We are growing. We are tooling up. We’ve already shipped some bangers. We have many more planned…
We would like 130k GTC
Our goal is to focus on bringing the toolkit to market, validating new prototypes, onboarding new talent.
Proposal Body :
This is a request to fund the Moonshot Collective with GTC from GitcoinDAO Treasury for Q2 2022.
The moonshot collective is a collection of builders & web3 community members who are prototyping experiments in coordination.
Last request for funding: Q4 21’ (skipped Q1 22’)
Workstream Objectives: Our target state is to build an innovation machine that systematically rapidly prototypes new coordination tools and takes them to market.
Current Mulit-Sig signers (â…”):
Owocki
Austin Griffith
Emu
6 High Quality Schelling Point activations planned
Moonshot Collective is proving to be a natural convergence point for web3 contributors who not only want to see this space succeed, but want to accelerate the pace at which we can successfully coordinate with one another.
21 Streams deployed
6 successful pay party elections for MC Contributors (and counting)
Voted on signers and deployed a baby multisig (Funded with monthly burn) where our devs get to feel our products. Here
Mars shot bots raised $140,500
Moonshot bots raised 786.24 ETH, $2.5mm at the time of the raise
Planned:
Ratify the compensation policy
Optimism partnership kicked off
Tip.party, pay.pary, tokenstream.party used to pay devs
Whew, $1.1M is certainly a big jump over the last quarter.
I would love to see this expanded to a 4 of 7. I know MSC has been growing the team, and decentralizing decision making on fund appropriation would be a great step to honor the growth of the team. Further, having multisig members who are your “customers” would really enforce the feedback loop too. Not sure if you have identified who your customers are yet, but I would love to see 1 or 2 of those on the multisig to offer a signal on the outcomes you are delivering.
The budget request breakdown is pretty hand wavy. Asking for 80k GTC for “product/prototype builds.” Do you have ideas on how that will be spent yet? Local contributors, outside contracting firms, etc. As I think about the budget here, with little details on the 80k, having more accountability on the multisig would be a great first step.
I think about this in two ways. Low detail/accountability on the budget request, high detail/accountability on distribution of funds (more multi-sig holders). Or perhaps the inverse.
130k GTC isn’t really a big jump. Our first quarter we asked for 40k and our second quarter we asked for 100k. Then we skipped a quarter and now we’re asking for 130k. We successfully deployed that GTC to build a lot prototypes and return (+3mm?) in public goods funding to the Gitcoin multisig. We will put this funding to good use and empower builders to create next generation dao tooling.
I’d love to get more customers as signers on the multisig. We’ll keep our eyes out for good candidates. Basically we just make a few signatures a month because of other tooling in place like our “baby multisig” that makes GTC distribution to builder streams a breeze.
I’m in support of this budget. I think Moonshots are the heart of why DAOs exist. The amount raised is greater than the amount asked for. This seems like a reasonable jump to me.
hrm, this is quite the budget for a single season, with little to no insight into how the funds are being spent, outside of the OKRs.
$700k for three months feels like it should come with more insight into which projects are getting what part of the budget. Do you have any thoughts on how you plan to staff or spend the funds across the two initiatives (protocol and product development)?
Can you help to understand what kind of insights and metrics into how these funds are being spent you would want to see? The OKRs are the key results for the seasons, as a collective we were under the impression that they are the primary way we should be governed.
It’s definitely a large budget but I’m supportive of this request due to the success of prior projects, exciting roadmap, total amount the moonshot collective has raised for public goods, and that a quarter was skipped.
Yes. Most workstreams have a transparent budget on funding planned for the duration of their season. Here is FDD’s, here is DAO Ops, etc.
FWIW, this is an area I hope that DAO Ops can help… both in sharing a budget template and helping MSC operationalize it if there is interest.
Given the sizable request, it would be great to know that there is a plan for the money and that it’s not being spent without a plan. I still have a hard time voting yes on a budget of this given the lack of budget, and progress on some of the tools (ie, missing market fit). The “success” to date has largely come from raising funds for public goods, which were (primarily) Kevin and Austin YOLO efforts.
I am really bullish on the tools MSC are building, and I would love to see more thought given to how those will become prolific amongst DAOs.
