Gitcoin Mission & Vision

🤖 DAO Governance and Vision
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As I’ve come in to help work on governance engagement strategy together with Gitcoin, I wanted to look at the mission and vision for the project in an effort to align and update the trajectory & the purpose of this DAO.

As you well know, the Gitcoin mission has been focused around building and funding public goods. As the DAO continues its journey to accomplish and strengthen this, I would like to propose the following as a better crystallised goal and modus operandi.

Gitcoin DAO builds for human thriving.

Gitcoin’s vision is to establish an empowering, open and collaborative space where individuals and communities can access resources in proportion to their value creation independent of their geographic location, education, background or offline identity.

By creating collaborative, decentralized funding mechanisms, Gitcoin has become the natural choice for seeding and supporting digital public goods. The DAO enables building for the public, by the public by helping individuals and communities start, fund, and scale open source projects.

All thoughts, comments and responses to this are welcome and encouraged.

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I support the direction of this mission statement. I’d be curious if people have proposals to amend it or not.

The DAO enables building for the public

One thing - I think it would be useful to define who the public is here.

My personal view is that the public is a series of circles that sometimes overlap and sometimes do not.

e.g. the public that serves ENS can also be the public that Gitcoin serves can also be the public that Ethereum serves.

Whats exciting to me is the intersection of these overlapping circles + the opportunity to force multiply projects that serve multiple public goods.

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e.g. if Project X₁ is in QF Matching Round Y₁, the matching multiple of that is Z₁. And if you add Project X₁ to Y₂Y₃…Yₙ, then the matching multiple of it becomes Z₁Z₂Z₃*…Zₙ. essentially if each QF round for each public is a fan, then all-together they stack to be a jet engine.

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For me, this seems more like a tagline than a mission. When I think of a mission, I think of a statement of how we will get to our vision.

I’m feeling like this is a bit unclear as to what it is that we do here and it seems broad in terms of an explicit direction we are aligning to.

That said, I like that we are opening up our thinking beyond just public goods, but to the outcome - human thriving.

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I love this!

Perhaps somewhere we should expand on what we mean by thriving?

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i like merriam webster’s definition:

characterized by success or prosperity

and also google’s.

verb
gerund or present participle: thriving

  1. (of a child, animal, or plant) grow or develop well or vigorously.
    “the new baby thrived”
  2. prosper; flourish.
    “education groups thrive on organization”

here’s dictionary.com:

  1. prospering or doing well; highly successful:
  2. growing or developing vigorously; flourishing:

do we need to choose one definition or is this clear?

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I’ve been thinking in this direction too. I like it, but it is quite broad.

GitcoinDAO builds for the public good

Taking the technical term “public goods” out but capturing the sentiment.

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Maybe builds public goods for human thriving? So it’s clear it’s non-excludable thriving?

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Personally I think the dictionary.com versions are the most clear.

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A bit of an aside but has anyone ever listened to J.Cole ‘Brackets’?

One of the topics covered in that song is Taxes.

We all hate to pay the IRS because we don’t get to choose where our money goes. I want my taxes to go towards NASA and not back-channeled into corporations. I want my taxes to pay for funding open source and public goods. In the long-term, the funding problem is one of citizen choice. Gitcoin grants fixes this

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START WITH WHY
I was sharing the old Simon Sinek Ted Talk on Leading With WHY to a friend and thought about our why, how, and what. Here is what I came up with…

WHY
We believe there is a better way. We believe that resources aren’t allocated efficiently, fairly, or legitimately AND that this is a solvable problem. We believe that solving this problem to the best of our ability will unlock the potential in people all over the world. People who are trapped in dead end jobs, unable to spark their creativity, and those who cannot find the mental safety to even begin thinking about happiness will find a new light if we are successful.

HOW
We have the magic sauce of connecting the best builders in web 3. This access to talent combined with a strong mission is how we will succeed. We combine the force multiplier of network effects provided by a 2-sided market with the force multiplier of building the tools which build more tools.

WHAT
We build & fund public goods.

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I like both of these statements, so…

We build and fund public goods, for the public, by the public by helping one another, individuals and communities start, fund and scale open source projects.

@owocki agree public is very broad - adjective of or concerning the people as a whole - but imo it needs to be, to remain as inclusive and accessible as possible.

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