[Proposal] FDD Workstream Season 13 Budget Request

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FDD Workstream Season 13 Budget Proposal

Workstream Mandate: Defend Gitcoin (Grants, DAO, & future products) from threats to its legitimacy, credible neutrality, and sustainability.

FDD is requesting $879,000 (93,500 GTC*) to fund Season 13 (S13) and replenish its reserves for S14.

High Level Budget Breakdown

Season 13 Budget Total = $596,295 = 63.5k GTC ($9.40/GTC*)

PLUS Season 14 Reserves = $596,295

Total Needed = $1,192,590

MNUS Current Reserves = $313,000

Total Amount requested at this time = $879,590 =93,500 GTC ($9.40/GTC*)

*Prices last updated 2/9/22

The GTC total will be adjusted based on the current market value at the time this proposal is moved to Snapshot and to Tally. The vote will be to send $879,590 in GTC at the current price when moved to Tally or the 20 day moving average (whichever is lower).

FDD Season 13 (Q1) 2022 Budget

TL;DR

Season 12 Financials

  • FDD made approximately $70k via good treasury management in S12
  • $40k over budget was intentional as we spent ½ of what we gained in treasury management efficiency. Total Season 12 (Q4) spend was $440,000.
  • Bi-weekly payments were made to contributors in a transparent manner.

Season 12 Accomplishments

  • Sybil attack rate jumped from around 6% of total contributions in GR11 to 26% in GR12 and FDD flagged 114,000 of them
  • The anti-sybil ml pipeline had a 140% flagging efficiency rate meaning we detected 140% of what human evaluators alone would have detected.
  • Increased human evaluations completed to over 6,000 - a 320% increase!
  • Built GIA software, tested on disputes, ran data analysis, and will be using it for all grant reviews in GR13. (This is better than comments on a notion page ie. previous system)
  • GIA test had 53 participants - A huge decentralization compared to 5-10 hired evaluators
  • Specifications made for a decentralized appeals system using Celeste or Kleros

Detailed Season 12 Review: State of FDD - Season 12 Review

Season 13 Financials

  • Season 13 is $155k increase = 34% budget increase

Season 13 Round Deliverables

  • We currently have 18 outcomes for the next 90 days. Each outcome has 3 measurable key results that will determine if we achieved the outcome.
  • Ground Control (Operations)

    • 90% of decisions for mid-season budget changes and new proposals will go through our FDD Operating System rather than just Disruption Joe

    • Disruption Joe will participate in our “source council” rather than having a workstream lead salary
    • Long term metric goals will be set to define the health of our initiatives
  • Sybil Defenders
    • GitcoinDAO will run the end to end operational processes of the anti-sybil ml pipeline reducing our dependence on Blockscience
    • A simulation software will be developed to let us better anticipate attacks and possibly increase training opportunities for the ml models
    • A human evaluations app built for effective training, improved inter-reviewer reliability at a lower cost per evaluation, and continuous data insights
    • Work will continue on our long term vision A Community Based Roadmap for Sybil Detection Across Web 3
    • We will gain soft commitments and technical requirements from 3 partners to a sybil data sharing network built with a web 3 ethos & ethics
  • Grants Investigation Agency (GIA)
    • We are using the GIA tool built last round to review the estimated 7-800 new grant applications that come in.
    • Our goals include increasing the number of reviewers per grant, lower the cost per review, and define a mechanism design that will allow us to open up the review process to anyone via staking of GTC
    • Building the decentralized appeals integration and testing it
    • Reviewing and updating ALL of the grant eligibility policy documentation

This budget was reviewed by many stakeholders including the FDD Multisig Oversight Council, other workstream leads, and some Gitcoin Holdings team members. One question that came up multiple times was “If you had to slash $x from your budget, do you know what you would cut?” The answer is yes. However, it wouldn’t be to the benefit of Gitcoin. We could operationally function at half this budget for GR13, but we wouldn’t be doing anything to build scalability into our tech or our processes.

Seeing the total donations increase round over round (S11 = $1.61m / 16.6 users to S12 = $3.2m / 27.2k users) at 50 - 100%, an increase of 34% to our budget seems justified. Especially considering the rate at which the sybil attacks are increasing (300-400%) and the complexity added to the grant eligibility process via side rounds.

