GG21 Community Rounds Announced

🌱 Gitcoin Grants
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GG21 Community Rounds Announced

We are thrilled that the second iteration of the new governance process for Community Rounds is underway with GG21! ICYMI, to be eligible to run a community round in GG21 and receive matching funds from Gitcoin, each community needed to upload their proposal to our gov forum by July 16th.

The GG21 Community Council took three days to review and vote on which rounds to accept into the round, and how to allocate matching funds to each. The voting for which rounds to accept was conducted in CharmVerse, and was ranked according to average rubric scores. The vote for how matching funds would be distributed was done through a poll at the end of the three days.

As per the learnings from GG20’s Retrospective, it was clear that the rubrics needed to be more detailed and more closely aligned to eligibility criteria and the proposal template. Rubrics that were used are the following:

Round Operators and Team

  • Identified Round Operator
    • Clearly identified Round Operator with past experience of running a round?
  • Team Members
    • At least two additional team members with previous experience to run a round?

Fundraising

  • Matching Pool Impact
    • Matching pool size (that the community is bringing in) is proportional to what they are trying to achieve?

Alignment with Gitcoin’s Mission and Essential Intents

Community and Impact

  • Community Size and Engagement
  • Impact Assessment Plan
    • Detailed plan for assessing grantee impact?

Thank you to all the rounds that applied! It was incredible to witness such a big interest in participating in GG21 as well as reading all your applications.

Thank you to the council @feems, @lanzdingz, @azeem, @mashal, @wasabi, @ZER8 and @thedevanshmehta for your engagement and stewarding of this decision, as well as your partnership in this process.

Results

Note that Gitcoin is proposing to fund the community rounds with a total of $400k in GG21. The council voted between allocating the matching funds either: 1) 60k to top 5 & 20k to bottom 5, or 2) 50k to top 5 & 30k to bottom 5. The vote passed with 60% in favour of the latter approach.

NOTE: The extra funds of $150k covering the remainder 5 rounds’ matching is pending community and steward approval, as outlined in this proposal.

Reflections from the council

Compared to last round, the proposals were definitely more “polished.” This round also boasts a high caliber of projects; all of the top 10 are credible rounds that will further drive Gitcoin’s mission and intent.

The council felt that the majority of proposals mentioned using impact measurement tools such as Karma GAP and Hypercerts, yet having no real mention of metrics they’ll emphasize on. A clearer and less vague approach to measurement, as well as more detailed reports and audits of past rounds is highly encouraged in future rounds.

Equally, we are planning on hosting training sessions, workshopping through the recently-launched Gitcoin Grants Canvas with all rounds applying to GG22, and included in that training will be on how to use impact tools (hosted by a council member). We believe that this will enable rounds to set themselves up for even more success and will equal stronger proposals.

We would like to give each round some direct feedback. You will hear from MathildaDV over the course of this week (please check gov forum DM’s if I’m not connected to you elsewhere) for some feedback on your applications. And just because you didn’t get in this round, don’t fret! There will be many more opportunities in the future.

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Kudos to Mathilda for exemplary running of the round, making it time efficient for all the council members. Also special shoutout to @wasabi for the work in designing the rubric and getting it up into charmverse, the process of reviewing really did work like a charm.

In some constructive feedback, I found nearly all applications lacking in the impact assessment plan. Most relied on self-evaluation methods, seeing Karma Gap or Hypercerts as silver bullets. This is something that Gitcoin needs to take lead on, helping round operators identify impact better so that over multiple rounds projects that execute are preferred over those that don’t.

In process feedback, the rubric on community size was imperfect and difficult to gauge, as was alignment with Gitcoins mission. More specificity on these parameters would be helpful, although it’s fine to have some things be subjective and left to our discretion while reviewing.

Overall, there was a great outcome yielded from the process and have zero complaints on the final selection. The council experiment seems to be working quite well!

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This is super exciting and I appreciate the constructive feedback. We’re grateful to be included.

Regarding your feedback, I don’t think the lack of clarity on impact assessment is an isolated phenomenon and I think Gitcoin would do well to invest in decentralized measurement, reporting, and valuation. We are making it a priority this round to work alongside all round operators to develop schemas for various types of impact reporting and will work with Karma GAP to integrate various JSON formats that will support grantees in identifying the best frameworks for their particular type of impact. I have begun organizing a Round Operator Alliance for this purpose! We hope to receive funding from the Cartographer Syndicate Community Round to provide coordination and research support for round operators as we work with grantees to develop pluralistic impact metric standards.

This is a planetary challenge and those of us who are working on solutions for it are often underfunded and need support to generate this kind of enabling infrastructure for on-chain public goods funding.

