GitcoinDAO Digest #17 2022

👋 News and Community
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Voting for Season 14 budgets has begun! First voting windows close on May 16th

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:point_right: Key actions for this week:

  1. Vote on snapshot for workstream budget proposals!
  2. Attend the upcoming Twitter space featuring Kimbal Musk and Kevin Owocki all about quadratic funding this Sunday, May 15th @ 8 ET!

:fire: Hot Topics:

  • Season 14 Voter Guides are here! Check out these great resources where stewards go into detail and explain their thoughts and reasonings:

  • GitcoinDAO’s Leon Erichsen, author of How Soulbound Tokens Can Make Gitcoin Grants More Pluralistic, contributed to Decentralized Society: Finding Web3’s Soul by Glen Weyl, Puja Ohlhaver, and Vitalik Buterin.

  • With a backdrop of season 14 budget discussions, Owocki asks “What would a Lean/Effective Gitcoin look like? :hourglass_flowing_sand:” This post provides four examples of stewards with “a complaint about a lack of leanness and a lack of effectiveness.” Owocki also shares his view that “[the] DAO spends millions of dollars in tokens on things that just don’t have ROI” and that “by pulling at these weeds we can have our execution meet our moment.”

  • Does paying DAO contributors in GTC lower the price of GTC from those contributors cashing out? Fred and Ivanmolto have conducted a data analysis on “the correlation between GTC outflow from GitcoinDAO and GTC spot price.” The analysis found that “contributors of GitcoinDAO are likely to hold their GTC and the average amount of GTC held by this group is increasing.” There appears to be no correlation between GTC outflow and GTC price, however “GTC is […] correlated to similar tokens in the sector.”

  • In Hiring Freeze?, Kevin Owocki gives notice that he is proposing a Hiring Freeze to Holdings Leadership due to concerns about a bear market and a lack of DAO effectiveness. On the topic of GitcoinDAO, Owocki says “I am just one node in the GitcoinDAO network. The DAO has no CEO. It is up to workstream leads & DAO leadership whether it wants to tighten its belts.”

  • Roadmap to GTC Utility :zap: by Owocki synthesizes the latest thinking on the possible utility of Gitcoin’s governance token. Beyond being used to ratify proposals, GTC could also be a protocol governance token (“by creating a widely used protocol”) or a metagovernance token (“[by] doing Mutual Governance Rights Grants”).

  • Owocki shares a demo and prototype for a GTC Conviction Voting dApp built by Virax, 0xDarni, and AustinGriffith of the Buidl Guidl. This dApp could increase the utility of GTC by enabling users to adjust the sort algorithm of Grants through staking GTC. Grants which have more GTC staked on them could be shown earlier to funders. This dApp was built in just 3 days!

  • Keikumata provides more information about the MintKudos team background and amends the proposal to scale back the requested funding amount and season 14 scope. The new scope would involve focusing on product discovery and designs while incrementally building trust with Gitcoin. Annika says that while the MintKudos team’s work is “super high-potential and exciting,” she doesn’t believe it’s appropriate to be a workstream because of “the existing US-based entity & venture funding raised.”

:ballot_box: GitcoinDAO Governance Overview:

Proposal Discussions Active Proposals Latest completed proposals
FDD Season 14 Budget Request for $486k USD Public Goods Funding WS Budget Request for S14 for $1.1MM USD
DAO Ops S14 Budget Request for $948k USD
MMM - Season 14 budget request for $841k USD
Moonshot Collective S14 budget request for $450k USD
KERNEL S14 Budget Request for $216k USD
dCompass - Season 14 budget request for $110k USD
MintKudos Workstream S14 Budget Request for $40k USD

:man_mage::woman_mage: Workstream Discussion

:seedling: Public Goods Funding

  • Kimbal Musk will be hosting a twitter space about quadratic funding with Owocki this Sunday, May 15th @ 8 ET - tune in!

  • We are reducing our budget request for the ‘publication’ and ‘impactDAO cartography’ categories by 50% each for an overall 6.3% reduction in our budget from 198K GTC to 185.5K GTC (at $6/GTC). We believe this is consistent with other workstreams tightening their belts and focusing on core initiatives.

  • We have launched shortened URLs for GR14 to improve the user experience and shareability of Gitcoin Grants!

:rocket: Moonshot Collective

  • As a reorganized collective, we have reduced our budget request for Season 14 by more than 20% from $564k to $460k. In order to reduce our budget, we have decided not to roll out a minimum base pay for ‘Trusted’ contributors or hire additional designers. We are also focusing on building for Grants 2.0 and GTC Utility, while stepping away from IOJ. We are committed to the priorities of the DAO and assembling a team to fully dive in on available opportunities.

  • We have a working product for 3 of 5 key workflows for our Optimism Partnership and successfully demoed this earlier this week! Optimism is identifying citizens to mint soulbound citizenship NFTs as we gear up for RPGF 2.

  • Episode 13 of the Green Pill Podcast hosted by Kevin Owocki is live! Special guest ManuAlzuru, founder of DoinGud, visits to share where his optimism comes from and talk about how NFTs can be used to empower creators to do good.

:blue_heart: Fraud Detection & Defense (FDD)

  • We are working on a revised budget while reviewing community and steward feedback. We are aiming to post amendments, with input from Gitcoin leadership, on Friday, May 13th. This will be followed by 5 days on the forum for discussion on the new budget and then a snapshot vote. We are aiming to reduce our budget request by 20% while also better communicating our alignment with the Grants 2.0 vision.

  • We believe core to some of the disagreement about our budget stems from how we are preparing for Grants 2.0. At FDD, we believe Gitcoin should be building the tooling that allows others to run their own grants rounds. We believe there are two types of tooling that this will require: sybil defense and grants eligibility moderation. Sybil defense tools (such as dPOPP and ASOP) are already being built. We also want to build tools that allow communities to reach consensus on what grants should or should not be eligible in their rounds. If we do not build this, those communities may delegate to a single person (creating a centralized system), fail to adequately moderate, or be stalled on running a round until they build their own tooling.

  • Sirlupinwatson shares two posts about learning sybil resistance. A Sybil attack is defined as “a scenario in which an attacker poses as many users as possible in order to infiltrate a system and succeed in secretly abusing it.” Sybil attacks can be prevented by having strong user authentication, creating a network that encourages neutral interactions, and punishing those who violate network rules.

:art: Merch, Memes & Marketing

  • We revised our initial budget proposal to reduce the funding request by 9% from $923k to $841k. We are focused on really trying to strike a balance in achieving all of the ambitious things that the DAO wants us to do, and doing the things that really matter.

  • We are interviewing candidates for leading the content substream and working on our marketing campaign for GR14!

:sunny: DAO Operations

  • We reduced the amount we’re requesting from the treasury for season 14 by 4.2% from $989k to $948k USD. “[We] anticipate that the initiatives and commitments we make in S14 will set up our team and the DAO for long-term success. We cannot predict the future, but we have big dreams for GitcoinDAO and in collaboration with our fellow workstreams, will continue to scale existing initiatives to meet the needs of the DAO. “

  • Based on feedback from DAO stewards and CSDO, we are exploring how we can improve the budget proposal and deliberation process for Season 15. This will involve better guidelines, financial anchors, and evaluation standards.

  • We are hiring! We are still looking for a qualified Support Lead. We also just put up a new role for someone to join us as a Community Management Lead!

:date: Upcoming community events

:wave: New to GitcoinDAO?

Thanks for reading!

As always; GitcoinDAO Digest is a community-led publication with summaries of the most important discussions and proposals across GitcoinDAO, with relevant links for further reading.

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