This is a great topic and I’m glad to see it surfaced. I love the idea of Aqueducts, but to your point it’s very possible for us to get overwhelmed by demand for specific themed rounds, and ecosystem rounds in particular (we’re already seeing a ton of inbound from projects across the ecosystem).
Ultimately, how we prioritize these rounds has to come from the DAO first and foremost, and to that end has to fit in with our mission & vision. Within the Public Goods Funding workstream there’s been a lot of research and discussion on this topic leaning heavily on some of the work that was done in Seeking a New Kind of Public Good and Other Internet’s Positive-Sum Worlds.
Personally, I think the prioritization matrix fits in well with these discussions, and I’d love to see a task force within PGF emerge to formalize such a matrix that includes our ecosystem partners. In my view the easiest way to do this would be to first draw from a combination of folks from the public library, grants ops, and partnerships.
Fortunately, most if not all of our partners thus far are high quality + legitimacy members of web3, and so making this matrix wouldn’t be too controversial.
However, as we scale we will have to make hard decisions about whether a partner truly aligns with our values, and these decisions may be uncomfortable and complex. Therefore, I’d recommend we put forward a committee that can specifically focus on outlining a private version of this matrix based on a public policy related to our core values (principally to define what we view as legitimate).
One interesting option we could consider w.r.t. legitimacy might be how much a project is willing to contribute to public goods beyond their ecosystem. I know some partners we’ve talked with have already expressed their willingness to donate up to half of their streams to Ethereum at large, and to me that’s a huge win not just for us but for the communities we serve.
tl;dr +1 on everything so far and excited to see the conversation move forward