I’ve been thinking lately about how Grants Rounds is our Metronome.
Whats a metronome?
A Metronome is “a mechanical or electrical instrument that makes repeated clicking sounds at an adjustable pace, used for marking rhythm, especially in practicing music.”
Musicians practise with metronomes to improve their timing, especially the ability to stick to a regular tempo. Metronome practice helps internalize a clear sense of timing and tempo. Composers and conductors often use a metronome as a standard tempo reference—and may play, sing, or conduct to the metronome.
The DAO’s metronome.
Gitcoin Grants is the DAO’s flagship product. Because of this - every quarter, the Gitcoin ecosystem revolves around a 2 week Gitcoin Grants round.
From there, we’ve evolved into layering things on top of this quarterly Grants round. Now the Gitcoin Grants round has become a quarterly stacked event - a combination (1) Gitcoin Grants round, (2) Hackathon, (3) KERNEL block, and (4) Governance activity
During each quarter, we achieve our mission by deploying millions of $$$ of funding to the community. Mechanically, a quarter looks like this:
- Plan for quarterly stacked event.
- Execute quarterly stacked event.
- Rest. Learn from the quarterly stacked event.
- Repeat
It is this rhythm that I am beginning to see the DAO evolve around.
Why does this matter?
The Grants Rounds, on their quarterly cadence provides a tempo to the DAO.
This is important because as the DAO grows & evolves, there are more people here than one can possibly maintain a personal relationship with. This metronome provides a coordination mechanism where the various workstreams can be in sync with each other by virtue of having the same time horizon.
Eg. The FDD workstream, public library workstream, and MMM workstream are all autonomous, but given that each is focused on making the next stacked event, they can each maintain a similar time horizon naturally because they have all internalized the metronome of the DAO.
