Gitcoin Citizens Retro #4 Update

[krrisis]

Hey Gitcoin Community!

We will soon officially announce Gitcoin Citizens Retro Round #4, but in the meantime, we already want to share what we know and would love to get your feedback on some points.

First of all, a huge thank you to all supporters of the previous 3 rounds: Citizens for their passion and contributions, donors for giving back, and everyone at Gitcoin for the continuous dialogue and funding this initiative. We learned so much over the past 3 rounds (see here, here and this recent internal retro), incrementally improving this initiative’s success and impact, with Round #3 being the most successful one to date. We will continue to apply these learnings in what’s next.

Now, let’s dive in.

What we know so far:

Timing

Deviating from what was announced previously, we are now planning to run Citizens Retro #4 after GG21, which will allow us to reward Citizens for work done over the two preceding rounds, increase the available funding, and focus on some internal reorganization (more on this below), which will ideally lead to more impact, both for Gitcoin and for all Citizens.

We are planning to run Citizens Retro #4 from September 24 to October 8, with applications opening up on August 27. This timing will be confirmed once we have secured the full budget.

Budget

We have funding available for one more round through the current GCP. However, we plan to request an additional budget to bring the total sum of matching funding to 100K GTC ($125.000 at time of writing). We are announcing this well in advance, to invite Citizens to start working today towards earning their fair share of this budget tomorrow.

This is the largest amount we’ve allocated to Citizens to date, effectively doubling the matching. Our previous rounds had matching funds of 20K, 22K and 50K GTC respectively, not counting donations. Additionally, we hope to secure extra funding through external support, as we did in the past with the help of @owocki (respectively 4.20 eth + 10K GTC in the last two rounds) and Arbitrum (who doubled our matching for Retro #3).

If you want to get to work right now, you can and should: join our Discord, attend Citizen office hours, dive into our idea board, propose your own ideas, and follow us on X for inspiration.

What we would love feedback on:

Engage Builder Citizens

With the updated essential intents, the focus of the Gitcoin team is more than ever on increasing Allo’s GMV. Citizens contribute to our ‘Gross Merchandise Value’ in so many ways, as explained here. However, technical submissions have been mostly limited to (epic!) dashboards, and we want to take this a step further.

For our next round we would love to see more technical applications: not just submissions for standalone work, but deep integrations with Allo Protocol and Grants Stack, which we can provide support for. We would love to know: how do you think we can ensure deep integrations with Grants Lab and how can we better encourage Citizens to submit more technical work?

Check out some ideas already popping up, and feel free to submit yours! Want to chat more? Join our Discord and talk to the team, or sign up for Citizen office hours.

Retropgf

The Citizens rounds have been a place for experimentation in both format and execution since day 1, and we plan to uphold this exciting tradition. After an entirely retroactive round, one mixed, and another retroactive one, each on a different network, we are now planning to run our next round as a fully retroactive funding round, with badgeholders (RetroPGF). We have a lot of in-house experience with @owocki’s team, who built one of the two frontends for Optimism RPGF Round 3, and Gitcoin is now also offering this as a service.

Next to our enthusiasm about dogfooding all things Gitcoin, we also have noticed how it is very often the same limited group of warm-hearted people donating to these public greats. We want to address potential donor fatigue, and see how only working with voting could influence the results of our next round. Next to this, it will allow us to work with categories of submitted work, which will make it easier to evaluate submissions, and potentially allocate funds in a different way.

Switching to RPGF will be our biggest experiment yet, and we have a lot of things to figure out by then. We feel very inspired, and would like to use this opportunity to ask for your input on organizing this round.

Some of the questions that have come up for us:

• Who should be the badgeholders, the voters for our round? Should it be all GG grantees? All donors? Should it only be participants of previous Citizens rounds?
• Should GTC holders be voters for this round, and if so, how do we set this up? Do we use simple voting, quadratic voting, conviction voting, …? Should we mix grantees and GTC holders? Or try something else?
• Do we keep our successful signal boosting experiment in the mix, and how do we make this work with badgeholders? Do they have double or quadratic voting power, versus badgeholders just having one vote?

We have so many questions (and a few potential answers) but first of all: we want to hear your thoughts. Let us know in the comments!

One more thing

Lastly, I’ve decided to step down as the main round operator for the Gitcoin Citizens Retro rounds, so we are looking for someone new. It has been a true honor and a tremendous, heart-warming, inspiring pleasure to interact with our community of passionate Citizens on a daily basis. Over the 3 past rounds I continued working with the core team, building on strong foundations, after two years of running DAO Ops before this. For me, it is time to explore new horizons (dms open), and for Citizens, this is an opportunity to step up! If you are interested in this role, or know someone qualified, please dive in and reach out!

