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 
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 
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 itās responsibility with the previous budget and has delivered on all itās 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 
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 donāt see any double spending as far as mentioned for contributors and furthermore if that were the case Iām 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 donāt 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 itās 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 itās 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 itās 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 itās 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 
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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 donāt 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. Itās 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 didnāt 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 donāt 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, āyou seem great, we have 4 hours a week available for youā 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, āOnly look in your neighbors cup to see if they have enough.ā
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 arenāt as far off as I initially thought we were. I do believe that FDD has a norm of receiving the reserves. Iād 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 didnāt 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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In fact, Sybill resistance is vital to many DAOs, and many are struggling how to protect their decision making and reward systems!
Proves a) the value produced in FDD work stream - and b) yes, agree - letās explore how to make this a building block for Web3, and (yes!) a component in Gitcoin value streams and token utility.
I support that FDD work stream aims for the moonshot version because of the opportunities here - and Iām looking forward to see progress towards a PoPP in upcoming seasons!
Couldnāt agree more! 
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I support this proposal and Iām looking forward to collaborate with the GIA for the review process in dCompass!
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Thank you Huxwell! We also look forward to collaborating with dCompass.
One of my OKRs is to actually create a training quest in dCompass and that surely will give us insights that may prove valuable for the review process.
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Great discussion going on here that is answering questions for many. Thank you Kyle for challenging the fdd to be fully accountable to the the community and ensuring the excess gets trimmed. It is pushback like that which make for an accurate and lean budget. Every workstream should be trying to provide and solicit feedback like this imo. I have a few thoughts and comments provided below. Looking forward to seeing you around and sharing the latest fdd news.
Yes we have considered it. The idea first arose when thinking about how to hold folks accountable for ābadā or exploitative behaviour as dao members. This got expanded to ecosystem participants. By taking a stake from new grant applicants (AND potentially EVERY dao member) we now have an ability to incentivize and shape behaviors within the dao. But carrying out these types of thought experiments has a cost. It seems like the FDD is being told āNo you are not meant to be innovating. Your budget is inflated because of un-needed R&Dā while in the very next breath we are being asked āwhere is the innovation?ā
And although such discussions about innovation happen regularly we are mostly focused on carrying out the mission as inherited from Gitcoin inc. We simply lack the people needed to successfully complete the mission while conducting major R & D. But we are continuously growing and filling out gaps in our range of sme. The targeted strategy sessions guided us as a team toward filtering out the weak results from our future goals.
The fact FDD has been a great steward of its budgets demonstrates competence and responsibility. This should be reason to increase the FDD budget not decrease it. The FDD is good with its treasury and they are eager to enlarge the mission focus. I want to see the FDD continue to grow and improve. It was said PGF might be the heart and soul of Gitcoin. Ouch. Well maybe that would make the FDD the liver? We filter out the junk?
Either way, it is hard for me to label any one group as the āheartā of Gitcoin. It is more of a vibe or a philosophy. But I do know the FDD team is stronger than ever, and ready to carry out the Gitcoin mission.
Full support for this budget. And a sweet dCompass quest.
Joe is a public āgreatā (nice one Ben) and we are living in the proof. The Dao is maturing nicely. Membership is growing and the folks iām seeing are very qualified.
Full support for this budget. Bias disclaimer: I am part of this crew.
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staking in the process will have no more of an effect than an increased gas price. itās an interesting idea, but ultimately a sybil attacker already has to front a large amount for gas. although, it would be worth simulating the affects of such a mechanism. i will keep this in mind as we progress with the matrix (red team) squad.
exactly what is duplicative? the data storage layer is part of ground control, the function of which has been pushed off for a very long time.
also, DAO Ops has proven to be too coarse to actually have a tangible impact in FDDā¦ bubble-up emergence of organization is more affective in both the short and long term (isnāt this what the DAO wants to facilitateā¦?) pragmatism (natural selection) rules, not downward imposed idealistic solutions.
do you know what the GIA even is? itās goal is to decentralize and cut costs in the long term. maybe we arenāt communicating itās function properly (@David_Dyor and i just discussed writing up an article to sum everything up), but simply dismissing it as the āwrong solutionā seems naiveā¦
i do somewhat agree. i have been vocal about my discontent with the sybil problem and relying on DID/sybil as a crutch. we had an enlightening exchange with glen weyl (QF paper author) about this.
