[GG21 Community Round Proposal] the 1st Asia Round with Gitcoin

đŸŒ± Gitcoin Grants
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Name (or Topic/Theme) of Proposed Round

Asia Round

Social Handle of Your Organization:

@GCCofCommons
@Pagodasia

Eligibility Criteria:

  1. The Grant must be in support of or directly advance the Asian public goods ecosystem; or at least one founder identifies him/herself as Asian. We will refer to the public goods report released by GCC last December for the definition of public goods.
  2. The project must clearly articulate the problem it addresses, the solution, the implementation plan, the financial plan, and demonstrate there is an excellent team or community for execution
  3. Project must be 3 months old and the project must demonstrate some tangible progress towards their stated goals, with a working MVP is available to the public. We will use Twitter, official website, github, and other public info to determine this. Newer projects should establish themselves and submit to the next round.
  4. Grantees can be eliminated from consideration in the round if they are found to be encouraging or enabling Sybil attacks or other forms of malicious manipulation of the grants platform or the Gitcoin community.
  5. Projects must comply with Gitcoin core rules and eligibility.

More to read here.

Round History:

GCC has previously conducted 4 consecutive Global Chinese Community Rounds in Gitcoin Grants 15, beta round, and 18, 19. In total we mobilized around 8k individual donors, raising over $58k from them.

This time, we are expanding the scope to the entire Asia region along with Pagoda, launching the first Asia Round in Gitcoin history.

Team Running This Round:

Role Name Relevant Experience Bio Social Handle
Round Operator Hazel Hu prev ran GCC rounds on GG18 and GG19 team lead of GCC, ex devrel marketing at BNB Chain & ex fintech journalist at Caixin.com; LinkedIn @0xHY2049 on twitter
Operations Associate Vivian Chen participated in Taiwan’s presidential hackathon QV round + helped plan g0v/da0 Hypercerts QF round Pagoda & da0 founding member; LinkedIn @vvntp6 on twitter
Data & Marketing Yuxin Zhu prev ran GCC rounds on GG18 and GG19 operator of GCC, data scientist at LinkedIn, designer and KOL on various Chinese social platforms @yuxinzhu4736 on twitter
Tech Expert Affe Zhang 3+ years experience in open-source communities; experienced developer prev in alibaba, Tencent & Samsung, Apache RocketMQ Committer @imaffe on github
Generalist Songyi Lee experienced in connecting Asia communities with global Pagoda & Xbound, long-term web3 ecosystem building; LinkedIn @iamsonge on twitter
Generalist Hal Seki 10+ years experience in open-source communities Code for Japan founder; LinkedIn @hal_sk on twitter

Alignment with Gitcoin’s Mission1 and Essential Intents

Asia, with its 4.6 billion people and over 2,300 languages, is an essential region for the mass adoption of Web3 public goods.The GG21 Asia Round is an exciting initiative of two leading communities in Asia - designed to unlock the potential of talented Asian innovators, builders, and projects by providing them with essential funding and resources.

We will:

  1. Accept project applications in native languages in addition to English, minimizing inequality due to language proficiency.
  2. Invite leaders from local communities and media partners as advisors to provide local insights, promote the Asia Round, and enhance the diversity and quality of project applications.

Additionally, our funding focus will lean towards developer communities, policy advocacy, funding mechanisms and tools & anti-censorship. We believe this embodies Gitcoin’s mission to “create technologies and opportunities that enable communities to build, fund, and protect what matters.” Asia’s vast community and user base will also best ensure Gitcoin’s intents of network effect, community-first approach, and financial longevity.

Anticipated Size of the Matching Pool:

  • The matching pool is anticipated to be 25k-50k USD. GCC is confirmed to provide 25k. We would love to match it with another 25k USD from the GG21 matching fund.
  • Funding address: eth:0x060114DD2D88b02Fe5Bb11A57B531e67DAE0cF54; oeth:0x37b8E2747D5E8BE8dD35DE8A942d2c97eBb49D28

Advisors for This Round:

Bob Jiang, GITCOIN China founder, co-organize Ethereum Sydney, twitter
Vienna Looi, ETH KL, Cryptobuddhistecon, twitter

GCC itself has a standing voting committee, composed of experienced professionals in the industry. The list of committee members can be found at here

We will also invite the leaders of our partnering communities and media this round. Our partners include, but are not limited to, EthPadThai, Code for Japan, da0, Eth Vietnam, Eth63, APAC DAO, Eth KL, wublockchain, DeSci Asia, LXDAO, Uncommons, PlanckerDAO, 4seas, etc.

