Hi Sov needs a tiny correction here. 
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spent some time with our gg data today to visualize the amount funded (y axis) over time (x axis). the size of each bubble is the amount in $$$ funded
if we group together rounds that run in the same monthā¦ and visualize the number of rounds (y axis) over time (x axis) + make the size of each bubble is the amount in $$$ fundedā¦ this simplifies the data a bit, this is what the trendlines look like.
one thing that visualizing this helps me think about is how the GG programs are basically marketing lightning strikes that channel everyones attention to gitcoin. and then the momentum spreads to the in between dots.
here is a visualizatoin of this point.
i am wondering how this will change now if we move to 6 month roundsā¦ whether the community rounds/self service rounds will continue to grow up and to the right (and larger)ā¦
now that the ciitzen rounds will alternate with the program rounds (each running every 6 months, but there is ideally lightning strike every 3 months), i hope to still see a continued pattern of up and to the right momentum of
- more rounds being run
- more capital being allocated
expressing this visuallyā¦ Will the upward trendline continue in the new format?
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Great catch ā¦ sorry for that. Just updated!
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Thanks for this, very interesting visuals indeed. To be clear, GG will continue quarterly, with the larger program round (OSS) to be bi-annual.
I think we have the opportunity to make those quarterly marks even more profound as we look to distribute funds back out via the new community round structure and empower those communities at the edges to further grow and fund what matters.
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Hi hi; long time fan first time in the forum hereā¦quick question: does a āCitizenās retro funding roundā already have an established flow everyone is familiar with? I ask because it seems separate from the OSS and community rounds but went unaddressed in the text.
Generally this seems like a really great move and if I had votes Iād be voting in support!
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@TheTokenJedi thanks for your comment! We met at the PDXDAO Event a few months back, glad to see you here!
You can. take a look at the proposal below for more details on the Citizens Program. @krrisis and @umarkhaneth are community contributors who can also help with additional questions.
The proposal below shows what has been most recently approved, but more emphasis will be put on this concept as we move forward, so expect growth and improvements to surface in the days ahead. @MathildaDV @Viriya and @CoachJonathan will lead many of these initiatives in partnership with my team.
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These are very interesting indeed! Thanks for sharing.
IMO from a marketing POV we will continue to have those lightning strikes as we will empower each community round to market their own round (giving them unique canva templates + designs) where Gitcoin will still amplify all marketing efforts and host shill spaces during these periods.
This is how Iām seeing it anyway! I personally donāt want to see any of those efforts fall away during a round.
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I do think scrapping web3 community and education round entirely is a mistake so i will be voting no in the snapshot
Many peopleās first entry into the gitcoin universe is through the permissionless core rounds . By choking this funnel point to developers only, we are shooting ourselves in the foot & hurting overall growth of the product stack. Some whose first experience is with a core round will later host their own community round, so Iām against closing it off entirely for non devs.
For a small amount every 6 months (even $150-$200k) gitcoin can market itās product stack to not just devs but also community folks. Seems counterproductive and penny wise/pound foolish in the long run. I expect giveths QF rounds to fill up the space being vacated by gitcoin moving away from funding anything thatās not tech related.
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Hey @thedevanshmehta thanks for your perspective! Responded on twitter and figured Iād do so here in a few more charactersā¦
First of all, I still see equal creation of funding opportunities for web3 community and education projects. The community round structure is intended to create those. In fact, you could run for a governorship position and advocate to set the criteria for funding to only web3 community and education based projects!
I think you and @owocki make a good points about not wanting to hurt product growth, which is obviously super important. Weāve made a commitment (regardless of whether this goes through) to report on the impact of any changes to the program and will certainly recommend adjustments if it seems like growth is negatively impacted.
Zooming out on the purpose of the Gitcoin Grants program ā weāre stewards of this fund and want to deploy it in a way that is 1 aligned with the community desires and 2 benefits the growth of the ethereum ecosystem. We see it as a key source of ācradle stageā funding for ethereum projects. Right now Iām hearing from grants managers in other ecosystems (typically funding more mature/unicorn projects) that they have healthy pipelines of community projects, but a lack of OSS projects and dApp builders. Given that, it feels like the Gitcoin Grants program can have the highest impact on the ethereum ecosystem this year by funding those OSS projects & filling that pipeline.
