Kris' Voter Guide S14

Voter Guides on the rise

Just as in Q1/S13 I created a voter guide. I’d invite all Stewards to create guides as a way to show accountability on voting, plus also to inform their peers, as a way to increase intersubjective consensus. You can start with the template created by @owocki here or you can duplicate this post and make it your own. As a reader, know that you can and should hold your steward(s) accountable on fairly representing you, you can find your (future) Steward via the Steward Health Cards, where you can (re)delegate your voting power at any time.

I hesitated to create this because every workstream who worked massively hard on this deserves a way longer explanation than the below, but because so much is at stake (bear market, overall direction of the DAO, and because perfect is the enemy of good (enough)) I went ahead: below some holistic thoughts on how I’ll be voting plus some details per workstream in the table.

Background: DAO Operations

On the note of lacking time, this is due to working more than full time in the DAO Ops workstream, so I’m looking forward to dividing the workload over some more talented contributors in the near future, and slowly getting there :slight_smile: We’re currently looking for a community management lead and a support lead, a treasury management job description is in the making but feel free to already reach out, and help us spread the word. Other ways to support us is by commenting on our workstream proposal and if you are a Steward we hope you’ll vote YES.

I want to note that although my comments are pretty concise they are deeply informed. Know that as an active contributor and co-workstream lead in DAO Ops I am - together with @Jodi - basically part of all the cross-workstream calls and with our various initiatives & its leads we cover a lot of ground within the DAO (Accounting, Community Experience, Community Governance, Devops, People Ops & User Support). It gives a good view on how this organism, this ‘slime mold’ :slight_smile: is evolving and how we can make it better, together. There’s a lot to do.

Gitcoin’s Purpose and Essential Intent

Especially helpful are our weekly CSDO calls (Cross Stream DAO Operations) which are part of the community experience initiative (in DAO Ops) and the extra strategy sessions (facilitated by @samspurlin from The Ready), which we’ve organized in preparation for S14, where we dove into objectives per workstream. Our latest session, which was about GitcoinDAO’s Purpose and Essential Intent, was the session that I was waiting for to make my own decisions as a Steward. The document you can find here is not our final output - next steps are being worked on by a core team - but we did reach alignment on the fact that we want to focus on 4 points as a DAO (random order!):

  • Improve Coordination Intra Gitcoin DAO
  • Gitcoin Grants 2.0 (Protocol)
  • Grow Grants GMV
  • Financial Sustainability

The first is at the core of what DAO Ops is about, 2 will be the key mission of the new Grants 2.0 workstream (S15) and part of what Moonshot Collective will be doing in the next seasons. Number 3 is key for Public Goods Funding and FDD (when it comes to anti-sybil defense), and 4 is spread over DAO Ops, future Grants 2.0 and MMM in my opinion, all in their own way. Logically a living organism as Gitcoin DAO does a lot more that indirectly ties into this but the above points plus my logic derived from this will heavily influence my voting behavior.

Workstream feedback

With that said, here is my assessment of the S14 Budget Requests (as of May 10th – subject to change)

Edit: first change, changed my vote for kernel to Yes

Workstream Recc Comment
MMM Yes I will support this budget as is. It’s been great to see MMM evolve and see it find a balance between being strategic and objective-driven and still leaving enough room for creativity & bottom-up initiative emergence. For me S13 was a transition season and I hope S14 will be the season MMM truly shows its leadership on all things memes, merchandise & especially marketing. More thoughts here
PGF Yes I will be supporting this budget as is, especially with the revised amounts for the categories Publication and ImpactDAO. I hope there will be lots of deep integration with MMM, DAO Ops and others + more budget transparency. More thoughts here.
FDD No I tried to read the many many comments under FDD and grasp the totality of what is being proposed, but I do not have the time to dig in deeper and read it all. I want to vote no, because I think FDD is too complex and is doing too many things that are not focusing on anti-sybil. I wanted to abstain because it feels uncomfortable to vote no without having the time to read through it all but 1) some comments during the Stewards Council made me realize it’s ok to sit with such discomfort and better to vote no than to abstain. 2) the fact that other stewards also mention (during the council) that they cannot evaluate FDD because it is too complex to them is to me the sign that it is. I will defer to other comments under the proposal on where and how budget reductions could be possible, to me it seems it can happen in all initiatives, as there seems to be a lot that is not focused on its core mission. I hope they will take this opportunity to drastically simplify their approach.
Kernel Yes Edit: Changing my vote to Yes based on the updated proposal, of which the amount was amended for the second time. Original thoughts: I appreciate the revised proposal by Kernel and I am one of the biggest promoters of Kernel as an initiative in this space. However, seeing the draft priorities as outlined above of what Gitcoin will be focusing on in the time to come, this is still too much at this moment. For me it makes more sense to immediately fund Kernel as a mutual grant project, which I’d definitely support. I just don’t think it’s in the best interest of Gitcoin to add the complexity of creating another workstream at a moment we want to focus more than ever, I also do not think Kernel wants or needs this distraction while pursuing their mission. Education is however a core public good, and web3 education for that reason lies even closer to my heart. Kernel is in my opinion invaluable, so I see two options here: a lower amount for this season or passing it separately as a partnership & mutual grant. I would support @Fishbiscuit’s proposal for a budget of 49K GTC.
DCompass No I will just copy most of Annika’s comment as it best reflects my views. Given our focus on Grants 2.0 & becoming a Protocol DAO and my lack of clarity as to how dCompass fits into that, I plan to vote no here. However, given how much time and effort has already been put into this project a mutual grant makes a lot of sense to me, and I’d definitely support this. Given the fact that Gitcoin has funded all development up to this point I however hope that we will be able to receive a higher amount of tokens than the 5% mentioned in the comments.
Kudos No This was a tough one. It is a pretty small budget request, but in the light of our need for focus, this makes no sense to me. If we continue to build a decentralized Kudos version, I hope the team can apply to become a part of either Moonshot Collective or the upcoming Grants 2.0 workstream. Another separate workstream at this point does not make sense to me. Again, an alternative is a mutual grant.
MC Yes Moonshot CoIlective has been bringing a whole lot of extra structure into their team in the past season. On top of this it plays an important role in creating the building blocks of Grants 2.0, such as dPopp.
DAO Ops Abstain I will be abstaining here as co-workstream lead who co-created this proposal.