Funding Mechanism:

We are using the combination model of QF + signal booster.

QF: Overall, we use Gitcoin’s quadratic funding mechanism. Team members will screen projects that meet the eligibility criteria, and then the matching amount for each project will be calculated based on the donations received by that project. However, the maximum matching amount for any single project should not exceed 10% of the total matching pool.

Signal booster: Inspired by the Gitcoin Citizen Round and in order to better combat Sybil attacks and introducing expert opinions, we will allocate $5000 from the matching pool and form a group of 10 people selected from our advisors, sponsors, community partners, and the GCC Standing Voting Committee. Each member will be given $500 to distribute to the Asia round projects and share their allocation strategies publicly. This design, combined with community donations, will determine the final amount of funds each Asia round project will receive from the matching pool based on QF mechanism.

Community Size and Engagement:

  • In this round - we are capturing the network of two major communities 1) GCC and 2) Pagoda.

  • GCC is short for global Chinese community of Universal Digital Commons. We have a core community of over 2,000 people distributed across X, Telegram, and WeChat. Additionally, we have partnerships with 15+ Chinese-speaking communities and media outlets, reaching an audience of 10k+ people. In the past 4 community rounds that we initiated, we mobilized a total of around 8k individual donors, raising over $58k from them. This is a testament to our impact. This time, by collaborating with community partners across Asia, we aim to expand the influence by 3 to 5 times.

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  • Pagoda is the Asia Ethereum network with 60 registered members from 14 different Asia countries, including Korea, Japan, Mongolia, China, Taiwan, Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand, the Phillipines, Indonesia, Combodia, Myanmar, India and Vietnam. We have a reach of 30,000+ community members/builders from 20+ Ethereum/Public Goods focused communities.

Type of Projects to Fund:

We aim to fund projects that in the following catogories:

  1. Asian Dev Communities: Projects that aim to build and support local Ethereum dev communities across Asia.
  2. Policy Advocacy: projects that help improve the policy environment for crypto startups across Asia.
  3. Public goods funding protocols and tools: Initiatives that explore innovative and credible-neutral funding protocols and tools for public goods and the builders in the region.
  4. Privacy and Anti-censorship: Projects focused on enhancing privacy and combating censorship within the Asian Ethereum ecosystem.

Estimated Number of Eligible Grantees:

  • We expected 50 eligible grantees from 10+ Asian countries.

Impact Assessment Plan:

For the community round itself, the core data we focus on are:

  • Number of donors
  • Funds raised
  • Number of projects applied, countries/languages of origin
  • Views and interactions of core tweets

For the selected projects, we will measure their subsequent impact through the following methods:

  • Growth in members of the project’s official social media and community
  • If the project’s main market includes the countries where our partner communities/media come from, they will help provide community reviews
  • If the project has applications launched in app markets, we will monitor their download numbers, etc.
  • Frequency and content of updates in the project’s GitHub repository

Additional Considerations:

Exceptional projects, in addition to applying for this Asia round, can also apply directly to GCC for larger grants (up to $50,000) after the community round. This requires submitting a more detailed financial plan, milestones and roadmap, technical solution, etc.

Potential Conflicts of Interest:

As Pagoda is a network of Ethereum/public goods Asia builders around Asia, we do have some of our team members that will potentially participate to receive a grant through this round. Potential projects include:

  • Vivian Chen: Zulandia Taiwan
  • Vienna Looi: Eth KL
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Nice, thanks for your application we are excited to see GCC show up for GG21!

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Thank you so much for your proposal and your interest in participating in GG21! Absolutely love the inclusion of Signal Boosting in this round. Reviewing and voting will take place July 17 - 19, with rounds announced here on the forum July 20th

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Taiwan community will fully support this Asia round initiative

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Great to see the first Asian round! there are many local communities and projects in this region contributing to public goods and need more global support and recognition.

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I’m so thrilled to contribute this project. I will encourage Japanese civic tech communities to join and support! :muscle:

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Supportive and excited for this from Taiwan!