Milestone Report

Full details here: FDD Season 13 Budget Request Details

Season 13 Top Level OKRs

Sybil Defenders - Legitimacy

Gitcoin OKR: Decentralization

FDD Objective: Build a community driven anti-sybil pipeline

KR 1: # of contributors to the open-source feature engineering pipeline during season x

KR 2: (Cost / Human Evaluation) goes down while maintaining inter-reviewer reliability

KR 3: # of ecosystem data partners

Grants Investigation Agency - Credible Neutrality

Gitcoin OKR: Scalability

FDD Objective: Increase participation, transparency, and legitimacy in Grant Eligibility process

KR 1: Average reviewers per grant

KR 2: Total number of reviewers during season x

KR 3: Grant time to activation during review period

Ground Control - Sustainability

Gitcoin OKR: Decentralization

FDD Objective: Be able to measure FDD health & increase the score

KR 1: Contributor satisfaction metric go up

KR 2: GIA execution score go up

KR 3: Sybil Defense execution score go up


Each of these top level OKRs has a mandate steward driving FDD to achieve them along with 2 of our multisig oversight group who are assigned as their designated Subject Matter Expert Zone (SME Zone). The top level OKRs provide semi-constant metrics we can use to see FDD progress over the course of 12-18 months.

We ran almost 15 hours of strategy workshops to determine which outcomes we needed to achieve during Season 13 to achieve consistent results on our top level OKRs. (Some of which still need to be baselined during S13)

Outcome owners then selected their Key Results to indicate success over the next 90 days for each chosen outcome. This process was part of our new FDD Operating System (FDD OS) which will allow us to create hierarchies of work while removing hierarchies of people.

Financials

Season 12 Budget

Season 12 Funds Spent to Date

$416,613 as of 2/1/22. There is one more weekly epoch left to pay contributors meaning our total spend for the defense portion of the Q4 budget proposal will be $40-45k over budget. This is a conscious decision made by the workstream to use part of the earnings from strong treasury management to start new initiatives, improve a few ongoing ones, and fund the transition to the FDD-OS v1.0 governance model.

Funds Carried Over From Season 12

$313k will be carried over from Season 12. This includes $278k in reserves plus $35k in treasury management gains.

Budget Increase From Season 12 to Season 13

FDD will have spent $440k on defense in Season 12. The Season 13 ask is for $595k which is a $150k (34%) increase.

Season 13 Budget

Current Contributors

FDD had 8 full time contributors going into Season 12. After spinning out other workstreams, we now have 6. With our effort to pay a base to all source council members for FDD, we will be at 9 FT for Season 13.

Format Below: Name (Outcomes owned)

Workstream Lead

Disruption Joe (Payments / FDD OS / ASOP Transfer / SDW Discovery)

Mandate Stewards

Ground Control (Ops): SirLupinWatson (Contributor Experience / Human Evaluations)
Sybil Defense: Omnianalytics: (Data Analysis / Community Model / Trust Bonus Update)
Grants Investigation Agency: David Dyor (Policy / Appeals)

Source Council

Includes all above plus all squad drivers (outcome owners)

Nollied (Data Storage Layer/Matrix/GIA Development)
Kishorditya (Mandate Delivery)
Waka (Contributor CAP Table Modeling)
Zer8 (GIA Reviews)
BFA (GIA Rewards)

The average Source Council member will make $90,000 USD annually as a combination of:

  • $500 Base (Flat amount paid weekly)
  • $500 Coordinape ($500/ SC member distributed via Coordinape)
  • $100 Participation (Show up for Weekly Update / Report Payments on Time)
  • $250 For each outcome owned
  • $250 Mandate Steward Bonus
  • $500 Workstream Lead Bonus
  • 10% SC Bonus paid quarterly based on OKR completion

In our modeling, the top 3 earners would make an annual income of $150k, $120k, and $109k as workstream lead and mandate stewards with 2 or 3 outcomes owned. The bottom three who only own one outcome each would earn $49k, $57k, and $58k.

This is highly aligned with their levels of participation and skills needed for their various positions within the workstream.

Contributors

FDD had 61 total contributors in Season 12. 20 are currently “trial” contributors. The first season a contributor participates is their trial season. During their trial season, they are not able to make proposals to the source council.

FDD will not be hiring on a “full time” or “part time” basis during season 13. Our source council could all be considered full time. Regular contributors range from 1-4 hours per quarter up to 30+ hours per week.

Notable Achievements

A full review of Season 12 Accomplishments can be found here: State of FDD - Season 12 Review

Table of Contents:

Direction - Objectives & Key Results

  • Sybil Defenders
  • Grants Investigation Agency
  • Ground Control

Financials

  • FDD Q4 2021 (Season 12) Budget
  • Current Holdings
  • Value Provided

Decentralization

  • Decision Making with FDD-OS v1.0
  • Source Council
  • Roles
  • Positions
  • Phasing Out the Stream Lead Role

Season 12 Accomplishments

  • Anti-Sybil
  • Policy
  • Research
  • Operations
  • User Support
  • Evolution

Proposal Body

High Level Budget Breakdown

Season 13 Budget Total = $596,295 = 63.5k GTC ($9.40/GTC*)

PLUS Season 14 Reserves = $596,295

Total Needed = $1,192,590

MNUS Current Reserves = $313,000

Total Amount requested at this time = $879,590 =93,500 GTC ($9.40/GTC*)

*Prices last updated 2/9/22

The GTC total will be adjusted based on the current market value at the time this proposal is moved to Snapshot and to Tally. The vote will be to send $879,590 in GTC at the current price when moved to Tally or the 20 day moving average (whichever is lower).

