Season 15 starts on August 1st!
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Key actions for this week:
Hot Topics:
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Gitcoin Product Collective’s Budget Proposal garners support and drums up excitement across much of the DAO. Some stewards comment on the high budget being requested ($1.44M when including 60 days reserves) but declare that it’s well worth it for the future of Gitcoin. Additionally, Lindsey shares a deck with details about how the team will seek partners to help design the future of the protocol.
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Schelling Point Event Workstream Setup Proposal receives widespread support from members and stewards within the DAO with several people raising the question “what is a workstream lite?”. Simona answers: “essentially it means that it does not carry bulk. It is an agile, streamlined workstream that comes together twice a year then dissipates and that it funds itself. There will be no budget proposals from this workstream.”
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Owocki invites the community to provide feedback on how he should update his delegations in an effort to create more transparency and provides his tentative updates. Kyle also shares his updated steward delegations for Season 15. Both delegations reflect a shfit toward emphasizing Grants 2.0 and the leadership of Lindsey Thrift and Kevin Olsen.
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In Llama’s Gitcoin Treasury Runway Analysis, myceliumcoordinator and epowell101 enter the fray to criticize the analysis for not doing enough. Coordinator requests an analysis that includes different confidence intervals for each outcome. Powell points out that the analysis assumes the treasury has a static value of $134M when the current circulating supply of GTC is only $32M and says “there is no way that our treasury can actually be worth 4-5x the entire circulating market cap.”
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Owocki updates on the result of his request for Impact Certificate Proposals. The top 5 proposals each won a $2k reward. Congratulations to Digital Gaia, Protein, Ethelo/Ashoka, Impact Oracle, and Crowdmuse! Gitcoin is also “in the early stages of forming a partnership with Protocols Labs” to identify how Gitcoin Grants, Impact Certificates, and other primitives can be a part of a thriving public goods funding ecosystem.
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Ben from ScopeLift introduces flexible voting, “an extension to the Governor contracts that enables delegates to split their voting weight across For, Against, and Abstain on any given proposal”
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Check out the latest episode of the Green Pill Podcast, where Kevin Owocki brings on Daniel Schmachtenberger, a founding member of the consilience project. This episode features a deep dive on the metacrisis facing our species and how we can find a way out.
GitcoinDAO Governance Overview:
Snapshot polls GTC Holders and Tally performs on-chain actions. Proposals that have on-chain steps, such as budget requests, move on to Tally after being ratified on Snapshot.
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Active Proposals:
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Proposal Discussions:
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Latest Completed Proposals:
Workstream Discussion
Public Goods Funding
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On July 15th, we officially made GR14 matching funds available for grantees to claim.
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We’re gearing up for GR15 by locking down matching fund partners and outlining a clear strategy and timeline for our operations.
Moonshot Collective
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Governance Operations Scaling: We’ve made the difficult decision to put this initiative on pause. Although we still see value in building a tool that enables fluid, granular, and informed voting instead of binary decisions, we recognize that in the current market downturn the DAO needs to be focused on work that is more closely aligned with our purpose and essential intents.
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Passport Identity Staking: We’ve kicked off a new initiative to aid our Sybil Resistance efforts by allowing users to stake on identity. We’ve completed initial inception and discovery work. Now, we’re moving quickly toward building a prototype with Scaffold-Eth.
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Operations: We’re gearing up for Season 15 by clarifying timelines, preparing for budget season, and working on drafting our OKRs. On the compensation side, we paid out all active contributors and are writing a standard compensation policy.
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Emu writes Moonshot Accountabilities; a contributor joint outlining the level of accountability for core, trusted, and citizen contributors. Core contributors “proactively participate in the strategic planning of the workstream, while also driving the execution of work towards our initiatives.” Trusted contributors are considered for initiative teams but are not continuously staffed, and allowed great flexibility. Citizen contributors are the most common, sometimes staffed, and are invited to participate in context calls.
Fraud Detection & Defense
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The FDD Review is a new communication series calling for honest critics to inform the community about what goes on inside FDD and provide feedback. This initiative comes “after a difficult restructuring and realignment sparked by the Season 14 Budget Request process, we learned that our communication was subpar.”
- Joseph Cook authors the first post in this series: Rethinking FDD in which he makes the point that “FDD should stop asking “How do we stop fraud”? and start asking “How can we optimally allocate capital”?” One solution is measuring how well capital is allocated by surveying the community on what they’re interested in seeing funded and comparing it with the actual outcome.
Merch, Memes & Marketing
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This week, we conducted our retrospective on Grants Round 14 and identified a need to create a content marketing strategy, start grants round marketing earlier, and tighten our partnership with the PGF workstream.
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We’re continuing the migration of our email and website to Hubspot and are excited about the new features this will unlock!
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CoachJonathan shared our methods and early results from Experiments in Governance at MMM. In order to improve the clarity and process of our decision-making, we have implemented a three-phase system for proposals to become governance.
- Phase 1: Proposals are conceived on discord or google docs.
- Phase 2: Proposals go on Murmur where we ask questions and decide if it should pass.
- Phase 3: If a proposal passes on Murmur, it is codified in our knowledgebase.
DAO Operations
- CSDO: At this week’s meeting, we discussed our preparation for Season 15 including timeline and proposal process. The CSDO will discuss budget drafts internally over the next two weeks with drafts going on the forum by July 25th for comments. Season 15 will kick off August 1st and budgets should be proposed on snapshot by August 15th. Then, funds should be in workstreams multisigs by August 29th.
Grants 2.0
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Grants Hub: We are finishing up the last pieces on our path to production: implementing pinata.cloud as a storage solution, and auditing our smart contracts. We’ve also conducted two user research sessions to identify what works and what doesn’t work for our users. Lastly, our latest demo shows off the user flow for reviewing and creating new projects!
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Round Manager: We’re focusing on ensuring our product creates a publicly available record of all grant programs and rounds. In order to do that, we’re utilizing an IPFS pinning service and storing a link to our pinned files in our smart contracts. Additionally, we’ve made our smart contracts upgradeable to ensure we don’t lose any links. Lastly, we have created high-fidelity designs for our MVP and are aiming for an August 1st launch date!
Upcoming community events
- Drop in on our weekly DAO Vibes on Wednesdays at 4:00 PM UTC on Discord! We have been seeing great attendance and engagement and we would love for you to join us.
New to GitcoinDAO?
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To learn more about what the DAO onboarding experience entails, please visit our notion page.