however i still think your reasoning isnāt very well thought out. the double-paying you are referring to is the growing pains of offboarding this responsibility onto the DAO. @omnianalytics is running the initiative to offload our sybil ML process partially onto the community (open source) in collaboration with the data storage layer squad that I lead, which will alleviate a lot of funding in the future.
againā¦ staking is not a very well thought out solution, slashing GIA will only harm the ecosystem and make the review process:
- take significantly longer
- require a good deal of human training/inconsistent grant reviews
- cost more to pay for human expert grant reviews
- the same amount of centralized (if not ā more)
- inhibit our ability to do finer grained data analysis of the grant-reviewal process
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Once again, there is a great discussion on another FDD proposal; which is consistent with FDDs values to provide an immense amount of transparency to their operations.
I am supportive of this proposal.
FDD is leading the efforts of progressive decentralization within the Gitcoin DAO community.
FDD provides a great amount of Workstream structure for the other Workstreams to follow.
I agree with @DisruptionJoe here;
But also I think what @kyle mentions here is incredibly important. I think there is a need to have a detailed conversation on Workstream treasury management moving forward. I think FDDs practices are proven healthy for the Gitcoin DAO in general, and there should be a learning, trial & error process for all the workstreams to implement and improve what FDD puts on the table as an example.
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FDD is a place where Iāve learned and developed a lot so far, it offers transparency and is open for anyone whoās eager to be involved in activities and technology that will shape the future.
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This is incorrect. There is currently no financial hurdle to create a grant as they are not on-chain. Staking would add a component of financial commitment while we wait to have on-chain grants.
I would love to understand this more and see where we / DAO Ops can do better. There is often a natural tension between ābest for the DAOā and ābest for my workstreamā that we should be constantly evaluating.
I likely donāt have enough context! It was presented as a tool to allow for programmatic reviews and that it was necessary to build due to the volume of grants being created. The old joke of spending thousands to design a space pen versus just grabbing a pencil came to mind here. I would love to learn more.
I have really enjoyed the conversation, and learning this has sparked for me and others. This is exactly the outcome I have hoped for. I also donāt mind that I am in the minority with my opinion. This is why we have lots of stewards.
Thank you all for the discussion!
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i didnāt say it costs gas to create a grantā¦ the āfraud taxā that you mentioned is in reference to gas costs for contributions & the splitting of funds into separate walletsā¦in order for you to donate to any grant it costs gas, not only that but sybil accounts have to split their money to other wallets somehow. how else would they do this without paying gas?
iām not sure what you mean by āprogrammatic reviewsā. but itās basically just taking the criteria that human reviewers usually base their decisions off of, turn them into criteria with āpassā or āfailā buttons for each one, which makes it easier for humans to review faster, more consistently, and with lower barrier to entry.
itās basically just a nicer google forms setup curated for the grant review process. alongside this, there is also all of the usual grant review processes that existed before, hence the larger budget, we just rebranded it all to āGIAā.
your space pen/pencil joke is still lacking a sense of reality with respect to GIA/FDD-policy. GR12 was great, and our human reviewers learned a lot, but their path was a little inefficient. a closer analogy would be that we found our way home from school, but walked an extra 2 miles due to some inefficient path choices. now, were leveraging our experience to take turns that get us home quicker.
this was used for our GR12 pilot:
https://gia-testing.ethelo.net/page/welcome-to-the-gia
āāāāāāāā
my recommendation for you is to seek context before making very impactful budgetary decisions. this is partially FDDās fault as a workstream, and itās something that myself and others are trying to push towards communicating context better. maybe try to participate a little more, especially when it seems like things donāt make sense.
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The GIA is a tool that would allow us to further decentralize the grant review process and would make the community own it more and more over time while leveraging the knowledge of the participants . Itās very interesting and allows for a lot of experimentation with low costs
We imagine a future in which the GIA will be self funded with a grant on Gitcoin and the reviewers will be incetivised that way and maybe create their own sub DAO hybrid, idk
I appreciate the time and thought you have give to our beloved FDD btw, these are very good conversations to have and they could lead to very constructive things.