FDD Season 13 (Q1) 2022 Budget

Multisig Address & Keyholders

Gnosis Safe address: 0xD4567069C5a1c1fc8261d8Ff5C0B1d98f069Cf47

Workstream MultiSig is a Gnosis Safe 4/7 setup with the following keyholders who act as board members or oversight to the actions of this stream. Each multisig keyholder has a responsibility to work with a mandate steward leading our top level goals in their “Subject Matter Expert Zone”. (Many are skilled in multiple zones but are only assigned to one to ensure their ability to keep up with the dynamic changes and help guide our work.)

  • Disruption Joe (Workstream Lead)
    • Operations / Collaborative Design / Mechanism Design / Growth
    • Former Gitcoin Holdings Grants Ops - First to leave company for DAO
  • Michael Zargham (Ops)
    • ML / Fraud Detection / Ethics / Systems Design
    • Gitcoin Steward / Blockscience CEO / cadCAD
  • Angela Kreitenweis/Conectopia (Ops) -
    • Mechanism Design / DAO Comp / Research / Policy
    • Gitcoin Steward / Token Engineering Academy
  • Trueblocks (Sybil)
    • Data Analytics / On-chain data / Commons Management
    • Gitcoin Steward / Trueblocks LLC
  • Armand Brunelle (Sybil)
    • ML / Software Development / Contributor Experience
    • Gitcoin Steward / FDD Contributor, Mandate Steward, Source Council
  • Bob Jiang (Grants)
    • Scrum/Agile / Chinese Ecosystem / Customer Support
    • Gitcoin Steward / Former FDD / Gitcoin User Support Lead / ENS Steward
  • Annika Lewis (Grants)
    • Venture Capital / Operations / Strategy
    • PGF Workstream Leadership / Grants Program Lead

All multisig keyholders are represented by their LLC and are not personally connected or liable for actions of the FDD or GitcoinDAO.

All keyholders are confirmed as committed to the responsibilities outlined in the FDD-WG Multisig Keyholder Responsibilities 1 document.

This budget request as per established norms for FDD budget requests is set to double our estimated quarterly budget for defensive measures to ensure that this workstream can properly function without issue in the instance of delayed votes, market downturns, & political issues.

In Conclusion: From Disruption Joe

FDD has been in the process of progressively decentralizing itself while learning to balance efficiency and decentralization. Our new FDD Operating System allows us to continue removing authority given (top-down) to authority recognized (bottom-up). Our model is built to follow core principles of subsidiarity and parpolity.

FDD is a single customer entity with the mandate of defending Gitcoin from threats to its legitimacy, credible neutrality, and sustainability. We are working hard to not only defend Gitcoin, but to do so in a way that what we build is modular, composable, and extendable to the rest of the DAO and web 3. The structure we are built on should be sustainable as long as its output is positive-sum.

As the FDD workstream lead, I intend to continue this role as a participant after releasing my workstream lead rights to our source council and the processes of the FDD OS over the next 2-3 quarters. I intend to leave FDD with a structure that will efficiently produce its intended outcomes and adapt to changing circumstances. Most importantly it will dissipate when it is no longer needed just as my leadership role will dissipate when our structure is sustainable.

Web 2 and all of human history was built on a finite amount of resources which could represent value. This perverted the incentives causing people to create collective entities (corporations / governments / institutions) which exist for a purpose when they are created, but would turn parasitic when that purpose was no longer needed. They would continue to exist for the sake of existing with embedded growth obligations causing the good-natured individuals to turn a blind eye to the dystopia their collective decisions would cause.

We now have infinite scarcity to represent the values we truly care about. It is now more profitable to cooperate than to compete. Therefore, the incentives guiding Gitcoin to a solarpunk future include us investing in our values and moving our investments as our needs change.

When an entity no longer has a purpose, it no longer needs to exist because the composable structure DAOs are building IS the future of work. Individuals no longer need to turn a blind eye to the parasitic or cancerous nature of their employer. They will simply exit. This will happen either gracefully or tragically, but it will happen.

I hope that my role in FDD will be an example of the former. I hope to model this transition in the near future and continue to serve the greater purpose of Gitcoin - To build and fund the public good

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Thanks for this extensive overview @DisruptionJoe . The FDD machinery to defend Gitcoin turns out to be a vital component of our infrastructure, and I’m impressed by the results this workstream team delivered. We had several rounds of reviews for the new season, including a critical assessment of the objectives, available here.
As multisig keyholder, I fully support the proposal for Season 13.

