Draft Scorecard
2025/08/18 - Version 0.1.1
By Owocki
Prepared for nidiyia re: âOutcome Based Funding for Web3 Popupsâ
(vibe-researched-and-written by an LLM using this prompt, iterated on, + edited for accuracy quality and legibility by owocki himself.)
Proposal Comprehension
Title: Outcome Based Funding for Web3 Popups: GG24 sensemaking report
Author: nidiyia, with help from James Farrell and Devansh Mehta
Link: https://gov.gitcoin.co/t/outcome-based-funding-for-web3-popups-gg24-sensemaking-report/23054
TLDR
Create a transparent, impact-driven funding model for popup cities and residencies. Require applicants to publish hypercerts with clear cost breakdowns and documented outputs, compute a standardized impact score, and route funding in proportion to verified impact.
Proposers
Primary: nidiyia
Collaborators: James Farrell, Devansh Mehta
Context: author has participant and organizer experience across multiple popups and residencies.
Domain Experts
Not explicitly listed beyond the proposersâ lived experience in Edge Esmeralda, Funding the Commons residency, ZuBerlin, and IERR Residency organizing.
Proposal might benefit from having some popup organizers onboard.
Problem
IRL popup cities and residencies generate real value for Ethereum but suffer from budget opacity, inconsistent outcome reporting, and weak impact legibility. This causes allocation inefficiency and reputational risk.
Background context on popup cities like Zuzalu supports the importance and scale of these gatherings, while public budgets and systematic evaluations remain sparse.
Solution
Stand up a GG24 domain. Eligibility requires: prior popup held, hypercert with total and line-item costs plus attendee contributions, documented outputs to compute a benefit-cost style impact score, confirmed next-edition dates and location, and co-funding so GG24 is under 30 percent of total outlay. Allocate matching by impact scores and publish a round report card at 6 months.
Hypercerts provide the shared data layer for claims, verification, and funding.
Risks
- Measurement burden and gaming. Applicants may optimize for the metric rather than durable impact.
- Software - who is going to input all of the hypercerts metada? will there be a good enough ux/network effects to make it worthwihle?
- Attribution and counterfactuals. Intangible benefits like trust and network formation are hard to apportion across overlapping IRL events.
- Data quality variance. Cost line items, participant counts, and output claims may be incomplete or non-standard.
- Coordinator capacity. Appointed stewards must stand up schema, review process, and dispute resolution quickly.
- Ecosystem uptake risk. Some popup organizers may decline transparency or hypercerts, limiting sample size.
- Timeline risk. Achieving meaningful outcomes by October is tight given Sept-Jan execution window.
- Buy pressure for the hypercerts, where will it come from?
Outside Funding
Not yet specified. Proposal sets a requirement that applicants secure co-funding so GG24 contributes less than 30 percent of total outlay. We will need confirmation that leading popup organizers have expressed willingness to meet this bar.
Why Gitcoin?
Gitcoin has prior rounds tied to Zuzalu and report-card infrastructure, which gives legitimacy to steward standards for IRL coordination domains and to publish transparent post-round analyses. ([Gitcoin Governance][5])
Owockis scorecard
| # | Criterion | Score(0-2) | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Problem Focus â Clearly frames a real problem, avoids solutionism | 2 | Sharp articulation of opacity and impact-legibility gaps in popups that matter to Ethereum. |
| 2 | Credible, High-leverage, Evidence-Based Approach | 1 | Hypercerts plus benefit-cost scoring is credible and standardizable, but evidence of reliability across popups is early. Add evaluator independence and audits. |
| 3 | Domain Expertise â Recognized experts involved | 1 | Strong lived experience from proposers. Would like to see named independent evaluators or advisors with measurement chops and real pop up experience. |
| 4 | Co-Funding â Backing beyond Gitcoin | 1 | Co-funding is a requirement, but no commitments listed yet. |
| 5 | Fit-for-Purpose Capital Allocation Method | 2 | Hypercerts with transparent eligibility, impact scoring, and report cards fits the domainâs epistemology and Gitcoinâs capabilities. |
| 6 | Execution Readiness â Results by October | 1 | Sept-Jan window is workable, but October impact will likely be early outputs: schema, onboarding, initial hypercerts. Delivery risk remains. |
| 7 | Other â Vibe and blind spots | 1 | Positive alignment and standards focus. Risks: metric gaming, inconsistent participation, and attribution noise. Plan risk-mitigation explicitly. |
Score
Total Score: 9 / 14
Confidence in score: 70%
Feedback:
Major
- Get explicit comittments from cofunders.
- Secure written expressions of interest from 6 to 10 target popup organizers agreeing to publish budgets and mint hypercerts, subject to a clear privacy policy and data schema. Include named targets and status.
- Specify the evaluation pipeline: who computes scores, independence of evaluators, challenge process, and how intangible benefits are translated into the benefit side of the ratio.
Minor
- Publish a draft hypercert schema with example field values and two worked examples from past popups.
- Pre-commit to a public dashboard listing applicants, data completeness, preliminary scores, and co-funding status.
- Outline fraud and gaming safeguards: random audits, document checks, peer challenges, and consequences for misreporting.
Steel man case for/against:
For
This domain operationalizes what the ecosystem says it wants: transparency, comparability, and retroactive funding based on evidence. Hypercerts plus benefit-cost style scoring can converge fragmented popup experiments into a legible market of impact claims, while Gitcoinâs prior Zuzalu rounds and report-card muscle give the right foundation to set standards.
Against
Impact measurement for IRL popups is messy. Budgets are sensitive, outcomes are diffuse, and attributions overlap. If key organizers refuse transparency or if scores are noisy or gameable, the domain could under-allocate to genuinely catalytic culture and over-allocate to well-documented but lower-leverage events. External narratives about popup opacity persist, and may not be solvable in a single GG cycle.
Rose/ Bud/Thorn
Rose
Clear, standards-first approach with eligibility rules that push the ecosystem toward transparency. The plan to publish report cards and route funding by evidence aligns with Gitcoinâs strengths.
Thorn
Evaluator independence, gaming resistance, and data quality are underspecified. Without organizer pre-commitments to share budgets and outcomes, volume may be too thin to benchmark across popups.
Bud
This could become a new way to solve pop up city funding.
Feedback
Did I miss anything or get anything wrong? FF to let me know in the comments.
Research Notes
- Open questions: which organizers are pre-committed, evaluator names, challenge procedure, how to score intangible outcomes, and data privacy approach for sensitive budget items.
- Future diligence: obtain letters of intent from target popups, review two example hypercerts with full cost lines, run a dry-run scoring on a past popup, and pressure-test the scoring rubric with independent evaluators.