I really like how these changes make it more straightforward what Gitcoin does, allowing the DAO to focus on its core priority and setting up Gitcoin for scaling faster and further!
I also quite like this novel approach to funding community rounds - if it works as a flywheel I believe it could generate even more funding for niche community categories than in the previous approach. There are obviously risks. Perhaps we could predefine some metrics to track for relative success of this new approach and re-evaluate after the first two rounds have been run under the new approach?
Cant agree more 10k and 5k rounds will do more justice to the smaller web3 communities especially in Africa, Yes giving more priority to OSS makes lots of sense. Question what comes first the product or community i believe community and education are vital for mass adoption of any web3 tooling that comes from OSS lets reduce the 25k cap and be considerate of emerging or smaller communities
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
First of all, my congratulations for the great growth of the project and the new implementations, I hope Climate Change continues to have the great support it deserves, I want a tree badge
Thanks for the updates Meg! I have changed my mind to vote FOR these changes, mostly for the following reasons;
Fits with gitcoins endgame of ossifying the protocol and exiting to community. Narrowing from various categories to a single one and then eventually zero gitcoin hosted rounds is the logical path forward, the only disagreements can be on the right timing (which no one can know for sure in advance)
I would push back on this as an oversimplification. The issue isn’t only funding (which is honestly quite low relative to most projects budget) but the loss of a public space where diverse projects in the ecosystem come together on one stage and share learnings with one another + mobilize their own community to support them. I often tell people the metric to optimize for in gitcoin rounds is not funding received but growth in twitter followers I’m curious to see whether community rounds will fill up the vacuum left by gitcoin in this regard
Incentivizes projects in the web3 community and education space to develop open source software. I would love for there to be support to projects that were in web3 community and education earlier but successfully used those funds to build a product with an active repo and are now eligible for the OSS round
I’m curious to see whether community rounds will fill up the vacuum left by gitcoin in this regard