During GR12 we accomplished a lot here at the FDD(haha, Iām part of the stream, how could I not be biased), we actually delivered and defended the DAO while maintaining credible neutrality. We experimented and decentralized all of the squads and even the core structure that we used in GR12 and evolved to this format for GR13. The OS that Joe presented is really an innovation and I think this is quite āuniqueā in GItcoin DAO. We have also been the home of research related to descentralization, reward systems and governance systems.
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Thank you for this massively detailed proposal Joe.
I think Iāve now (re)read all of the comments, plus also the comments under @kyleās voter guide.
As always extremely impressed and inspired by the level of detail put in your proposals, I think the thoroughness of your approach & transparency can and should be an inspiration for any DAO.
Iāve spent quite a few days on mulling over whether I should abstain from voting or vote no - the way it currently stands I will probably vote no on the current budget. The main reasons for this are 1) the reserves which are requested and 2) the investments in innovation and governance within this workstream, which increase complexity and imo reduces effectiveness, at least at this point in our DAOās timeline.
When I read the comments here - except for Kyleās, who went for a hardcore deep dive - I think it shows that many people are supportive for one of two reasons: either they are a part of FDD and for this reason might be biased and/or see things I am missing, or they are stewards who appreciate the thoroughness of the FDD proposal and for this reason are supportive of the proposal, without actually understanding in detail what you are proposing and why.
It shows we still have a long way to go to incentivize Stewards to dive in and allocate enough time for these crucial decisions, and hopefully @Popās council proposal (WIP) will help on that level.
Both of these observations are very subjective and I am sure might rub some people the wrong way. I for my part can honestly say that I do not understand all of it, and it is one of the many reasons I am/was hesitating to vote, I simply do not have the time available to dig even deeper.
However, because of the large amount being requested, reading kyleās observations combined with my own observations of the workings of FDD as a daily and full-time contributor within the DAO, and especially point 1) & 2) above I will probably vote no on this iteration of the budget.
Some more detail on my logic here:
1) Reserves
FDD is the only workstream who has been āsaving upā and I think the argumentation shows we mainly need to work on getting rid of internal politics (which indeed do exist! and are very frustrating) and get better at DAOing. However, allowing these (enormous) reserves is counterproductive: it is basically saying that our governance mechanisms of allocating budgets are not working / cannot be trusted. To be honest I agree with that point 
The answer however imo is not to keep doing this & have funds ready to allow spinning out as a standalone DAO or to cease collaboration, but to work more on / invest more in the operations of the DAO as a whole, and improve our communication & governance mechanisms, as we have one shared/joint mission.
2) Innovation / Governance
Working within the DAO Operations Workstream I can say that there is a lot we need to do when it comes to effective governance, transparency and incentivization, thereās room for massive amounts of improvement & growth, and FDD has been leading the way here, because no one else was. However, I do not think these initiatives should be developed under FDD, they belong mostly under DAOops, which now exists and is slowly scaling.
This is not a question of centralization, it is even the opposite to me, as DAO Operations was created to service shared needs of the entire DAO. With certain elements of this proposal we are actually working towards a centralization of power within one workstream, and I think we are too early in the process of our own DAO (and all DAOs) to move this fast. Personally I think it could endanger the focus on the mission of Gitcoin, which is to build and fund public goods, not to become the most effective DAO.
Ideally one day weāll be both.
I think the work of FDD is mission-critical, so I would vote 100% yes on a budget that is considerably reduced. I trust the calculations by Kyle make sense, which brings us to a budget around 35K GTC on top of what is already available.
I think this leaves plenty of room for innovation (also on topics of governance, eg the source council) and might be a signal for FDD to focus even more on its core mission, streamline for simplicity and effectiveness, and a signal for DAOops that it needs to really and urgently invest in better governance and incentivization modelling for the entirety of GitcoinDAO.
What you want to achieve within the boundaries of the budget that will remain - which is still around 50K GTC (!) counting the built-up reserves is still very ambitious.
