Jokerace - GG18 Feedback/Feature Request Contest - Summary & Insights

[koday]

GM Public Goods Funders,

We are excited to announce the conclusion of our first-ever Jokerace! This contest was designed to garner valuable community feedback and feature requests after our most recent grant round, GG18.

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First off, a huge thank you to all those who participated, contributed, and voted! Your insights are invaluable for the ongoing development and improvement of Grants Stack and the overall program.

Contest Overview

The Jokerace was initiated to invite active members of the community to provide constructive feedback and feature requests that are directly relevant to Gitcoin and its operations. The contest ran from September 6 to September 20, with a week for submissions and another week for voting.

There were a total of 15 submissions and 295.64 votes deployed, check out the full results here!

Rules & Voting Mechanism

To ensure only those involved in GG18 could contribute, we set up rules governing eligibility:

• Only wallets that donated in GG18 and payout addresses of GG18 grants could create submissions.
• Feedback had to be pertinent to Gitcoin.
• No spam, profanity, hate speech, or personal attacks were allowed.

The voting mechanism was crafted to reflect the degree of user involvement in GG18:

• 1-9 Unique donations = 2 votes
• 10-19 Unique donations = 4 votes
• 20+ Unique donations = 6 votes
• GG18 grantee = 8 votes

Top 4 Responses

Here are the top-rated responses:

1. User: omnianalytics.lens
   Idea: A grants recommender system based on a brief 5-10 question survey for donors.
   Total votes: 123.92
   Full submission

2. User: voicedeck.eth
   Idea: Comment section under each project, open to wallets that clear passport score requirements.
   Total votes: 49.349
   Full submission

3. User: hylos.lens
   Idea: Gas back feature to earn points for every donation that can be exchanged into gas back fees.
   Total votes: 48.283
   Full submission

4. User: tekr0x.lens
   Idea: New projects should be featured at the top and various improvements on project listing and URLs.
   Total votes: 28.06
   Full submission

As promised, the submitters of the top 4 responses have been sent 0.03125 ETH (~$50 @ ETH value of $1600). Check the transactions here: 1, 2, 3, 4

Takeaways

• Community-driven Feature Development: It’s clear that our community is full of creative and insightful members willing to contribute to Gitcoin’s evolution. Ideas like a recommender system and gas-back features are interesting and could significantly improve user experience.
• User Experience and Accessibility: Suggestions about adding a comment section and creating shorter URLs signal that while our platform is functional, there’s room to make it more user-friendly and interactive.
• Community Response: The Jokerace seemed to be well-received by members of the community on Twitter/X. See some examples here, here, and here.

The Importance of Community Engagement

Running this Jokerace has demonstrated the immense value of community engagement. Not only do we get direct feedback from those who use our platform the most, but we also foster a sense of collective ownership and contribution. This sets the stage for more dynamic and responsive engagement cycles, ultimately benefiting everyone involved.

Looking Forward to GG19

The feedback received has helped to set the wheels in motion for what promises to be an even more successful GG19. We’ll be closely evaluating these top-voted ideas and considering them in our development roadmap. Stay tuned for further product and program updates, and keep your eyes peeled for more Jokeraces in the future!

Thanks again to everyone who participated for your invaluable input. Here’s to making Gitcoin an even better platform, together!

[meglister]

Thanks so much for posting this and running the joke race @koday !

I love the idea of a recommender app from @omnianalytics . We don’t currently have this on the Grants Stack roadmap but if there are community members who are interesting in building it – I’d fund it. Please let me know if you are interested!

We also have several improvements coming to the grants experience for the next round, and I think we’ll be able to address the idea from @Tekr0x.eth too!

[Tekr0x.eth]

Awesome! Thank you. I really enjoyed using Jokerace to give feedback and input. I look forward to seeing the improvements

[jengajojo]

Jokerace is a great tool for community driven feature development and I’m glad to see this was useful here. It would be helpful to give these rounds more promotion on forums as well as other internal channels to gather more feedback.

[omnianalytics]

Oh yay! I won the race!

Seriously though, I have always imagined a recommender system for Gitcoin and it would definitely be a part of my donation selection workflow. I’d give a little to the top grants, a little to the smaller grants, and then I’d use the recommender system to find the a rank ordered list of grants that match closely with my interests at that moment.

[thedevanshmehta]

Thanks for the tweet shoutout, I greatly enjoyed the jokerace! I also loved reading the other suggestions.

The biggest room for improvement is increasing voter turnout. It’s a legitimately hard question on how to do so, especially as most haven’t bridged to PGN before and it seemed trivial asking them to do so only for this competition.

I also thought it absurd that by default i had to pay $0.3-$0.5 in gas fees for every project i voted for However, by going to advanced settings and putting gas limit as 0.00000001 gwei i could push the transaction through for free

[ale.k]

Love these-

I wonder if revisiting bounty programs might make sense to action on some of these community raised suggestions that don’t fit easily into the Grants Stack team’s roadmap?

[FractalVisions]

Honestly I’m sad that we missed the opportunity to participate in this and wish we had been notified sooner.

Perhaps even a PGN drop to all the grantees of GG18 would have been a smart way to onboard everyone to the network with a high voting turnout. Providing a faucet would have increased the excitement of all the participants.

Bridging to PGN is painful because I had to bridge my funds from either Arbitrum or Optimism back to Eth main net before bridging to PGN in the most backwards compatible L2 bridge process I have ever had to complete in order to participate. In fact I gave up because gas fees were too high at the time.

It wasn’t until I submitted my Gitcoin Citizen application that I forced myself to bridge over funds finally to PGN.

The first time I didn’t send enough and ran out of gas after my first or second transaction while editing my grant. So then I had to bridge again from L2 > L1 > L2 in order to complete my application.

Imagine the friction that people feel when bridging from L1 to L2 and then multiple that by a few times. That is the amount of friction this caused which demotivates any regular user from participating.

Let alone if a project received a majority of their matching funds on Optimism in the last round how did you expect them to bridge their funds over to PGN ?

Was there no consideration for those who already have funds on L2 from the donations on Optimism ?