So for me this one is a very hard decision.
I am leaning towards voting for option 3.
The reasons are that:
- I believe FDD, or something like that essential to Gitcoin grants and as such should definitely be something we should have during the grants round.
- I am sure that sybil Detection DAO is not something the DAO should spend funds right now under the current market.
- I am not confident that the current FDD team is able to deliver on what the DAO needs in the long run. I am not sure if it’s the fault of the team organization, the roadmap they are trying to stick to, or a breakdown of communication between FDD and the rest of the DAO. Something is off.
For Option 2 we are asked to fund “Passport Truthseekers” and “Community Intelligence”. I read the bullet points and explanations of what each of those is. I can’t really judge if it’s useful or not. I don’t have anything to judge by. No results to compare with.
On the other hand I understand that this is what innovation and research is about, but how long can we keep funding research without concrete results?
Then again I see comments by @David_Dyor and @DisruptionJoe here in this thread where they say they are surprised about the misalignment between the DAO and the FDD.
Some of the un-alignment accusations came as a surprise and the FDD should have a season to respond. If you think the scope of FDD drifted please give us the chance to demonstrate how aligned, lean and laser-focused we can be. Help us understand the dao-wide priorities so we can help the dao. Try to guide this crusty teenager before abandoning them. The results will be incredible.
and asking for more time to act on the feedback
It would also leave a 3/4 built skyscraper behind where people could say, “see, GitcoinDAO couldn’t provide a protocol without single points of failure and they wasted all their money on this thing”… but it might just be that finishing building that skyscraper would have removed the single points of failure. (skyscraper = the sybil work done so far)
Which makes me want to help towards aligning more on the goals and giving more feedback. I am really torn, between option 3 and 2, but leaning towards 3.
Even if If I vote for 2, it would still not be a vote for the current way FDD is doing things. We need to reconsider a lot of things. Most important of which are:
- Conciseness. FDD has a tendency to go off on a tangent. Every time I look at what you guys are doing, it sounds and looks more and more complicated than the previous time. You also tend to have funny names and very long form descriptions of everything.
- Keep it simple. (similar to point 1.). Please keep things simple. Stewards are not your enemies, but if we can’t understand what you are doing, or if we have to spend hours to understand something that should have been straightforward (come on guys it’s not rocket science) we won’t blindly say yes to it.
- Alignment on goals. Do one thing and do it well. It seems that FDD is trying to do too many things at the same time. We should have discussion within the DAO about what the FDD’s mandate and goal is again.
- Communication. There seems to be a breakdown of communication between you guys and the DAO. This is evident by the surprise you show in the feedback while this was already known between stewards in previous rounds too. Also by the comments in this thread about lack of inclusion in grants 2.0 planning (quoted below).
I would really love very direct feedback from @lthrift (Product Director) @kevin.olsen (VP of eng) @brent (Passport PM) and @nategosselin (Grants PM) to see which specific points are not aligned here. Let’s have a productive conversation!
I am also asking for us to be involved in co-creating a future. I don’t understand why FDD was only involved in the grants 2.0 planning in discovery workshops where the product team for grants 2.0 learned what FDD was currently doing, but not in any future planning where we could have put these ideas forward and course corrected together at an earlier point in this process.
No matter what option is voted for these 4 points need to be addressed.
Since the snapshot vote runs until tomorrow evening and it’s already late here, I will sleep on it and vote tomorrow. But wanted to leave my thoughts here first.