It is true that Moonshot Bots, which raised $3mm for Grants matching pool, was mostly a Kevin/Austin YOLO to start.
I’d just briefly challenge this assertion by pointing out a few counter examples that the collective has built:
Successes at Moonshot that did not deeply involve Austin/Kevin
Quadratic Trust, was led by @anneconnelly and her team with only recruiting/advisory support from myself and Austin, and was able to build & ship a social quadratic curation experience that successfully was used by hundreds of people during GR11, and proved that Quadratic Funding can be used for curation (something that’s been on the core team backlog for a very long time).
The Greatest LARP was built by a half dozen people from the collective (though it was my vision), and raised $500k for public goods + the comic was read thousands of times.
Tip.Party, TokenStream.party, and pay.party, and the inchoate multisiend app have each been used dozens of times to reward Moonshot Devs, and are run almost entirely without my involvement. Though to your point these tools need more work to cross-pollinate to other DAOs.
There will be a half dozen marketing activations at schelling point driven by Moonshoters with almost no involvement by myself/Austin. An art gallery, actors doing on-theme performances, NFT auctions, a POAPathon, and a few other bespoke activations. I cannot say how successful these are yet, perhaps on Friday we can.
Successes in Rapid Prototyping at Gitcoin
And even before the Moonshot Collective launched in July 2021, there was a track record of successful YOLO innovation happening in/around GitcoinDAO. For example:
Fundoss - a QF application for web2 that successfully raised $95k for web2 oss. (2021)
Downtown stimulus - a QF application that successfully raised $45k for Boulder COVId relief. (2020)
WTFisQF - an easy QF calculator/explainer, used by 100s of ppl per month. (2020)
QuadraticVote.co - an easy tool for hosting Quadratic Votes, used by 100s of ppl per month (2020)
Hosting Sustainweb3 - a one day conference about OSS sustainability, with attendance in the 100s and video watches in the 1000s (2020)
the launch of Gitcoin Labs and the Burner Wallet, with my friend Austin Griffith (2019)
Various experiments & products launched on Gitcoin.co including small experiments like Gitcoin Quests, Gitcoin Kudos, the Quadratic Lands, an avatar builder, a quadratic funding social network, and other tools that later evolved into being flagships like Gitcoin Hackathons or Gitcoin Grants. (over the years)
a handful of other tools that recorded here and here (over the years)
Of course, Moonshot Collective does not take credit for the innovation that precedes it, but it is cut from the same cloth of this innovation - so it is worth mentioning it to give full context.
In Conclusion
It is true that the Moonshot Collective does need more work to get to its target state, and the recent additions of two product managers and a project manager (and the systems they set up) are investments in getting more systematic about the progress towards product market fit.
But I think we should start that journey with a consensus that the tools sometimes reach product market fit right now. I also want to dispel the notion that the only successes have come from myself/Austin (they have been the result of the work of ppl in many corners of the collective).
@kyle We are also really excited about what MC has developed so far. Our next big questions are around whether the problems these tools solve for our experienced widely across DAOs, and if the specific solutions we’ve built for them (the tools themselves) are meaningful solutions to those problems.
We are tackling this in two ways:
Short term: cleaning up the usability and intuitiveness of the tools we’ve already built (specifically pay, tokenstream, and tip) and getting them into users hands
Longer term: digging into evidence-based research about how DAO workstreams outside of our own function, drawing a map of a typical DAO’s landscape, identifying the big white spaces, and going after solving those big, exciting problems
Tip will be going live at Schelling Point (woohoo!) and we plan to have Pay certainly and Tokenstream hopefully in a much more usable place by the end of the month. Excited to see what we can learn!
I appreciate you noting this and I want to echo that this is my sentiment as well. The work of the collective is and needs to continue to be stronger than just the funding brought in for matching pool (though that is important).
The callout on other projects is helpful, but my primary concern is that the funding feels immense without clear details on how to spend it. I am being critical right now of another workstream to request a large reserve (which is contentious), and to instead use the governance process quarterly to ensure they are accountable. It feels appropriate to ask the same of MSC – to have a budget with details on how it plans to spend and not make requests that are too large for their needs.
Is this something DAO Ops can help with? How can we support you all with this type of planning? @emudoteth
Whew, $1.1M is certainly a big jump over the last quarter.