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Thanks for reading, looking forward to comments and more voter guides.

Public Goods are Good,
Kris

7 Likes

Just trying to muster whatever energy I have left while recovering from COVID so here’s my voter guide! I’ve done my best to give every budget the attention it asks for (reading everything and deliberating)

QZ’s guide

tl;dr

Workstream Amount Recc Comment
MMM 152.9K GTC Yes I am supportive of S14’s budget to give MMM some breathing space to hit its stride. Gitcoin’s brand is one of the strongest in the space and I hope to see S14 put MMM into a great position to be able to start reeling in costs come S15 and have a stronger focus.
KERNEL 49K GTC Yes I am supportive of Kernel joining the DAO as a workstream especially with the changes proposed following my recommendation
FDD 118K GTC Abstain As of now I am leaning towards an abstain on this season’s budget because I’m 60% in agreement with FDD’s direction and budgeting. The last week has been brutal on the market and I am of the opinion we need to buckle down our hatches. If during S14 FDD can demonstrate that there is demand for sybil defence outside of Gitcoin and provide a service, then the economics of this workstream will change drastically.
DAO Ops 115K GTC Yes I am voting for this budget but would like to see a clearer reign on costs. Similar to the rationale behind lowering FDD’s budget, I think DAO Ops should aim to try and do more with less season by season.I see DAO Ops as similar to HR/Finance functions. So DAO Ops ideally shouldn’t take up more than 5-6% of GitcoinDAO’s entire proposed budget. Assuming nothing has changed, 115k GTC is 17% of the combined budgets of MMM, PGF, FDD, DAO Ops, and MSC.
MSC 83k GTC Yes I think its important for Gitcoin to keep building our new ways to fund public goods and to fund ourselves. Looking forward to putting some of these tools to action!
Kudos 6.6k GTC No I am voting no because of several reason but ultimately this cannot be a workstream in a DAO as it is its own entity already. Instead lets explore a grant leading to a future token swap. This isn’t a vote against the project itself, but against this method of getting funded.
dCompass 19K GTC No To be this is a clear no because there’s more reserves than what is requested + the format is wrong
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Isn’t the task force of a “Steward” to understand a budget request or at least partially, then challenge it or be willing to be challenged?

I feels like reading your comments you are not making your own assessment of the situation, instead you are following up on what other “Stewards” are saying and seems like you don’t have time to read anything or this is to complicated then you are just tossing it away.

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I think I’m being pretty straightforward about it here, right? I was indeed being influenced by other Stewards that dove deeper (for this round) but especially by the steward council where a lot of people expressed they did not grasp what FDD was doing, which - as said - is/was probably a sign that they are doing too much. Being a more than fulltime contributor you sometimes have to prioritize what you do, there is only that much time.

Not sure what your point is here?

Here are some adjustments. It would be great to see if it helps.

FDD Season 14 Budget Proposal - Google Docs

We are only working on two things. Sybil defense and grant eligibility reviews. Not sure what other things you are referring to.

Maybe it is because FDD is literally solving unsolved research problems which ARE complex, not complicated? Is that a possibility? It would be great to know if the new proposal draft makes it less complex.

If you are looking for net reduction, is one of these four options enough?

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I’m supposed to be on the steward council but wasn’t sent the invite for the call. FYI

(Yes, I was told I missed filling out the lettucemeet, but once the time was set, a calendar invite was sent which I was not included on)

It definitely helps a lot, and I think one of these 4 proposals should pass for sure.

I think this was definitely a breakdown in communication and in the future - whichever the outcome of the letttucemeet is - @Pop will make sure that all stewards council members will receive the invite. Do know there are detailed notes, which you can find here.

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Again, I did post twice in the steward council channel and emailed. Had I just communicated once perhaps I would understand - saying that, adding everyone to the call regardless of response can be the catch-all for the future

1 Like