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Wow this sounds interesting 
Lovely approach to metagovernance of rounds thanks; more grants = more growth for everyone
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This is an interesting idea and way to move web3 community and education into the hands of communities themselves. The idea could work if people can raise 25K outside of Gitcoin for matching funds. I could be wrong, but aside from Zuzalu (which got a significant amount from a specific donor) or chain-specific rounds (Arbitrum/Polygon), I donāt believe any community round has come close to being 25k in size. The SheFi round supported by Octant was about 14k USD and was the largest community-funded round I believe. There is the Climate round, but that also used to be a core round that has now spun off into being community-led, but still ran its last round as a large-scale and more accessible round. *also not counting dev-specific rounds either - talking mostly about rounds that web3 education/community projects would fit into.
Is the idea to have larger protocols and chains (like Arbitrum, Base, Lens etc) run these community rounds? Or would the idea be a group like GreenPill x RefiDAO get together and go out to search for 25k in funding, then come back to gitcoin to see if they will match it? I understand it could be a combo, Iām just curious who the āwhoā is you envision will be running these rounds.
The 25k bar to entry before matching begins feels a bit high (at least to start seeing at this is in 2 months) for the community of current grantees to meaningfully be able to take over and run these rounds for the larger community - without it being chain agnostic.
Maybe there is slow progress to the 25k min after 1-2 rounds to build momentum and let the community of past grantees get a handle on how it might want to support each other moving forward in this.
I support the idea in theory and experimenting is part of what weāre all here to do - just curious about how this will maybe affect those āmedium and smallā tail projects/communities that donāt have the bandwidth or network to raise the 25k to be eligible for matching, but have been using Gitcoin rounds as a way to keep building because of the consistency in them.
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With how seamless it was using grants stack for the Octant + SheFi round, Iām really excited about this proposal, it definitely creates a lot of opportunity to highlight the tech in the form of success stories, and I feel like it can continue to create a lot of win win outcomes for everyone participating.
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@owocki
It will continue even better. People will have time to rest and be excited about the future round event and when the time comes, theyāll give it even more, otherwise smaller more often events can be rather tedious. Itās like when youāre excited about 1-2 annual rock festivals instead of the monthly local smaller gigs.
Also, now people can make their own rounds and since there will be only 2 major official Gitcoin rounds, theyāll have more time in between if they wish to do their own thing, so that part is perfect.
@lanzdingz
I agree with you. Instantly had the very same concerns about the entry bar being too high and the impact on the smaller communities/projects.
@thedevanshmehta
Very valid concerns. I do think that Gitcoin and Giveths overlapped a bit too much, so if they somehow become complementary, thatās still a big win in my book, because they wonāt be competing directly for the same audience, as that kinda made Giveth seem in the shadow of Gitcoin overall and if not for the awesomeness of the project and perseverance of the devs, if felt like one of those projects that might just call it quits eventually if not getting some sort of edge (those reward points are an interesting concept though but not sure if enough). I clearly donāt want Giveth to go away and will focus more on it myself, even though Iām a developer myself of an open source game project.
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I like the
- focus on
open source software. I can focus on metrics related to downloads and onchain creations. - bigger rounds less frequently. gives us time to build instead of constantly applying for funds.
- I appreciate getting the email telling me to review this proposal
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Thanks for the comments, very much appreciated. I wanted to add some responses in line to your comments.
We have had the minimum Community Round size at $25K for a few seasons now (as linked below) and as recently as GG19 saw Community Rounds of this size that included Token Engineering Commons, Open Civics, Greater China Community, and 1inch LATAM.
I believe with the help of this community and new focus from our Ecosystem Collective we can come up with creative ways to connect funding partners with groups who are looking at creative ways to fund what matters to them (we have a few discussions to this end happening that you will see in the days ahead as new rounds are launched!)
We appreciate the vote of confidence. We realize this is a shift from how we have traditionally run Gitcoin Grants but believe that it is the right move and will allow for further growth at the edges over time.