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I really appreciate you putting such detail into this proposal Joe.

I’ve been part of the fdd for a few seasons now and I am one hundred percent committed to supporting the fdd. Let’s keep this momentum going. I think the team keeps getting stronger and with the organizational changes like Notion overhaul and compensation systems being integrated we are building a foundation for success.

I think this proposed budget recognizes the importance of solid dao systems, in addition to our Mission-First focus. As our dao and fdd get more established we become even more capable. The fdd is growing and this proposed budget will ensure we can keep the mission growing as well.

David Dyor / blazingthirdeye

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I can honestly say that the FDD is really succeeding in decentralization and empowerment, as well as being avantgarde from a governance and implementation standpoint.

Actually, I’m the living example that this workstream is successful in it’s progressive decentralization. Started here as a simple reviewer 6 months ago, gained trust, had some web 3 experience, got even more involved and became squad lead. After 5 months I was proposed a Source Council role.

This has been one of the most fulfilling, exciting and innovative parts of my journey in web 3.0 until now and I have explored a lot of frontiers and DAOs until the present moment.

From a growth and innovation perspective the FDD is the place to be :sweat_smile: , joking, but not really. Seeing the FDD evolve in this way and being part of it is amazing. From GR12 to GR13, the FDD has managed to become more efficient at protecting from Sybil attacks, more decentralized all while experimenting and innovating…

These being said, I hope that my skills, vision and values can continue to add value to the FDD and I can’t wait for GR13 to begin :innocent:

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This is what I did end of January 2022… simply exited web2. And now I am starting to become a contributor of FDD.

And yet, also within this future of work, that we are now perceiving as our presence, we need to carefully balance simplicity and the right amount of structure to function as our backbone.

Soft front, strong back.

Looking forward to supporting the FDD OS and Contributor Experience.

Thank you all for the trust upfront :blue_heart:

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Killer work Joe. I learn alot from your posts. :+1:

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As always impressed by your detailed and thorough proposals @DisruptionJoe. Sorry, I was unable to join the team at this time but I 100% support your leadership and path to decentralise and empower your team. Results speak for themselves. Keep up the amazing work FDD :heart:

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Awesome work @DisruptionJoe and the whole stream! The granularity given into the thought for the next Q is really great! Been a part of FDD for half a year now, and I really love the discussions phase that everything goes through before finalizing things, that part, specifically, makes me believe in the direction we are moving to realize the decentralized future!

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Looks great @DisruptionJoe - thanks for the detail in the request. It’s very helpful.

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Love the “source council” experiment, Joe

One more comment is “would you share the KR scores every month?” (like the OKR tool)

There are detailed plan and clear squad in FDD work stream, and clear OKR settings.
So as multi-sig holder, definitely I would support FDD for season 13.

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Yes Bob. In our FDD Weekly Update meetings (which are open to everyone to watch) each outcome owner covers their recent accomplishments, what they are working on this week, their issues, blockers and shoutouts.

Each 90 day KR is self judged by the outcome owner as Green = gonna hit it, Yellow = at risk, Red = Don’t think we can make it.

The 90 day krs are used for a bonus portion of source council pay that is dependent on all of the OKRs being hit. For example, if we complete 80% of the OKRs, then we all get 80% of our potential bonus amount. This incentivizes individual outcome owners to report accurately and the other source council members to step up to help where there are issues.

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This is a huge increase. Were there materially large changes to the Algos that we are using to detect these? Have we gone back through GR11 data to see if the new algo would catch missed sybil in GR11?

This is pretty immense (the number of outcomes you are driving towards). There are only 12 listed in the proposal, are there another 6 missing from the proposal?

There is an interesting evolution of FDD that is unlike other workstreams. When I look at PGF, which is arguably the heart and soul of the DAO, they are modeling much of their work off of a similar ethos to what Peter Pan has talked about.

The entire DAO will be organized as sub-DAOs and ideally two-pizza teams:

PGF has three/four “sub-DAOs” (lets call them sub streams) that have less than 5 people per sub stream who are compensated. This structure lacks the same level of anti fragility, but also offers accountability on outcome with more budget efficiency. (more on this below)

I really like the council idea and commend you for trying this out. The Incentivization on showing up on time is a great way to align participant incentives to the outcomes you want (punctual attendance to run efficient meetings!) This approach seems like it would create an accounting nightmare though. The complexity in tracking and paying people feels rather burden some. This is my opinion on the cumbersome accounting, but I am interested in seeing how this works out.