I do believe every major city indeed needs its own fire department, and we have one, but we are not a big city just yet, we are a big name, but counting active (and effective) contributors, we are still a ābaby DAOā, and we have already spent a lot of time on reducing internal politics aligning, in challenging times and a long-distance context, simplicity is key in order to continue on that path.
The vision for FDD is fantastic and I hope building a āsybil defense network for the metaverseā is where we will arrive at. But letās first make sure our city is thriving, viable & regenerative, before its fire department becomes a city on itself.
Note: I hope this feedback is useful and is interpreted the way it is intended: some constructive thoughts to help us achieve both our medium & long term goals, without stifling innovation or demotivating you or other contributors. I believe in moonshots and I believe even more in the need for a decentralized world, but Iāve also first-hand seen the risks & failures of bringing too many layers of complexity too soon.
I will not have the time to respond to comments on this in the way that Kyle has done above and under his summary because of Ethdenver and a number of other reasons. We can however discuss irl and will definitely read any comments if they appear here.
Thank you. That means a lot!
I think you are underestimating our Stewards. Some might have skimmed it, but take @akrtws for example. She is part of our multisig as a steward providing oversight of our workstream and is not a paid contributor of FDD. (FDD set ourselves up with a 4/7 multisig designed to represent our stakeholders and provide an additional layer of oversight which the other streams havenāt done.)
She participated in a 2 hour overview session giving very tough criticisms and then had multiple one on one discussions with myself and other contributors. After responding to her and other multisig keyholder critiques, we eventually got to this final request.
To say that she, or @bobjiang and other stewards are not fulfilling their duty if they support this budget request is not necessarily the case.
You have over 700k GTC delegated to you. I think it is your duty to understand it.
So you agree that mission critical work might be susceptible to these issues?
It is not new and we are not āsaving upā we simply ask for one quarter of funding extra as we have been since the first budget proposal. If we were āsaving upā, we wouldnāt explicitly be showing that we are topping up what we currently have to make sure we continue to have 1 season worth of reserves.
FDD is not spinning itself out as a standalone DAO. We have no interest of doing that. We may incubate projects that end up having a broader application potential than our mandate in which case we would support them spinning out. A community data collective for sybil detection for example.
I am 100% focused on serving FDDās mandate which is defending Gitcoin against threats to its legitimacy, credible neutrality, and sustainability.
I fundamentally disagree that reserves for one season, another 90 days, makes it so FDD isnāt accountable for its results. Additionally, I will be bringing a proposal to CSDO before next season to establish a norm around reserves for all workstreams.
Quite frankly, Iām a little shocked that you, as the person responsible for contributor experience, feel as though the way to achieve accountability is by putting contributors financial stability and mental safety at a higher risk than necessary. 90 days of extra funding is not going to strip workstreams of accountability imho.
Or because we canāt supply legitimacy and credible neutrality without having a solid foundation. It would be wise to think of our need for proper governance structure as part of our mandate.
I agree that DAOops should own this for GitcoinDAO as a whole, but each stream does need to manage its own internal governance. We are explicitly working to do this well. This is less than 4% of our total budget. Whether or not a workstream explicitly identifies these needs in their budget does not mean it isnāt executing and paying for them.
Secondly, our governance process says that after 5 days on the governance forum and 5 steward comments, the proposal should move to snapshot. Even after getting the required amount of comments, our proposal is still not on snapshot 5 days later. (I could post, but Iām trying to go along with some hard work by @Pop to improve steward comms.)
The reason for this delay was cited as stewards requesting more time to review the proposals. No steward posted these requests on the governance forum or in the Stewards channel in Discord. Now, I am NOT accusing anyone of wrongdoing, but you could see how with you being the only steward who has commented during this delay period, one could be see this as delaying the vote so you could post this critique.
For this reason I think you should ABSTAIN from voting on this proposal.
Additionally, it shows the need for multiple workstreams to be actively involved in governance.
Please say more? How does FDD managing its own internal governance centralize power for all of GitcoinDAO?
Not sure how you make this connection.
How do you reconcile these two sentences? In one you state that we should not focus on becoming the most effective DAO, then you say that FDD should focus on streamlining our focus for simplicity and effectiveness.
