avoid such issues. We know where the landmines are, we just need to someone to prioritize routing around them out BEFORE Gitcoin steps on the next one.