Tomorrow is Merge DAY!! 
Also, we’re in the thick of GR15, with 8 days left.
So far, Gitcoin’s Cause Rounds have raised over $1.3M from large donors. 
One important note: today(9/14) is last call for Grantee submissions at 12p US Pacific Time/7p GMT. If you or someone you know is working to get a grant into GR15, the cut-off is today.
We often see a flurry of activity at the end of Grants Rounds. We expect GR15 to be no different!
Check the Gitcoin Grants calendar for upcoming events here.
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Hot Topics
From Twitter
- This recent tweet from Gitcoin Steward, @LefterisJP:
We briefly discussed this tweet during our Tuesday “Weekly Workstreams” call.
Kyle Weiss had this to say:
“[Gitcoin Grants is] striving to become a permissionless protocol…As we move to a permissionless protocol, the amount of funding that happens is no longer going to be driven by [GitcoinDAO]. It’s going to be driven by these ecosystems, and their ability to band together, and fund their shared needs.”
It’s also worth noting that, per Weiss, “[GR15’s] main round is still the largest quarterly open-source community-led funding event, inside of a web3 ecosystem”.
From the Governance Forum
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“Introducing v2 of the Steward Council & future plans” – Shawn from DAOOps shares a thread with reflections from the first Steward Council and a plan for the next. Lindsey asks about the current council selection process, which Shawn shares is based on an algorithm combining a stewards snapshot, forum, and workstream participation. Scott enters the thread to recommend an alternative selection process where workstreams play a larger role by being present at council meetings, and nominating stewards to be voted on for the council.
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“Discussion: What is the purpose of GTC?” – Nate Gosselin from GPC posted a thread asking questions about the utility of GTC, such as, ‘what is our token’s Most Valuable Interaction (MVI)?’ His answer focuses on GTC itself as a product and “unit of trust that enables network participants to enrich their reputation in our protocols.” Join the discussion.
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“How should I change my delegations? [Q3 2022]” – Owocki posted a reply to this thread, where he gives data + charts showing how decentralized his voting power is. Owocki seeks to decentralize his voting power to “50 up-and-coming leaders in the DAO”–he currently needs ~30 more delegates to make this happen.
From Owocki: “pls come to my office hours or fill out this form if you have anyone you want to nominate to receive a delegation!”
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“Scaling Gitcoin Grant Reviews” – J. Cook posted this deep dive on the challenges of scaling Gitcoin grant reviews, and offers some possible solutions. In his words, “The challenge is to build a protocol that allows grant reviewing at scale to be very fast, very cheap and very accurate…Achieving any two of these is easy…but optimizing across all three requires more sophisticated protocol engineering”. Add your reply.
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“Knowledge Transfer: Generate Economic Graph Visualizations” – Owocki posted a short explainer on how to generate graph visualizations from Gitcoin grants data. For previous grants rounds, Kevin has posted them in Twitter threads like this one. Since he’s disaffiliated himself from DAO leadership, he will not be creating these graphs for GR15. Owocki encourages DAO contributoors to step up and take this on!
Latest Episodes from GreenPill
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GreenPill #42: All about GR15! Kevin is joined by Leon Erichsen, Associate PM on Passport, Annika Lewis, Workstream Lead for PGF, and Brent Martin, Senior PM at Moonshot Collective to talk about GR15. The group also talks about the history of GitcoinDAO, how Gitcoin Grants are shifting, and of course—how to get involved in this round!
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GreenPill #43: Kevin welcomes artist, philosopher, ontological anarchist, ux researcher of the expanded field, holobiont, aspiriting symbiont, inhabitant of terra that is learning how to live in a dying world—Travis Wyche. The two cover so much ground, but the main topic of exploration is their new project, the Pluriverse Guide!
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GreenPill #44: Kevin is joined by Ethereum core developer, Danny Ryan. This episode was recorded in late August, but Danny brings the insight heat as it relates to all things the merge. Specifically, his deep dive explanation of Proof of Stake, how crypto can do good for the world, and so much more.
Gitcoin Governance Overview:
Snapshot polls GTC Holders and Tally performs on-chain actions. Proposals that have on-chain steps, such as budget requests, move on to Tally after being ratified on Snapshot.
Active Proposals:
Proposal Discussions:
- None this week.
Latest Completed Proposals:
Workstream Discussion:
Public Goods Funding
Grant Ops
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The Grant Ops team has been focused on grant reviews this past week. We’ve improved our workflow since GR14, but the process is still tedious.
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Grant Ops has been hosting numerous Twitter Spaces for grantees this round that have had strong engagement–even our 12am full moon shillfest!
Grassroots
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Lani hosted this Twitter Space on how to create a “Collection” on Gitcoin Grants. Check it out while it’s up for two more days, before Twitter pulls it down.
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QZ is hosting a Library Session on the Merge tomorrow, via the Discord server.
Fundraising + Growth Ops
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The round is moving along well. GR15 Fundraising Figures, to date:
- $500k+ Main Round
- $1m+ in Ecosystem Rounds
- $375k ETH Infra Round
- $500k+ DeSci Round
- $300k+ Crypto Regulatory Advocacy Round
- $350k+ Climate Cause Round
- $150k+ DEI Cause Round
Moonshot Collective
Quadratic Voting
- The focus of this past week was around narrowing our possible solutions down to a single solution. We made that decision and aligned with dependent stakeholders on what it was and why we decided that. From there, we ensured the feasibility of our solution and had devs build a POC, and will make decisions to get to a more final product. We will be documenting the end-to-end architecture this week and ensuring there is alignment on that as well.