As I dig into the roadmap you have linked and outlined, this summary at the top really stands out:

The FDD workstream budget was approved and began to decentralize the process by having the community take over responsibility of approving grant eligibility, paying contributors to evaluate grants and accounts flagged as sybil by the ML algorithm, and even paying the contracts to SMEs guiding the machine learning efforts

The future of sybil detection includes a “community data lake” with anonymized data allowing data scientists anywhere to compete to find the best models using an open-source feature engineering pipeline. Sybil accounts will be detected across Ethereum addresses, DIDs, and Gitcoin accounts. Eventually, meta-models will give even greater insights.

This was the dream we had for the workstream in its inception, and reading this blog post was a great and inspiring refresher of the dreams we held when launching the workstream. I am really torn on if now is the right time for us to expand to the great vision this budget is advocating for (and if we should be paying for three teams to build ML models, for anti fragile and evaluation purposes)

Frankly, It’s a moonshot. Going straight from crawl, to run… scaling immensely to hit strides, build out the data lake, scale ML teams, all while creating an operating system and operations layer to manage it all.

when is the right time for FDD to seek additional customers to validate this vision?

This vision was born based on a single team’s needs (Gitcoin’s Grants development team) and continuing to fund it without confirmation on a broader market need feels like we are gold plating a system that is for a single customer. I am interested in acting in good faith and continuing to fund as is for S13, but I would request more feedback before funding in S14. I am also happy to help as much as I can to make intros and help validate this as I love the vision!

this is another example where we are building and scaling without stopping to evaluate how to solve the problem from first principles. For example, have we considered requiring 25 DAI to be staked per new grant request to help increase the fraud tax on this process? If so, apologizes for throwing stones, I do worry that scale has been the default state for FDD (in many cases for good reason, as it reduces fragility).

When I review the budget, It looks like roughly $596K is budgeted for, but your request is asking for twice this (roughly) - why the reserves? Further, there are folks that seem to potentially be getting double paid on the ground control budget.

Here is my take as a single steward who has tried to really dig in and understand the proposal.

  • The Ground Control work seems like it may be duplicative. As some of that work is being covered/compensated by DAO Ops. I would strike most of that budget if I am being prudent.
  • I would also deny the reserves. FDD has been a great steward of the budgets it has received and the reserves feel unnecessary.
  • GIA seems like the wrong solution to the problem, but I would leave that $75K budget intact with the hopes of us partnering with GPG to build in a staking model in GR14, or another software based hurdle (recognizing a change for GR13 is likely too aggressive).
  • Sybil Defenders budget seems pretty heavy, but I am not an expert in how to cut there. Knowing BlockScience is at least half the cost here, it would be great to get the model owned by the DAO so that those funds could be re appropriated… right now it feels like we are double paying, but I am fine with that if there is an end in sight. I would advocate strongly that we do not continue to fund the Block Science requirement in S14 as we would have funded all the work necessary for the community to take this over in S13.
  • I would also leave Source Council as is as I really appreciate the though that went into crafting the experiment. It seems to be a primary funding mechanism for contributions and I would love to see how it evolves and what FDD learns.

Given this, I would personally like to see a budget request closer to $555K. With $313K in reserves, an actual request of $275K (35K GTC) feels more than sufficient even with some price volatility.

This assumes that in S14, we can reduce costs as the “double payment” for BSCI and Community run models goes away, the GIA work is hopefully greatly reduced (if GPG can help build staking into grant creation or some other software deterrent to the deluge of new spammy grants), and DAO Ops continues to support and fund work that FDD relies on (DevOps, Consulting, Accounting, etc.)

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No. There was some code refactoring for performance but no substantial updates to the code. Although we did increase our number of human evaluations up to 6,000 which lets us know that our statistical validation of the model is more accurate.

There are 18 listed here in the budget request details. This is 3 top level outcomes with nested OKRs for outcomes owned by individual squads (each of which could grow to be it’s own subdao).

The average top level goal has an “essential intent” for the “subdao” which is a guiding statement for the next 12 - 18 months. For example, Grants Investigation agency has an essential intent of “Increasing legitimacy and transparency in the grant eligibility processes”. This has 3 metrics which can tell us if we are improving quarter to quarter. Both the essential intent and these metrics will be reviewed each quarter to determine if the direction is still appropriate.

Then, within the Grants Investigation Agency, there are 5 outcomes that bubbled up from our strategy sessions. Each of these outcomes has a driver. They selected their KRs for us to measure their success over the next 90 days.

Each of these subdaos (grants, sybil, ops) easily has a 2 pizza team. The core of each is small with maybe 6-10 key contributors. The reason FDD has such large contributor numbers is because we have the human evaluations and grants reviews which pay a large number of people relatively small amounts.

FDD basically has 3 subdaos each with 3 source council members (Full time) and maybe 3-4 part time contributors. This seems the same to me. I think our difference is that we structured in a way that contributors that participate in any one of the 3 subdaos can easily bounce between the 3.

