GG20 Eligibility Criteria - Community Rounds

đŸŒ± Gitcoin Grants
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In the proposed new structure, we will create a dedicated pool of funds (up to $125K quarterly) available to support “matching on matching” pools. Communities with any amount raised for matching and meeting the round criteria can apply for up to $25K in funding from Gitcoin to go toward their matching pool. The GG20 Community Council (a Gitcoin DAO-elected external council) will proceed to review applications and vote on which communities to fund in the upcoming round.

The below outlines the minimum viable criteria we have set for community rounds in the past (with a few added pieces). We want to hear from the community whether these criteria should be adjusted for GG20. Please review this post and drop your feedback in the comments. We will leave this open for comment until February 20th, thereafter making any relevant changes and ratifying it through a Snapshot vote.

Eligibility Criteria for Community Rounds

TLDR: How to get a “Community” Round Approved

  1. Identify the Round Operator and at least two other partner team members who will be reviewers and/or be involved in managing the round.

  2. Every round must raise their own matching pool (no minimum)

  3. The round should align with Gitcoin’s Mission and Essential Intents

  4. All rounds must comply with Gitcoin’s core rules, which include no fraudulent activity, no quid pro quo, hate speech, or other activities out of alignment with Gitcoin’s essential intents.

  5. Show proof of funds in a multisig (similar to how anyone can view the funds in Gitcoin’s multisig)

  • We highly recommend that proof of matching funds and any further plans for funds raised by communities be provided by the time applications are in review. This will help council members review applications more easily.

Before the Round

The 1-2 months leading up to the round require an intentional blitz and dedicated owners who can drive the responsibilities below forward. For smaller first-time rounds, all these may fall on the Round Owner if the round owner is operating in a near full-time capacity – but generally, we recommend building out a small team to assist the round Operator as well as a small group of stakeholders from the community to be an Advisory Team of committed people to help generate ideas, gather feedback and provide support throughout the round.

Round Eligibility Document

A Round Owner should create an eligibility criteria doc for what projects qualify for acceptance.

While this can evolve if needed, the first version should be created before going out and fundraising and recruiting grantees so that it is clear to parties what is eligible & what isn’t for the round.

The first-order mission-critical areas include:

  • Allocating or otherwise raising funds for the matching pool
  • Grantee recruitment & onboarding - (Runbooks will be made available with guidance for this process on the new Gitcoin Grants Stack tools)

Then, once a Community Round is approved into the round, the phases would be the following:

During the Round

Responsibilities include:

  • Marketing the Round
  • Supporting Grantees and Donors

After the Round

Responsibilities include:

  • Overseeing the payouts and KYC process (if required) to ensure smooth facilitation and address questions or issues.
  • Conducting a retrospective of the round to assess what worked and what can be improved and sharing feedback as appropriate with Gitcoin.
  • Matching funds must be released within 3 weeks. If not, will not be eligible for further matching or participation in GG rounds.
  • Ongoing support and communications with Grantees are often required as the round concludes.

REMINDER: This is the minimum for a viable round. The Run Book provided to Round Operators will include much more information about how to run the best possible round.

Community Round Partner Offerings - GG20

Gitcoin’s Agreements:

  • Gitcoin Marketing Support: Includes the following:
    • Highlighted on our grants website
      • Each community round will also receive a GG20 designed banner/assets to add to their round.
    • Highlighted in our announcement post
    • All open shill spaces are open to the program & community (round operators get to book slots on these)
    • Partner logos on the main funder banner grants website & shared in all Gitcoin Grants Round emails
    • Each Community Round will receive a unique Canva deck with unique round-specific assets for the partners to market their round with and share with their grantees. Gitcoin will amplify these posts.
    • Each partner will receive a marketing best practices handbook and any resources needed to run their round successfully.
  • Responsive Grant Ops Support: Our dedicated Grant Ops team is available for general questions and support.
    • A dedicated support group with selected round operators will be set up

Partner’s Agreements:

These are non-negotiable.

  • Publish a fleshed-out proposal on the gov forum
    • The elected GG20 Community Council votes on the proposals and allocates matching funds (up to $25k p/Community Round)
  • Meet all eligibility criteria for running a Community Round
  • Round donation and application periods to align with GG program round (OSS)
  • Be responsible for outlining your round’s eligibility criteria
  • Owning marketing and grantee & donor support of your round
  • A post-round retrospective report released 30 days after closure of GG
  • Complete security training with Gitcoin’s security consultant
  • Round operators should provide clear feedback to all applicants with a short rationale on their approval/rejection.
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Hi thanks for writing this up !

I know there were previous discussions on gitcoin charging 10% of matching funds raised to offer it’s support during community rounds and become sustainable

Is that plan being operationalised this round ?

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I can help with this question!

The 10% fee will not be applied to any of these community rounds moving forward, and overall, Gitcoin will be moving away from trying to monetize support for these community rounds (those selected by the council for GG). When a community round is selected by the council for matching funds that will afford the round the marketing and product support previously seen with the community rounds service.

