[Proposal] Gitcoin Passport Workstream Season 18 &19 Budget Request

[kyle]

edit May 2nd 2023
Voting is now live on Snapshot. Go Vote!

Gitcoin Passport S18-S19 Workstream Budget Proposal

This is the integrated funding proposal for the Gitcoin Passport workstream requesting funding for Season 18 and S19 (1 May 2023 through 31 October 2023).

This budget request has been deeply reviewed and approved by CSDO, as well as some of our top Stewards, namely Disruption Joe, Carl, and others. We invite you to offer feedback, ask questions and help us identify any blindspots we may have. Coordination starts at the governance layer, and we need you to make us better.

TL;DR

This season, the Gitcoin Passport workstream will drive significant impact in the Gitcoin ecosystem by focusing on the following key outcomes:

1. Growing adoption and usage of Passport through development of on-chain mechanisms, user experience improvements, and broader DevRel initiatives.
2. Generating upside through strategic tests, including at least two revenue experiments, to identify sustainable value capture mechanisms that contribute to the long-term sustainability of the Gitcoin Passport App and the DAO.
3. Gathering a plurality of scoring mechanisms for communities to adopt, encouraging innovation from the broader community and making Passport a more versatile tool for managing identity and reputation.
4. Galvanizing community experiences around Passport by researching and potentially enabling custom community experiences, integration capabilities, and branded Passport experiences natively in their applications.

Outline

Gitcoin Passport is an Identity and Reputation aggregator that offers communities the ability to gate access to their most important experiences - Protect what matters. While Sybil resistance is where Gitcoin Passport has been focused (to improve the Quadratic Funding outcomes for Allo initially), we are now seeing it be used to help protect Airdrop experiences from farming, and also prevent POAP and badge farming from many communities. We have integrations with a number of leading protocols and teams to enable really unique experiences (Bankless Academy, Snapshot Voting, etc.)

In Season 18 and 19, we are going to put our foot on the gas and really grow the presence of Passport in the Ethereum ecosystem. One focus area will be centered on deploying on-chain scoring mechanisms to enable more native smart contract interactions. Another is to explore communal scoring approaches (perhaps Cluster mapping in the QF mechanism, Identity markers for on-chain voting, etc.). DevRel efforts are going to ramp up, with us focused on deeper integration support, robust documentation and lots of great sample apps.

We have broken out our budget to showcase where we plan to develop over the next 6mos, but I will caution that 6mos is a long time in crypto . At our halfway checkpoint when we request the second half or our budget, we would like to offer an update on our progress, but also offer insight into anywhere we are deviating from the plan here.

Amount

Passport Workstream is requesting 832,372 GTC* = $1,323,472 for S18-19, excluding reserves and rolled over amounts.

	May	June	July	S18		Aug	Sept	Oct	S19
Total GP Budgeted Spend	196,949	195,949	196,949	589,846		196,949	195,949	196,949	589,846
33% Buffer				196,613					196,613
Past Season Treasury Balance				249,447					0
Total S18 & S19 Request				535,148					786,459

Budget evolution:

	S17	S18/19
Passport Budget Requested	515,254	589,846 (per season)

A full breakdown of the budget can be found at the end of this post.

*The amount of GTC requested and the value of the reserves will be adjusted based on the current market value at the time this proposal is moved to Tally using the lower of the current price or the 20 day moving average, whichever is lower.

We will be requesting our funds through one Snapshot vote, but the release of the actual funds will be split over two Tally votes (one at the start of each season) for reasons of accountability and to mitigate potential price fluctuations.

** How much more/less did we spend than the requested budget (excluding reserves)

Outcomes, Projects and Milestones

As described above, there are four thematic areas we going to be focused on:

1. Growing adoption
2. Generating upside
3. Gathering a plurality of Scoring Mechanisms
4. Galvanize community experiences

Growing Adoption

Adoption of Passport will come from both sides of the marketplace (Developers/Communities and Passport Holders). This is an “Always On” theme for us. We will continue to make the user experience better for Passport holders, while also ensuring the developer experience is fantastic with lots of sample applications that can be easily forked, really great tutorials, and high-quality documentation. In this season, we will continue to improve the Passport Holder experience with a redesigned dashboard and improvements to the “one-click verification” flow we are in the process of implementing. For communities adopting Passport, we will continue to expand the support, knowledgebase, and sample applications while improving the integration touch points with expanded details via API. Additionally, by positioning the Gitcoin Passport team at the forefront of innovation and the bleeding edge of Sybil defense, identity, and reputation, we aim to become the default Schelling point for these critical discussions.

