Voter Guides on the rise
Just as in Q1/S13 I created a voter guide. Iâd 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 Iâll 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 Iâm looking forward to dividing the workload over some more talented contributors in the near future, and slowly getting there 
Weâre 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 youâll 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 âslime moldâ is evolving and how we can make it better, together. Thereâs a lot to do.
Gitcoinâs 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 weâve organized in preparation for S14, where we dove into objectives per workstream. Our latest session, which was about GitcoinDAOâs 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 â 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. Itâs 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 itâs 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 Iâd definitely support. I just donât think itâs 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 @Fishbiscuitâs proposal for a budget of 49K GTC. |
| DCompass | No | I will just copy most of Annikaâs 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 Iâd 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