Gitcoin has Top Level OKRs and one of them is decentralization. How do you come to the conclusion that FDD should focus on efficiency in the decentralization and efficiency tradeoff?
You know what stops little towns from becoming big citiesā¦ when they burn down.
How about we build all parts of the system to be regenerative individually and collectively. That is alignment.
The thesis of your criticism has not had anything to do with the introduction of complexity or the speed at which it is introduced. It has been about whether reserves are justified and who should own certain functions.
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This sentence implies the FDD gets supported for a couple reasons that are not related to mission-first activity of fraud detection & defence. This statement is unsettling on several levels. Mostly it hints we are losing focus of the mission. Funding public goods & oss. Is this really suggesting the workstream dedicated to protecting the funding is only supported because 1)fdd members want to get paid and 2) Stewards like Joeās writing ? Well I like to think people support the fdd because they donāt want funds going to bad actors. The fact Joe is a good writer only helps communicate the granular details to voters. This feels like somebody accusing an political party of gaining support only because they have a nice brochure. The brochure is just a proxy for the platform and ideology.
The talk around the FDD GR13 budget is illuminating. I see issues similar to the issues at hand when considering numerous grant applications from 1 large Dao. It is all about financial connection and accountability. Are the sub-daos routing money back to the parent dao? Are Gitcoin Dao workstreams routing funds to the greater Dao somehow? How is profit shared from each parent & sub dao? Now these issues are confronting GC as we debate budgets. I would like to know how much and by what manner Gitcoin GPG/LLC exerts control over those workstreams it funds. I was fairly surprised to learn that not all workstreams get equal support from the core.
Kris said the support shown by FDD members somehow means there is a lack of non-workstream member support. This is a reach imo. Something about correlation not equal to causation comes to mind. For Kris this translates into a reason he likely wonāt support the budget. Did I land in bizzaro world somehow? Arenāt dedicated workstream participants a reason to increase budgets not decrease them? Personally want I the most leaned-in contributors to get the most budget and power.
Some workstreams get direct funding from the GPG? say what?!? I had no idea.
Some workstreams actively manage their treasury to create revenue. Nicely done! (but here comes the tax collector. The benefits of great treasury management should be awarded mainly to the workstream that created it imo. I could see allocating 20% back to the parent dao maybe.)
Some workstreams are thinking of spinning off into an independent dao. whoa. Feels like this is quite a divisive idea. Are we Gitcoin a nebulous group of linked mini-daos with narrow scopes? Or are we Gitcoin Dao - Funder of OSS and its Developers? I sure hope for the latter, but Ostrom seems to favor the former. Please educate me on why this is better.
Responsibility for innovation at Gitcoin is uncertain. Nobody seems to know who should push the innovation envelope beyond MSC. I think innovation is one of those org-wide topics that deserves org-wide guidance. In the absence of wide-spread guidance this responsibility falls on each workstream. I argue it is the workstream folks who are best suited to guide innovation within their streamās mandate. FDD should guide FDD innovation. PGF should guide their own innovation. And so on. Would be great to get some input from the greater Steward group and GPG but until then we got you covered. The FDD has some innovation ideas evolved from many rounds of successful mission completion. Please donāt cancel these goals. It is too sudden and drastic imo. If there is some dissent, letās discuss and shift some of these goals as the group deems proper. The suggestion to cut-off the innovation arm of the FDD comes without warning, without time to prepare for the transition and without thought of the FDD staff that are involved in these areas. If anything, cut the weakest innovation ideas, not the program itself. Iād love to see a Gitcoin survey about which areas of innovation are most favoured by the community. There are likely innovative experiments happening in workstreams that we donāt even know about yet.
Above all, I want to heartily thank Kyle, Kris and Joe for their time detail and commitment to Gitcoin. You folks demonstrate the āleaned-inā behavior I try to mimic. The energy you three are giving the program is so admirable. Yes it is push-back, but that is what will make us lean and agile. Thank you <3. Also thank you to all the other commenters and folks dedicated to prudent money management at Gitcoin. We need you all.
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Iāve decided to vote yes on this proposal even though I have reservations. In particular, the increase in the budget given that the budget is being driven from the ground up is concerning.