HTH! Thanks for your support!

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Thanks a lot for this post, I’ve been asking questions recently around running a round for the B<>rder/ess community.

I’ll digest this later today when I’m done with the 2 Year report on B<>rder/ess progress I’ve been writing.

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Really pleased to see that the back and forth feedback on the GG proposed updates post was taken into consideration for this eligibility criteria. While I think no minimum matching amount required may open up the floodgates, I think this is the right move.

That said, I’m hoping that the grants council has a vetting rubric of some kind to make those decisions easier (and to also support unbiased decision making :slight_smile: )

Nice work team!

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Echoing @Viriya’s sentiments. I think this is a good first stab at how to run Community Rounds and I’m looking forward to seeing the results and potential future shifts.

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I am excited to see the foundations laid here to empower multiple communities and, as an extension, grantees doing valuable work across diverse causes.

The following alignment is likely implied as part of the runbooks for individual round design. I am calling it out if we want to explicitly spell out any of these design choices as part of the Partner’s Agreement necessary to qualify as a community round.

  • Eligible Passport Score for matching: Should the community rounds default to the same thresholds as Core Round (e.g., Matching power will proportionally increase for scores between 15 and 25)? If not, there should be a mandatory minimum threshold for Passport Score (say, 15) for matching for a Community Round to be eligible.
  • Collusion-resistant QF: Community rounds should deploy the same versions of collusion-resistant QF as the core rounds to mitigate unfair influencing of the distribution of matching funds.
  • Impact Assessment: As part of the proposal, the community round should express a point-of-view on how they intend to assess grantee impact over successive rounds as part of their eligibility criteria. While the specific mechanism or tool (Hypercerts, GAP, Deresy, etc.) should be a choice of the round operator, we should encourage deliberate steps each community can take to iteratively increase the rigor of impact assessment for future grantee eligibility.
  • Transparency in applying grantee eligibility: The round operator should provide clear feedback to all applicants with a short rationale on their approval or rejection.

Looking forward to seeing the evolution of community rounds!

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I want to thank everyone who contributed to the Community Council review and suggested enhancements for Gitcoin Grants. It’s exciting to see the evolution of these changes, and I look forward to continued collaboration.

Together, we will implement these updates, derive valuable lessons, and foster growth as we move forward.

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In support of these criteria – looking forward to seeing how these first rounds go!

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Excited about the new overall direction of Gitcoin and happy to support any of the future rounds :raised_hands:

Thanks team and @MathildaDV for your work :saluting_face:

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Indeed, this might ‘open up the floodgates’ as @Viriya noted. But this is an exciting direction to go in for Community Rounds and I can’t wait to see this continue to scale. Great work Gitcoiners!

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+1, this could help Matching Partners to make educated decisions about increasing the funding round after round.

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Thank you to everyone for your comments and feedback! Especially would like to address @rohit’s comments:

Up until now we have provided best practices and have resources like the Runbook that we can point them to. We believe it should still remain the community’s decision what they’d prefer to do here, as it might be restricting for community rounds.

It goes into your following point as well. Seeing that the rounds have been relatively small, we haven’t seen a problem with them handling sybil squelching themselves. There are areas where we may think about getting help from more qualified community members to offer support and guidance as well in the future. We will offer guidance and advice on using collusion-resistant QF because I agree it’s a very strong mechanism and it works well.

Love these ideas! What we can do is add it to the propsal template to give communities applying the opportunity to express if and how they are planning on assessing grantee impact.

I will also amend the eligibility the reflect that round operators should provide feedback on rejections/approvals as that’s a very important point!

And of course, no matter what, teams may always be in touch with Ecosystem Collective as well as the Grants Lab grants ops team and we will provide best effort support.

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[UPDATED] I have updated the below line item and added it to the partners agreements.

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I think there could be also a possibility that round operators will cheat by only accepting projects within a very short time span.

For example, alert their friends that “we will apply at 2pm, you only got 1 hour.” Hence, rationale for other projects to be excluded is ready.

Plus, I am absolutely against any interviews or any additional requirements on behalf of the applicants.

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Brilliant, this could be also implemented in community council voting

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I’m not actually sure I know what you mean. But the way it’s being set up and something that’s part of the agreements is that application and donation timelines of community rounds match up with OSS. And that’s why eligibility criteria for each round is so vital. That’s the criteria for accepting/rejecting grantees.

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Absolutely, I just think that some basic guidelines for eligibility criteria should be compulsory for all rounds to avoid breaking the hate speech criteria.

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Oh for sure! We do provide all community rounds with those guidelines and they have to conform to our core rules, as outlined in the post here:

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Some more points I think would be good to consider;

Rounds should maintain the same sybil resistance measures as the core round. (really essential I think)

There should be more transparency around grantees addresses and the community rounds own funding.

It should be made clear who the round stewards are.

Lobbying round stewards in private should not be allowed - communications must be open and transparent.

There needs to be more accountability around ensuring that eligibility criteria are adhered to.

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