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hey, awesome.
iām fairly new to gitcoin mechanics and i donāt speak from a thorough understanding of all the gitcoin round details
however, theoretically applying sound principles of iteration and testing to validate / invalidate a new idea ā¦ I would recommend not doing anything too drastic if there is current, steady growth
instead, take these new ideas and test them in a sandbox first, define what the expectations are based on the changes made and define what metrics will be used to evaluate them
if the results are positive outcomes, scale them, if not, iterate on the idea and test again
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Looking forward to aligning the Citizens rounds with some of the upcoming GGs! I hope this post makes it easier for citizens to plan the work they do in advance of the round.
Wanted to +1 this. In particular, it would be amazing to see @thedevanshmehta running a round.
Personally I think the recent community round results have shown the eligibility criteria are too broad and leave room to fund almost anything, including communities dedicated to airdrop farming. Running not one community round but several which are each more focused and helmed by someone with subject matter expertise to draft tight eligibility criteria could lead to better outcomes.
Gitcoiners often feel in a tight spot as we try to remain credibly neutral and not take too strong a stance on what deserves funding and what doesnāt but instead let the community decide through their donations.
As a result, over time the Community and Education rounds were expanded from their initial focus on Media and Independent Journalism (back in Round 4 Bankless/RSA/David Hoffman raised funds and were validated here). I think there is now space/funding for people to create bottoms-up rounds that are specific, opinionated, and higher-quality without costing any of Gitcoinās credible neutrality
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Donor fatigue is real, the shift on cadence have its pros and cons, but IMO the pros outweighs the cons.
I do like the fact Gitcoin is shifting toward a more measurable impact within the verticals that provides the highest upsides as OSS & ETH Infraā¦ basically everything else depends on these two.
Gitcoin is shifting from trying to fund everything to fund what matters to the long-term growth of Gitcoin and enabling communities to do the same with the Grants Stack.
I also agree with @Sov & @umarkhaneth about the Web3 Community Round; I think as builders focus on a specific chain and built their home base providing value to that ecosystem, they will have the opportunity to unlock even more funding; this already happened with RetroPGF 3.
+1 on this one, he could do a great job running a round. 
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Thanks for all replies, really appreciate the back and forth!
If i correctly understand the community round structure, they are āmatching on matchingā funds. So i expect the types of groups that would use it are well mobilized specific communities like DeSci, Arbitrum Citizens, Zuzalu, TEC etc rather than more general categories like all web3 community and education projects, which wonāt have a driving force to raise initial matching funds that unlock the extra funds from gitcoin.
So i donāt see community rounds as filling up the space being vacated by gitcoin in getting rid of the free for all web3 community and education round. Gitcoin rounds are a schelling point that bring together teams and people - now they will mostly bring together devs and specific communities running their own round. Which is a negative for everyone in the space, we want diverse groups of people during the festive season of gitcoin rounds.
I hear you on these points, for every ZachXBT we funded there were countless other low performing projects.
I have put some ideas for making web3 community and education more like open source rounds by judging content artifacts similar to how we look at code. similar to open source software, the impact of content can be assessed online.
Overall i hate to see gitcoin give up on this space simply because evaluation is hard. I also think it will reduce the diversity of projects participating in rounds , as you either need to belong to a niche subcommunity holding a round or have active open source repos.
This is a fair point. I would push back on the notion that good web3 content creators have enough funding sources already - because we honestly donāt. And even aside from the matching funds, these rounds let people who appreciate our writing contribute to us. We no longer have that avenue
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Glad to see the increased matching pool for ETH Infra and OSS BUIDLing. Running rounds twice a year will definitely help focus attention and resources optimally.
@thedevanshmehta makes a good point on the $25K threshold being suitable only for certain well capitalized communities. Iād rather like to see this threshold be adjusted based on how closely a community meets a given criteria how well is their work aligned to the greater ecosystem needs at a given point.
Iād additionally like to suggest a term limit for badgeholders with a clear performance criteria and code of conduct in order to continue playing the role as well as some from of compensation in the GTC (ideally locked for 1 year)
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