I think the Peter Pan one is basically what we mimic and are moving to as seen in our roadmap of progressive decentralization. I think it is also important to understand that this can be fractal.

Why else are we here? Governments and institutions no longer pay for the moonshots and R/D needed for public infrastructure. A sybil defense network is a base level public good for the metaverse. It’s like having a fire dept. Unless your town is super small, you need one. Additionally, all the advancements made by the big ones will be open source and free for the smaller town fire departments to build upon.

In the modular, extendable, plug-in architecture we are discussing for dGrants with aqueducts driving the donations, defending the legitimacy and credible neutrality of a round through sybil detection and grant curation is the most likely reason any org will have to create an aqueduct next to the goodness of their collective hearts.

Less abstract - Yes, we are moving all the blockscience work to be run by the DAO. Yes, we are funding 2 distinct models right now. Yes, we need them if we want to scale. One is entirely focused on being the main one we operationalize during the round. The other is figuring out how to get unknown community contributors to be able to participate at various access levels to collaboratively build and update the features and eventually the model itself.

Sure, we could save money by not running these in parallel, but why would we do that? We are building public goods that the world needs. It is public infrastructure that won’t get funded anywhere else which will enable a cambrian explosion of innovation in how we allocate resources.

The idea that we should “cut the fat” because we CAN run the operations on a smaller budget rather than take the moonshot that could solve the problem properly is the mindset and incentive model that drove web 2 to be extractive. imho. We, Gitcoin, users and stakeholders are here to build a better way.

Once this is built, the business model is not that of web 2. (Finding customers and extraction)

The business model is that the matching pool will grow through aqueducts and donations which choose Gitcoin because we can offer the turn key services with legitimacy.

The treasury will grow via more people recognizing our values and seeing that groups like FDD, Moonshot, PGF, etc deliver. We turn their capital into public good. They can either donate and lose their capital or they can participate by holding GTC and letting the DAO catalyze their capital into impact.

The gitcoin stakeholders will grow as the many subdaos mature. Some will have customers, some will need governance, some will find their role being closer to knowing how to solve problems rather than solving problems.

https://gov.gitcoin.co/t/the-gitcoin-anti-sybil-flywheel/9417

Yes it is. The mandate of FDD is to defend Gitcoin. When Gitcoin no longer needs this service, or doesn’t want it from us, then it should simply dissappear. However, the people who are participating as contributors can continue to organize.

I’ve been told we shouldn’t be looking for customers or thinking about our own business models in the past, but it seems like the thinking around that is coming around the corner now. (Probably, because it is inevitable for every subdao)

Sybil detection across web 3 will require it’s own incentive mechanism at some point rather than relying on Gitcoin funding it. How do we get that conversation started? (One of our sybil outcomes is to get buy in from community partners to share data for features in a community data lake)

Yes. We did consider it and still are considering it. (It says that further down in the tl;dr.) Staking and any incentive design choice can have 2nd and 3rd order effects we might not foresee. Therefore, we have been doing the research to know that we are making the best decisions we can before making them.

Yes. We have done the reserves every budget and explain in the budget that part of our work is mission critical and we don’t want to be unable to perform due to political hiccups or other unknown issues that might come up. I don’t think a 6 month budget, especially after having done this and not only been responsible, but made gains ($70k) through treasury management. (Only GTC, Eth, stables)

There is one person who was moved to DAOops who is getting a weekly amount from this stream. How many streams can you assign to that person without increasing their pay?

Are there others?

Exactly what part of the Ground Control budget is duplicative? I’ll list them all here to make it easier to discuss. (Format = Outcome Name (Outcome owner) | S13 Outcome Budget Total = % of FDD S13 Total Budget)

Payments (Joe) | $6.5k = 1.1%
Contributors are paid on-time and understand how their payments work
This $500/wk is going to the person handling all of FDD payments.

FDD OS (Joe) | $10k = 1.7%
Contributors all have a voice in a self managing system
We need someone to drive the operationalizing of having this system. Initial setup and organization first. Tracking steps and creating runbooks for it to work. Plus some expert guidance and help here and there.

Contributor UX (SirL) | $14k = 2.3%
Contributors understand their role, responsibilities, know how to show up and put a participation “Level Required” effort toward the mission
This is NOT duplicative to the GitcoinDAO onboarding as FDD has certain info, needs, and rituals we have with our contributors. Learnings from FDD have been brought into other streams before too.

Mandate Delivery (Kish) | $14k = 2.5%
FDD effectiveness in delivering on its mandate is easy to communicate
FDD needs to know how well its outcome owners are performing and how well it is doing on delivering it’s mandate. If the models we create work, then the rest of the DAO could use them

Contributor CAP (Waka) | $4k = 0.7%
Model and simulation is available to analyze collective decision outcome variations
For us to launch bottoms up initiatives, this is critical info.

