Gm new fam,
I’ve just finished sitting on a public art funding jury, and it had me thinking there are probably some useful tools to share, namely scoring and feedback for grants.
While the simple mechanism of give funding the the projects you like the most works well, it would also be great and so valuable to give feedback so that anyone can iterate, improve, or rethink their proposal.
Further, scoring can potentially offer transparency: broad categories to score such as impact, feasibility, and merit allow for more clarity around how decisions were made, and as a tool for applicants to assess their own proposals.
They are still really subjective, but could be a really useful way to compare competing projects.
Also, having even loose guidelines can
help granters better discern if a project is aligning with their values.
Not sure if everyone would want to take the time to provide feedback, but what if it was framed as a sort of civic service (rather than duty) - would folks need to be incentivized beyond that?
Thoughts?
can you say more about how public art funding is scored? and what is working in that world?
this idea kind of reminds me of the “wall of love” feature we used to have.
back in GR7, we used to have a feature where when you went to your grant cart + added tokens to each grant you could click a button that gave various feedback statements like
i love your mission!
this project is high potential
important money lego
custom mesesage
then upon checkout that message would be posted on the grants wall.
over time these messages were aggregated onto a “wall of love” and you could basically see the community feedback ebb & flow over time.
the feature was removed for reasons unknown to me tho. probably tech debt or team turnover related since those were gitcoin’s biggest challenges at that time.
So, generally, grants share criteria for success ahead of time, and at times have strategic priorities in order to bring equity to marginalized artists. Criteria are usually along the lines of merit, impact, and feasibility - for example - artistic merit (is it good? is it thoughtful? has it already been done 1000 times?) and impact - (who will benefit from this? Does it connect well with the communities it plans to address?). Feasibility refers to their proposed budgets - and projects can fail if their budgets don’t align with the proposed scope, or if they aren’t paying artists sufficiently).
Feedback is private to the applicants (successful or otherwise) and success is public. For best practices the juries are always composed of peers.
The criteria are published ahead of the grant writing, so candidates should know to address the criteria directly.
So, for gitcoin, could suggested criteria do any good for potential funders to help them in their assessments? Does anyone need or want help with assessing before choosing what to fund, or is it all good already?
Again, could it be voluntary to do some assessments? Could there be a mentoring aspect to assessments? Say a pre-grant dry run?
Forgive the maybe basic question - Are the grants ever thematic? EG “this round we’re focusing on infrastructure, or this round we’re jazzed to see environmental impact”?
Some granting foundations do this in the arts funding space.
Just some thoughts. For the most part, funding goes to innovative work.
Another thread has a conversation that is related which is “How might we ensure trusted outcomes, enable exit/capture-resistance, and minimize cost for any community-curated reviewing needed?”
I agree that in general we can improve our collective decision-making by talking.
For example, EA nonprofits often create EA Forum threads to champion their approach, where people can share their concerns and judgments. This affects grant recommendations.
A cheap way for Gitcoin to experiment with it might be to tweak the application process slightly, so that you first post your project to a Discourse instance and then the Grants listing just links to these threads.
I wouldn’t agree more. Some sort of criteria in which the project owner is provided some sort of feedback on making the product better even if they don’t get to take part in the grant round. I am a game developer trying to fit in to the Web3.
