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 Partnerâs 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!
I want to thank everyone who contributed to the Community Council review and suggested enhancements for Gitcoin Grants. Itâs 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.
Indeed, this might âopen up the floodgatesâ as @Viriya noted. But this is an exciting direction to go in for Community Rounds and I canât wait to see this continue to scale. Great work Gitcoiners!
Thank you to everyone for your comments and feedback! Especially would like to address @rohitâs 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 communityâs decision what theyâd 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 havenât 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 itâs 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 thatâs 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.
Iâm not actually sure I know what you mean. But the way itâs being set up and something thatâs part of the agreements is that application and donation timelines of community rounds match up with OSS. And thatâs why eligibility criteria for each round is so vital. Thatâs the criteria for accepting/rejecting grantees.
Absolutely, I just think that some basic guidelines for eligibility criteria should be compulsory for all rounds to avoid breaking the hate speech criteria.
Thank you for your feedback! Everything that you point out would be needed, yes! Transparency around funding and who the round operators are, as well as accountability, are all already baked into the agreements as well as the questions outlined in the proposal.
As mentioned, we strongly recommend and provide guidance around how sybil resistance is done within the rounds. Historically, we have not come across any issues doing it this way. If we encounter an issue, we can look at amending this in the future. And because all round have to comply to our core rules, which includes no fraudulent activity, this also ensures that round comply to sybil resistance measures throughout.
Appreciate the callout of Impact Assessment tools. As far as I can tell, hypercerts, GAP and Deresy are close to the Grants Stack and the Gitcoin ecosystem. Iâd like to learn what the path to integrating these solutions as part of the required assessments for round operators.
For example, one could implement a flow similar to the Application Questions in the round creator and manager. When a field containing a GAP, Deresy or hypercerts reference is detected, a link is rendered to inspect the data. This would be the bare minimum but a cleaner UI around this would be more effective probably.
We were denied from the first cohort which left a bad taste in our mouth. In recent months leading up to the new year we have stopped spending ample amounts of time in governance forums, discord, and telegram channels as well. This is because the time spent developing our actual product with our developers and working on the code has become much more valuable and will provide more meaningful impact than the discourse of communication we have here. But also because prior to the Gitcoin Citizens round 2 there was a call to action for members to become more involved in governance and helping assist community members in the discord. Which didnât get rewarded. So we are hesitant to spend any more of our precious time for work displaying our thoughts in text form.
Honestly the team is feeling highly discouraged to participate in the immediate Gitcoin ecosystem grants programs. It feels great to be running a round independently and we are thriving in the spirit of decentralization with Gitcoin grants stack technology at our fingertips. Itâs nice to have your own freedom and not be bound by another overarching structure.
We will no longer be participating as grantees starting in GG20 because the amount of time/energy spent on a Gitcoin grant campaign was not meeting the benchmarks for our current fundraising goals so we have pursued funding from other programs in order to provide more room for newer young players in the web3 startup world of Gitcoin.
This is still a very crucial part of many web3 startups and our team has made it clear that the lift for each round was well beyond the rewards from the funding we received during grant rounds on Gitcoin during the year of 2023. Although the small amounts of funding we received during each round did help to subsidize a portion of costs for development. Itâs time to move on.
We are happy to have made it to this stage of separation from the dependency of grant funding from Gitcoin. Thanks to Optimism and the rewards that we have received from the Retroactive Public Goods Funding we are able to complete the development of our MVP and fund our own grants program without any help.
the round & add more grant managers so it is impossible to become eligible for this opportunity.
to Optimism and the rewards that we have received from the Retroactive Public Goods Funding we are able to complete the development of our MVP and fund our own grants program without any help.