Hi all – the Grants Lab team met yesterday to discuss the feedback and recommend some adjustments to the proposal! Again, wanted to thank everyone for the fantastic engagement and discussion here and in 1x1s, DMs, etc.
OSS Round
The feedback has been nearly unanimously positive on the 2x yearly, $1M format. I think we have a strong vote of confidence to proceed with this!
Web3 Community & Education
We’ve received a few categories of feedback on this, in order of volume:
- The majority of feedback was from donors or grants managers who were supportive of the new format. There’s been a lot of acknowledgement that the scope of the round has expanded very widely, which makes it more difficult to fundraise for (where do your matching funds go?) and donate to or support. From the internal Gitcoin team’s perspective, we feel that raising the average quality of grantees is best solved through decentralization. Given our desire for credible neutrality, we’re ill-positioned to make controversial decisions on eligibility. Additionally I believe that external communities hold far greater subject matter expertise in the sub-areas of community & education (eg - journalism, desci, AI, climate) that are applying for funding.
- The second category of feedback was from previous grantees who are excited to run their own rounds. I’m really excited to see this enthusiasm and we’re already preparing to support them! Many of these individuals noted that the fundraising bar might prevent them from participating – we’ve had some great dialogue on that in the forum.
- The third category of feedback came from a small but vocal group of grantees who are disappointed to see the current format evolve and potentially lose a source of funding for their organizations. We recognize that this is a possibility and appreciate that change is hard – though we very much hope to see former grantees eligible and participating in the new format! We commit to measuring former grantee funding and involvement in this new structure. We hope to see 50% of former grantees who apply receive funding equivalent to their previous participation in Web3 Community.
Moving forward
- We’ll proceed to a snapshot vote with the recommended OSS changes
- We’ll revise the proposal to remove any quotas on the funds provided to matching pool – so that any funds raised are eligible for matching.
- We will limit the number of community rounds for GG20 at 5 to make sure that we can properly support them in this new format, but anticipate raising this in future rounds.
- If the proposal passes, we commit to giving the council more and more authority over time – including the ability to create new matching pools (like a web3 journalism round) in areas they feel are underserved.
- We’ll leave this post open for another 2 days (though 2/15) and then proceed to a snapshot vote