Data Storage Layer (Nollied) | $22k = 3.7%
Contributors can easily access data without compromising security
I think this one is obvious, it would probably spin off to DAOops soon, but FDD needs it and DAOops didn’t include it in their budget nor did they start a conversation with us about it. We can’t just not perform our core function because another stream “should” own the work.

Data Analytics (Omni) | $10k = 1.7%
Collect and repurpose data analysis for continuous insights
Right now we are doing a lot of one-off analysis that get used once and then thrown out. Kevin had a bounty for data analysis on grants. We could take the great code people write and collect it to setup dashboards to run a data report after every round with the same set of insights people found in the bounty rather than look at it once and forget it.

Overall, I don’t see anything overlapping except the one person who we should discuss in the payments.

I would not deny the reserves. In fact, I’d recommend that every workstream participating in CSDO guidelines add reserves to their budgets.

There are two problems here. Staking solves one of them, GIA software solves another.

Staking, how might we raise the cost of fraud for registering sybil grants? or HMW decrease likelihood of sybil attackers making new grants?

GIA software, how might we dynamically let communities determine and update the inclusion criteria for an ecosystem, cause, or round, and then curate grants according to the dynamic policy? or HMW allow self curation of criteria and grants by the community?

This is our plan going forward. However, we may want to continue working with Blockscience in other ways.

Awesome. We are very excited to do this.

I appreciate your feedback but for reasons listed above I don’t agree. Our defense budget is rising by 34% while the round totals are rising at 50-100%. We are also still early and investing in a better future. Your recommendation seems to be to cut all the innovation and only fund the items needed to operationally run a round.

I think a good goal for FDD is to continue to lower our rate of budget growth. Last round was 50%, this one 34%. To do this while supporting defense of Gitcoin Grants which is growing at an exponential pace seems to be a good place to be.

I’d encourage stewards to look at what we set out to do and if we achieve those goals. FDD has been incredibly transparent and has set very clear top level goal metrics to improve round over round and clear OKRs for each outcome funded to keep us accountable.

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Big fan of the work that is being done by this group. The little window I have had into this workstream through working on the GIA project has inspired me by what is possible in this space. What a great breakdown of all that is involved Joe. Couldn’t support this more. Can’t wait to see all the epic stuff coming from this team in the season ahead.

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I see the logic of a staking model but I worry that would create additional friction for donations when we are trying to reduce friction and onboard more people.

Also this doesn’t address the subtlety of decisions that are not cut and dry. There is still a need for reviewers and having a process to do the review that is transparent and inclusive Reduces the pressure and responsibility on any small group of individuals. It also provides a model for greater decentralization of this kind of process and provides opportunities for meaningful participation for DAO members.

Of course I’m biased because I’m involved in the project but I wanted to add more context for discussion.

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FDD is vital to Gitcoin and Joe is a public good.

Love this thorough overview - it has my support. Thanks for putting this together!

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Joe is a public good :slight_smile:

Maybe even a public great

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Chiming in here on the latest FDD budget, some of the numbers that have been presented are truly impressive :fire: great work here team.

  • Increased human evaluations completed to over 6,000 - a 320% increase!
  • Sybil attack rate jumped from around 6% of total contributions in GR11 to 26% in GR12 and FDD flagged 114,000 of them
  • We currently have 18 outcomes for the next 90 days. Each outcome has 3 measurable key results that will determine if we achieved the outcome.

Regarding this specific portion of the proposal:

Season 13 is $155k increase = 34% budget increase

Given that the work-stream has proven it’s responsibility with the previous budget and has delivered on all it’s stated goals to date I would say the 34% increase is well justified, based on the overall decrease from the 50% increase of the last season.

I think a good goal for FDD is to continue to lower our rate of budget growth. Last round was 50%, this one 34%. To do this while supporting defense of Gitcoin Grants which is growing at an exponential pace seems to be a good place to be.

Complexity builds, sybil attacks are increasing, thus the size of the team and the value of their work is increasing. We must keep that in mind as we scale up.

an increase of 34% to our budget seems justified. Especially considering the rate at which the sybil attacks are increasing (300-400%)

Personally I think this is essential ecosystem infrastructure and we need to double down on these efforts to ensure that we are keeping the contributors well compensated for their work, while keeping an eye towards the progressive decentralization of the work-streams, which @DisruptionJoe has been doing a kick-ass job at thus far :leg:t4:

My feeling is that we need to trust the work-stream leads and rally behind them at this time, approve the budget set out so that they can keep driving towards their goals.