Identity Staking
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This week would be considered “launch week” for the identity staking experiment.
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We shipped the smart contract to mainnet on Monday, and finished getting CNAMES setup for a launch on Wed. At launch we worked through a few unexpected minor bugs that came up when we pushed from staging to production.
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For the Passport portion of the UI - the sidebar updates shipped on Wed. Weadded a link out into the sidebar to send users to the Identity Staking app to learn more about it. We still have some adjustments to make to the tiers to get the amount required corrected for a better UI - PR is completed for that, it just needs to be deployed.
Operations
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During our weekly sync meeting there were no objections to the proposed updates for the problem-solving request process and the proposal to add transparency to the process.
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Next week we will continue to explore what the long-term future of MC looks like. We will also continue working on the logistics for the problem solving request form
Fraud Detection & Defense
Grant Eligbility
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“Fileverse Grant Deactivation” – On Friday, September 9th, an FDD workstream reviewer deactivated Fileverse’s Grant. The proper process was followed, and a new sybil attack vector has been identified. Disruption Joe posted this thread in the forum, sharing the results of our investigation into an alleged sybil attack.
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We’ve recieved over 580 new grant applications in the last 14 days and approved over 300. We’ve also resolved all outstanding appeals and are launching the Great Grant Hunt tomorrow! Sign up here and join forces with 150+ agents to defend the grants program.
Data Empowerment
- We’re also getting ready to run a hackathon where we empower our community members to use Gitcoin grants data to build Dune dashboards, subgraph APIs, and custom models. We’ll be hosting this as a joint effort with web3event.co
Data Research
- We completed 5 different Sybil scoring algorithims to be used in Sybil detection and summed up our discussions on cost of forgery to identify the best avenue for further experimentation. We also built a Dune dashboard for GR15 to better understand how many users are identity staking.
Merch, Memes & Marketing
- This week, we shipped the Passport product page(now live): https://gitcoin.co/passport
- We deployed our GR15 launch week campaign: blog posts, email blast, Twitter Spaces, and tweets, tweets, tweets! Our GR15 Announcement post on Twitter is doing numbers–577 retweets and counting. Jess runs the Gitcoin twitter account and is absolutely crushing it!
Content Published This Week
- Web3 Has the Potential to Tackle Climate Change
- WTF is Trust Bonus?
- Gitcoin Grants Round 15 kicks off Sept. 7
Request: MMM is looking for designers! Check out the JD here and send along your portfolio to CoachJ (DM to CoachJ#0481)
DAO Operations
- This week we discussed how to improve CSDO’s operating system, grants round pain points, and contributor operations. For our OS, we feel a need to improve our strategic decision making process and are keeping a log of strategic topics. For grants rounds, we talked about keeping funders and community aware as we make any shifts to eligibility for the main round. We also surfaced significant pain points experienced on reviewing, and tagging on a platform that is both actively used and legacy. For contributor operations, we discussed the need to be careful about access control during our offboarding process, how to determine which contributors receive gitcoin emails, and paying contributors in stablecoins.
Community Governance
- A new GovAction tracker was created and can be found here.
- A new Steward onboarding plan was created and can be found here.
- There’s also a discussion happening in the forum about the the next Steward Council.
Support
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We are tracking tickets and support requests across multiple channels. Average ticket handling time (as of 9/7), is Discord: 8 hours 46 minutes, and Email: 13 hours 55 minutes. We are continuing to track a log issues across cPlatform, Passport, and Grantee XP.
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Over 45 updates to the knowledge base have been completed.
DAO Tooling
- We are collecting info for our contributor database in Notion (Sobol migration + access).
People Ops
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A new Peer Review Proposal went to CSDO today.
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We are working with various workstreams re: compensation modeling for each. FDD and MMM are testing compensation models, MC are DAO Ops are close to finalizing theirs.
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Questions? Drop in to the #daoops-general channel in the Discord.
Gitcoin Product Collective
- We are targeting to be production-ready with Grant Hub Phase 2 (Anchor) by Friday, September 15th*. With this week’s progress, we are about ~97% complete.
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Happy to share that we have officially hit our MVP milestone! You can see our first version of Round Manager live here, which allows you to deploy a round and manage project applications on Optimism and two testnets.
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Beyond that, we have spent this week doing some housekeeping on our initial code and kicking off our next two initiatives.
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This week we assisted the engineering, support, and marketing teams leading up to the GR15 launch, and supported Passport holders in the round. We also worked on partnerships with third-party projects to integrate Passport for ID verification.
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We added new features to the backlog to improve Passport app and SDK and even ramp up new stamps for GR16 that we missed this time around
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We also pushed forward Passport partnerships.
Upcoming Community Events
GR15 is going strong–just eight more days to go!!!
Events this Week
Thursday, September 15th:
- The Merge and Beyond, 2:00 – 3:00pm ET on Twitter Spaces
Friday, September 16th:
- @ReFiPodcast Twitter Space (gr15 ReFi projects), 12:30 – 1:30pm ET
Monday, September 19th:
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GR15 Give-A-Thon Twitter Space, 9:00am – 10:00pm ET.
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GitcoinDAO Citizen Welcome Call, 3:00 – 4:00pm ET
Tuesday, September 20th:
- ReFi DAO Twitter Space: gr15 (DEI & Climate), 11:00 – 11:45am ET
Also, check out our Grants Events Calendar for up-to-the-minute updates!
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