Name (or Topic/Theme) of Proposed Round:
OpenCivics Collaborative Research Round
Social Handle of Your Organization:
@OpenCivics
Eligibility Criteria:
- At least one project lead must be a member of the OpenCivics Consortium
- Projects must conduct research that is Creative Commons as a public good
- Research must fall in one of the following categories:
- Impact and contribution measurement, reporting, and valuation
- Commons governance, self-organization, and decision-making
- Collaborative knowledge management, learning, and sensemaking
- Open protocols, community templates, and coordination infrastructure
- Community currencies, cooperatives, and alternative economics
- Decentralized project management, roles, and certifications
- Resource allocation, funding mechanisms, and funding sources
- Projects must agree to coordinate and collaborate during and after the round with other grantees to collate and present their research in a Grantee Impact Showcase prior to GG22
- Grant applications must direct funds to a multi-signature wallet
- Projects must indicate what collaborative mechanism they will utilize to govern, evaluate and compensate participant contributions (Coordinape, DeWork, Charmverse, Notion, DAO Haus, Google Docs & Sheets, etc)
- Projects must indicate reasonable and verifiable milestones for low, medium, and large funding outcomes
- We agree to comply with Gitcoin’s core rules
Round History:
- This is a new experiment as part of the OpenCivics Grants Program which has run two previous rounds.
- Our first round offered an experimental context to evaluate the benefits of a round in which all grantees were members in a non-rivalrous network of innovators.
- Our second round offered an experimental context to evaluate impact attestations and a hypothesis that larger grants would support more significant impacts which could be more easily documented and attested.
- Our third round offers a new experimental context to evaluate how grant funding can be utilized to catalyze experimentation in on-chain collaboration and to develop open source civic engagement research that can be compiled and shared as a public good.
- We will continue to iterate based on insights from our last round, including a smaller matching cap and an exploration of solutions to process credit card donations.
Team Running This Round:
- Round Operator: Benjamin Life, Co-Founder, OpenCivics, Bio, @omniharmonic
- Team Member 1: Spencer Cavanaugh, Steward, OpenCivics, Bio, @clinamenic
- Team Member 2: Patricia Parkinson, Co-Founder, OpenCivics, Bio, @polyparkinson
Alignment with Gitcoin’s Mission 1 and Essential Intents:
- This round aligns with Gitcoin’s mission and essential intents by supporting open source research that directly empowers communities to utilize web3 coordination tools for civic engagement and collective action.
- This research will be shared as a public good in the form of educational resources and foundational explorations of new approaches and utilities that support both civic innovators and local community organizers.
- The research we hope to see emerge from this round will increase accessibility to web3 tooling for community organizers engaged in civic initiatives. This applied research will serve communities’ autonomous self-organization and expand blockchain network effects by broadening the scope of how web3 tools can be applied the context of civics and community organizing.
- Making web3 infrastructure for civic engagement more accessible through documented case studies, curricula, and research will help communities directly coordinate to meet their own needs instead of having to rely on large centralized bureaucracies.
Anticipated Size of the Matching Pool:
- Initial matching pool is currently 3.9 ETH.
- The matching pool is anticipated to be $60,000 - 70,000 USDC, fundraised through DeCiv Fund, Gitcoin, and Arbitrum.
- Funding address: OpenCivics.eth (Mainnet Multi-sig) or 0x4D652fB5C0119650a5563B978105D05F8333b44d (Arbitrum One).
- We have a clear plan in place for future fundraising, including:
- Exploring matching fund partnerships with Arbitrum, Celo, Optimism, Ethereum Foundation, Octant and other social impact foundations.
Advisors for This Round:
- Renee DAOs: Lobby3, Talent DAO, DeSci
- Renee ran the first two OpenCivics Rounds and has been a leader in experimental funding mechanisms for public goods development and DeSci research.
Funding Mechanism:
We are using quadratic funding on Allo Protocol because it supports the collective evaluation of which research initiatives would be maximally beneficial to the broader regen web3 systems change community. We are also requiring grantees to direct grant funding to multi-signature wallets to ensure that the utilization of grant funds is democratic and transparent. We will continue to utilize Karma Gap for impact attestations.
Community Size and Engagement:
- The OpenCivics community consists of approximately 133 members and our social media following is 1,300.
- Previous rounds received donations from over unique 800 donors
- Previous rounds received $18,934 in crowdfunding
- Funded projects will likely be small research pods of no more than 10 individuals
- We estimate 10-20 grantees will be eligible for the round
- OpenCivics will continue to develop our impact attestation program with Karma Gap and our open impact schema development within the still-emerging Quadratic Funding Impact Alliance
- Grantees in this round will be encouraged to identify research-oriented attestation schema to document their impact (how many people read, commented on, or shared their research, how many citations their research synthesized, how many subsequent publications cite their research, etc).
- Grantees will be required to share their research findings in an open forum on X in order to be eligible for future funding.
Type of Projects to Fund:
- We aim to fund projects that are developing open source research into various forms of civic innovation and civic engagement, ranging from:
- Impact and contribution measurement, reporting, and valuation
- Commons governance, self-organization, and decision-making
- Collaborative knowledge management, learning and sensemaking
- Open protocols, community templates, and coordination infrastructure
- Community currencies, cooperatives, and alternative economics
- Decentralized project management, roles, and certifications
- Resource allocation, funding mechanisms, and funding sources
Estimated Number of Eligible Grantees:
- We believe that 10-20 grantees will be eligible to apply for this round.
Impact Assessment Plan:
- We intend to assess grantee impact through Hypercerts and GAP.
- Our detailed plan includes
- Evaluating applications based on listed milestones for low, medium, and large funding outcomes
- Conducting three milestone reporting office hour sessions for grantees
- Providing 1x1 mentorship and support for impact attestation and reporting
- Conducting an open grantee impact showcase before GG22 for grantees to report back to the community what they accomplished with their grant funding
Additional Considerations:
Community members should also consider OpenCivics’ commitment to learning and growing round over round. This upcoming round, we will implement the feedback we received from grantees and donors in the previous round. To make our round more accessible, we will be exploring a partnership with viaPrize in an attempt to provide matching pool-eligible credit card donations from non-web3 users. We will also be lowering the matching cap to ensure a more equitable distribution of matching funds to grantees. These innovations demonstrate our commitment to learning and growing in public and continuing to support the development and maturation of the quadratic funding and public goods ecosystems.
Potential Conflicts of Interest:
Because of the collaborative nature of the OpenCivics Consortium, round operators and Stewards may engage in collaboration with grantees to support their research initiatives and collate their research. To avoid a conflict of interest, round operators agree to not receive payment from any funds distributed during this round.
Thank you for your consideration.
Public goods are good.
In Us We Trust,
Benjamin, Patricia, and Spencer 