I don’t see any double spending as far as mentioned for contributors and furthermore if that were the case I’m positive we could solve with a simple policy of base wages from a single stream or a flexible compensation plan that utilized coordinape or some other such tool. It is common in this space for people transitioning from one team to another to have a honeymoon period where they receive rewards for contributing on multiple fronts, but that needs to be evaluated on a case by case basis as some people are simply capable of doing more and deserve to be compensated at such a rate. Again I leave that decision up to the work-stream leads to solve internally and I don’t intent to review all their deliverables. They will self regulate their budget and have autonomy in how to apply it, or the entire fluid nature of the DAO and it’s work-streams will revert back into some draconian accounting nightmare from the Web2 era.

FDD deserves the full budget requested and the reserves, to cut the budget at this time and reduce the spend simply because we can work at half capacity seems to work against our goals of pushing towards high impact outcomes and providing equitable compensation for this diverse group of contributors who have clearly proven their worth to the DAO.

In terms of moving towards a more sustainable and incentive driven approach to funding this stream, I think it’s a bit to early to introduce anything like that, but when the time is right trust me I will be at the ready to bring the right supportive partners & orgs into a discussion about this topic and it’s overarching utility to the entire grants ecosystem.

I know @DisruptionJoe has already applied some of his early thinking around this for review from members of the MetaCartel and our associated grant pipelines, FDD has been committed to defending Gitcoin in it’s mission to Fund Public Goods and we must continue supporting the efforts of their contributors as they scale up their operations and streamline their contributor incentive mechanisms.

Thanks for all the work you guys do, & the thoughtful comments on it by others in this thread :slightly_smiling_face:

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I love this question, and I think tools like dPoPP may help. Also, introducing staking on identity (even outside of dPoPP) could offer an income source that also incentives participants to hunt for Sybils. I would love to brainstorm more of this.

I don’t think this pay is a problem as well as each workstream understands its happening. I was under the impression contributions form DAO Ops were also covering this work. I am fine with splitting payments (and making sure a fair total salary is in place). I am less interested in each workstream negotiating with people what they believe is a full time compensation just to find out later they are getting paid by others as well. Now, this is really tricky when we evaluate the performance of individuals who may be participating in other DAOs as well. It’s rare any one person can work two FT jobs, and deliver results as if they were.

I understand we differ here. No other WS is requesting this, and this tells me it is not a DAO wide norm, but something unique to FDD. I am down to chat about this at CSDO and see if we want to adopt a new standard like this in the future.

This is really great. I didn’t realize this was a capability of the system. Have we used GIA to do this yet, or is this future state we are talking about?

I think we better aligned in the other thread, but just for folks here. I am actually not calling for any budget reduction, I am advocating for the elimination of the reserves and using some of the current reserves.

I do think the comparison to round size and your budgets is a red herring. Other Workstreams have not grown in the same way, despite being the ones who are running, marketing, programmatically supporting the rounds.

I appreciate that I am a single voice, and I am highly supportive if other stewards want to fund as is. I am merely calling out adjustments I would like to see in order to support the proposal. (and trying to seek context for myself and the benefit of others). I have learned a lot about FDD as part of this review, and I am more excited for the work that is happening as a result.

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That is why there should be clear and measurable outcomes. I don’t need to worry about whether that person is also working for another DAO if I have onboarded well and leveled up an individuals access to opportunities. They are delivering or not delivering.

Now of course we will ask and in FDD I work to coach the outcome owners to assess this BEFORE commiting. One advantage of the way FDD works is an outcome owner can say, “you seem great, we have 4 hours a week available for you” then they can determine if that person fits within a week or two. Imagine you own the outcome of going through all the current grant eligibility policy and deduping/updating it. When you present your weekly accomplishments to all of FDD on Monday, you will probably want to update your team to be successful.

There is also a DAO vibe similar to the old saying, “Only look in your neighbors cup to see if they have enough.”

This round we are moving from using GIA for the disputes only, to using it for all the approvals of new grants. Next round we will probably focus on dynamic criteria to adapt it for side rounds.

Another cool part of that is we could use it for other things too. Things like filtering proposals, community assessment of work quality, and even reviews of new DAO contributor applications.

We have a clear difference of opinion here, but aren’t as far off as I initially thought we were. I do believe that FDD has a norm of receiving the reserves. I’d argue that instead of a brand new steward (lol) pushing us to change our norms, we use your suggestion and have CSDO discuss and present a unified solution prior to Season 14.

This seems reasonable to me because we have:

  • a proven track record of not abusing the reserves in the past
  • $70k in treasury management gains last season (more than the entire DAO combined)
  • High transparency - Perhaps the most transparency of any workstream (DAOops, which uses our system or maybe moonshot, but it is onchain rather than human readable)

Honestly, thank you for your time. I felt a little blindsided at first because we didn’t discuss this before getting to the public forum, but I think you made the right decision to post this and follow up on every thread. It is a good example of the behavior we would like to see from all stewards!

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