I’d like to specifically thank @umarkhaneth, the instigator of the Citizens rounds, my rock and partner in crime, it truly was an honor, ser. A huge thanks also to @shawn16400, with whom we ran Round #1, @carlosjmelgar for stepping up for Round #2, and @jon-spark-eco and @rohit for their strong support and advice on Round #3. Through all of this, @MathildaDV has always been there with her continuous insights and comms support through all the rounds, and will continue to be. Thank you Citizens, for your heart, your feedback, the gifs and giggles, and your relentless passion.

We look forward to your thoughts on the round design in the comments or your role application here.

And as always: we can’t wait to see what you’ll do next.

[ZER8]

Excited to see the Citizens evolve!

@krrisis

Some of the questions that have come up for us:

• Who should be the badgeholders, the voters for our round? Should it be all GG grantees? All donors? Should it only be participants of previous Citizens rounds?
• Should GTC holders be voters for this round, and if so, how do we set this up? Do we use simple voting, quadratic voting, conviction voting, …? Should we mix grantees and GTC holders? Or try something else?
• Do we keep our successful signal boosting experiment in the mix, and how do we make this work with badgeholders? Do they have double or quadratic voting power, versus badgeholders just having one vote?

We have so many questions (and a few potential answers) but first of all: we want to hear your thoughts. Let us know in the comments!

A couple of ideas around the badgeholders:

1. Maybe a mix, 30% grantees, 30% gitcoin stewards and 30% citizens or 25% each + 25% for GTC token holders. May complicate things but can help to see how different groups vote and spot possible inconistencies. I’m afraid that if the badgeholders are only the former citizens it would create incentives to vote for the people you “like and know” vs the ones that have impact. Same issue with signal boosting imo.

2.For the first round it would be cool to test conviction voting and yes I think mixing GTC holders and grantees is a great idea + it creates a use case for holding GTC

[KMLLC]

@krrisis

For our next round we would love to see more technical applications: not just submissions for standalone work, but deep integrations with Allo Protocol and Grants Stack, which we can provide support for. We would love to know: how do you think we can ensure deep integrations with Grants Lab and how can we better encourage Citizens to submit more technical work?

To address this specific narrative, what resources would be provided to citizens who are not as tech savvy with coding as others? Do both these opportunities offer no code solutions in which to integrate? Especially speaking for those Citizens who may not be surrounded by a technical development team.

Apologize for my ignorance if this has already been addressed in another forum post. Just digging in to what was brought into my near focus with the recent call on June 10.

[free2ride19]

The round will be retroactive with lots of badge holders. Awaiting response…
@free2ride19

[abitrolly]

@krrisis

how can we better encourage Citizens to submit more technical work?

Publish highscore, how much drinks people get for their technical work.

You know, I am sitting at the bar and got this mail with [Gitcoin Governance] Summary.

I followed Gitcoin since 2017 hoping that it will close the problem of feeding open source artists who broke loose from their dumb enterprise jobs to do things that need to be done properly.

I donated to some projects, created projects on my own, played a bit with the passport, delegated my token to some fella, and could not remember who it was to check What my delegate is doing? Advocated Gitcoin Grants to Python Software Foundation to support https://pypi.org (unsuccessfully).

Did I earn anything from contributing to open source projects? Yes. When people hired me from UpWork. I could buy food, buy beer, clothes. Did I earn anything from Gitcoin. Yes, I’ve got some GTC tokens from Gitcoin, which I think I can sell, but… I don’t know. Probably should try it and see how much beer I can get for them, and report here.

I occasionally contribute to GitLab and guys sent my some swag until it became a reputation risk to work with people stuck in leper countries. I contributed to GitLab, because I felt this stuff was valuable for me personally (or because it is MIT licensed project that earns money, which is phenomenal). But working for tokens may be not that exciting. Open Source is “scratching own itches” after all. If my itch is lack of money, there are still a lot of opportunities to sell one’s soul to dozen of all kinds of shady guys. To understand if Gitcoin can really provide alternative, it needs to be compared, in beers.

After 7 years watching I don’t really think any of us outside the crypto craze can get any life support from it. I still consider myself in the scene, but as I grow old, my tolerance to cognitive load lowers. Keeping up with all these innovations is hard, and I don’t see that Gitcoin collection and distribution mechanism target low lifes like me.

No matter how much trillions are printed by US, we won’t get any stable generators out of that, and even if we get them, the first served are the most vocal ones and those who do 95% of work. Do they get enough money and time to spend them? I don’t know. But if they are not good, then the rest of us just don’t have any chances. I have my GitLab/GitHub activity feeds that projects like GrimoireLab were able to parse (until CCPA/cookie/GDPR/whatever-lets-censor-act hit them). This feed could potentially be proposed to some humane (aka save-the-meatbags) AI that could mark some activities, when they are valuable to some organizations, with tokens of these organizations. The organizations that fundraise and seize generators for values that they advocate and promote, the values that I push forward with my activities. And at the end of each day, convert these tokens to beer that I can get at the local bar.

EDIT: Hated reading my own typos. Hope you could enjoy it more.

[KMLLC]

Define “badge holders” please. I am not seeing the connection to my quoted reply.