I realize this is probably the only way for the budget to be driven, given the early nature of the process, but a bottom-up budget that increases at this rate, I am sure everyone would agree, is unsustainable.
In the future, I will probably vote against a budget increase of this size (for any of the streams) without a much clearer āfrom-the-topā feeling for how it fits into the larger DAOās mission / planning.
EDITED: I should have said how amazed I am with Joeās energy, his positive attitude, his attention to details, and the huge amount of work heās already put in. Nothing I say above is reflective of my thoughts on Decentrazation Joe or any of the team.
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The FDD proposal is now on Snapshot here.
Before stewards vote, Iād like to offer a point of reconciliation in a hope to sway those pushing for a no vote. Iād like to offer a compromise to address the core reasons expressed for voting no after a nice heart to heart in Denver yesterday with @krrisis and a few shorter discussions with @kyle the past week.
ASK - Iād like you to be ok with our 90 days of reserves on this budget and vote YES as is
There isnāt a fundamental issue with the Season 13 budget at this point, but with the reserves.
The arguments against have not been about whether FDD is getting results and executing. They come from a place of concern with our rate of growth and the DAOs overall ability to assess the effectiveness of a workstreamās efforts. Combine this with the concern that the DAO as a whole hasnāt figured out how to prioritize budget between all of the workstreams.
I agree with these observations. I will address one at a time, then follow with my argument for the reserves.
Compromise 1 - We address the core issue of budget growth and rate of budget growth by agreeing that āstructured streamsā have a capped rate of budget growth (w/ specific CSDO override mechanism if needed)
During Season 13 we will work together to formulate a percentage cap to the allowable growth rate cap for structured streams. We will also formally set the requirements for being a āstructuredā or āsemi-structuredā stream and the benefits a workstream may receive for participating in CSDO governance.
Compromise 2 - We will collaborate to improve the DAOs overall ability to assess the effectiveness of a workstreamās efforts
The FDD Mandate Delivery squad is tasked with determining the effectiveness and health of FDD initiatives. While I believe each workstream should be able to track this on their own, it would be great to take the learnings from our effort which is needed sooner because of our mission critical functions, then collaborate to design a framework to be owned by DAOops in the future.
This could include spinning out this squad to DAOops for Season 14 or simply reducing these efforts from around 4% of FDD total budget to < 1%.
Compromise 3 - We collaborate to figure out a framework to prioritize budget between all of the workstreams
One steward, @tjayrush has suggested we put a % of total budget on all the budget requests. We did this within FDD as you can see on our FDD Season 13 Budget Proposal Details, but couldnāt do it with the entire DAO.
We can collaborate on a framework for providing this context to the entire DAO in the future.
As for this budget proposal, FDD is only asking for 60-70k GTC for season 13 (depending on GTC price). This is not the largest seasonal budget request, or the second largest. However, solving sybil resistance (ensuring each vote is a unique human) and grant eligibility (community curation of consent to participate) are the two of the most important problems for Gitcoin to solve.
Because of the importance of these efforts, it seems that our relative prioritization is reasonable for this season before we agree to the new framework.
My argument on why reserves are reasonable
I believe not having reserves is both operationally a potential problem, but also detrimental to contributors mental health and financial stability. I think we are all in agreement that the workstreams could still be held accountable even if they have more than 90 days of operating budget at a time.
My argument is that ALL workstreams should have at least 90 days of runway at a any given time. We shouldnāt back them into a corner.
With the current system, contributors can only plan expectations of an income for 90 days at the beginning of a season. At the end, they might only be able to plan a few weeks or days into the future. (Right now for example, most workstreams would be in the red if they actually executed and uses the budget they requested for Season 12.)
With my suggestion, even in the last days of the season, a structured workstream would benefit from having 90 days of financial stability at the end of each quarter rather than at the beginning.
Yes, it is an assumption that they will execute. I think this is reasonable as we can set the requirements for being a structured workstream to include a level of earning this trust. (Maybe after a first trial season, they get this right?)
Iād encourage us to assess whether this would be appropriate for all workstreams during the upcoming season and before s14 proposals as part of this compromise.
Thank you both for your attention, professionalism, and honest feedback.
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