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First of all, I want to express my gratitude to Gitcoin for providing a 50k matching grant to the upcoming Asia Round. This is a huge encouragement for us. As GCC focuses on donating public goods, the evaluation challenges discussed here are something we constantly explore. We use an internal scoring system as a reference, which you can see here: GCC Scoring Sheet. But we admit it’s super tough to apply a single scoring system across different fields, project types, and stages of development. It’s also demanding for each committee member to score projects in such a detailed way, and long-term use of one system can lead applicants to game the system, rendering it ineffective. Besides our ongoing efforts, we hope the Asia Round will inspire better solutions to these issues. Thank you again for your recognition and support. We can’t wait to see the amazing outcomes of GG21!

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Thanks for the shoutout :saluting_face:, it is a pleasure to also work with you, I’m always looking forward to reading your detailed feedback whenever we’re doing reviews in a grants program :hammer_and_wrench:

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Great news! Thanks to all the folks on the council for their time and consideration.

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I would love to see this as a submission in the Cartograpgher Syndicate round. Maybe a good opportunity for a QF Impact Alliance collaboration :slight_smile:

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We are grateful for Gitcoin’s recognition and continued support for the DeSci ecosystem’s development. The additional $30K matching fund for our GG21 round is a significant boost, and we are excited to run the DeSci round to advance decentralized science projects.

The news about upcoming training sessions and workshops with the Gitcoin Grants Canvas is fantastic. Totally agree on the importance of a clearer approach to impact measurement, especially in the scientific field. To that end, we have been exploring different methods to independently measure the impact of DeSci projects.

@HazelHu is right. it is tough to develop a single system for impact measurment. We are trying different ways:

Following @manuelolariu collaboration with Karma GAP since GG20, we established the DeSci on Gitcoin community within Karma GAP. Currently, there are 103 grants across 88 projects within DeSci. We will categorize these projects into six areas: community, publishing, data in healthcare, funding & IP, infrastructure, and research DAO. Moving forward, we will utilize Karma GAP’s features to assign specific questions for measuring each grant’s impact. You can view our setup here. And we just finished our first screen-sharing on how to create project on Gitcoin and Karma GAP introduction to our grantees yesterday.

Additionally, we have initiated regular discussions with the DeSci research team, which previously published the “DeSci Landscape Analysis” for the GG15 DeSci round. These discussions focus on improving DeSci impact measurement and evaluation.

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This is a great point, evaluation is a challenge not just in our world but also in the regular philantropy world. In fact its slightly worse there, since its the NGO that pays the impact evaluator for assessing their work, so it becomes more akin to a marketing document.

What struck me reviewing all the projects (i had to abstain from open civics as im a prior grantee) was the lack of consensus on even the right approach to accountability. It’s nice that Karma GAP and Hypercerts have become the tools of choice, but the mechanics of how they are used is still TBD. An important approach i saw with the TEC round was conducting a retro funding round following the QF one, so one approach could be;

Receive funding in QF > Create artifact from the round as Hypercert with a price attached to it > Retro round buys the cool artifacts produced

Some form of outcome based funding is certainly needed to move the space ahead.

Most approaches i saw relied on some form of self-evaluation by projects. While that’s certainly a start, along with a common registry to disbar bad or ineffective actors, i wonder if some form of scoring by not just committee members but fellow grantees in a round can make the burden lesser. Its worth a conversation with @M0nkeyFl0wer as his work with Thrivecoin is at the cutting edge of the method you described.

Would you say that scientific impact is slightly easier to assess, since there’s usually some proof of work in the form of papers, data or analysis that is undertaken? Linking funds with delivery of artifacts and then stating the artifacts created from the funding in the next application for a community round would make the job of assessing impact much easier.

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This is really exciting! Congrats to @MathildaDV and everyone else involved. Great work community council.

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UPDATE: Due to GG & product/engineering teams wanting to ensure a good user experience in lieu of multi chain checkout (soon to come!), LUKSO will unfortunately not be participating in GG21. To ensure that the LUKSO community is fully set up for success in running on their own chain, an independent round outside of a GG round will enable this (COMING SOON), due to the fact that the Gitcoin team has pre-determined chains that rounds are able to run on in GG21.

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Amazing to see all these community rounds. Looking forward to GG21! Let’s Go!

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I’m curious, please share the link.

I’m genuinely curious to see how the ᴘʟᴀɴᴇᴛᴀʀʏ ᴄᴏᴜɴᴄɪʟ :dove: was stacking against other participants and whether something similar was used:

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Hello,
Thank you for the opportunity
It was our first time applying, could you kindly help us find our way to know how this effects our proposal
[GG21 Community Round Proposal] Decentralized Documentation: Empowering Bioregional Initiatives]