Generating Upside

Charging for the convenience layer of Passport is an essential milestone in working towards the long-term sustainability of the app. We are not in a rush to extract value from those who wish to protect what matters, but we do want to test and show that there is a viable strategy to flow upside back to the DAO. This may be in the form of virtue signaling (staking GTC for elevated API access), or it may be in request fees (charging GTC for API requests), or it may even come from making data available on chain (when someone pushes their data on-chain, a small amount of Eth is moved to the treasury). We don’t know the best answer, but we want to spend the next 6mos really thinking about how to be regenerative for the DAO through value capture mechanisms that communities won’t reject.

Gathering a plurality of Scoring Mechanisms

Gitcoin has built the scoring mechanisms that exist today in Passport. We want to incorporate innovation from the community and from others who are pioneering great identity and reputational models. To start, we will enable “custom scoring” where communities can input their own weights for stamps we have. Long term, we may explore a plurality marketplace that enables other teams to develop scores and charge communities to use those scores. The intention is to create a Schelling point of robust identity scoring mechanisms and ensure communities have access to the best solutions tailored to their specific use case. _Scoring mechanisms that match community needs is the future. _We think of this as a “local maxima’’ versus a “global maxima.” The Global Maxima is Gitcoin’s default Unique Humanity score. But a Local Maxima is tailored to the stamps that a community cares about most (certain POAPs, Otterspace badges, ENS, etc.).

Galvanize Community Experience

There are a number of communities we have chatted with who have loved the idea of using Passport, but have told us “we want to own the user experience” – more specifically, they want to have a branded experience where their users can verify stamps in a trusted way. Today, this isn’t easily possible. We will research and at least design (not committing to build phase without more research) how we might enable communities to launch branded Passport experiences natively in their applications. To start, we can build common UI components that can be embedded on other applications. Next, we would like to explore how we might enable themed Passport experiences to exist where customization can be defined in the scorer application. For example, if you want the Bankless Academy themed Passport, with only the stamps that the Bankless community cares about, head on over to this URL. This is still early in the problem definition phase, but 6mos from now, we aspire to have more optionality for communities in how they integrate.

Measurement

Measuring progress against these goals will be critically important:

1. Growing adoption
   1. Increase the number of Passports by 5x (to 1MM)
      1. Maintain an average stamp count of 8 or higher per passport.
   2. Increase the number of integrators by 5x
2. Generating upside
   3. Test at least two experiments to generate upside
   4. Generate at least $1 in revenue
3. Gathering a plurality of Scoring Mechanisms
   5. Ensure at least 5 scoring mechanisms available to communities
   6. Ensure at least 4 of the scoring mechanisms are used
4. Galvanize community experiences
   7. Research and decide if we should build custom community experiences.

List of S18 & S19 Goals

This list of Milestones and deliverables are ones that we plan to accomplish throughout the two seasons. prioritization and timing of these deliverables has been removed from consideration as we are still evaluating the order in which to tackle these (though they are loosely ordered in priority order here).

Initiative/Project	Outcome	Milestone/ deliverable
Passport Holder Experience Improvements	Product brief. Enhance the user experience for those holding Gitcoin Passports by streamlining the onboarding process, improving the passport dashboard, and refining the overall user interface.	Increase number of passports to 1M Increase number of VCs per passport > 9
GTC Staking Improvements	Incentivize user engagement and commitment to the platform by allowing users to stake GTC tokens	Increase GTC staked from current peak of 150k GTC to 450k GTC Increase cost of forgery
Revenue Experiments	Discover durable value capture mechanisms that provide a regenerative flow of resources back to the DAO	> 2 revenue experiments conducted Generate $1 revenue
On-chain Scoring	Facilitate the adoption of on-chain scoring mechanisms, enabling native smart contract interactions and providing more accessible and versatile data for dApps	Number of scored passports on-chain Number of dapps utilizing on-chain Passport
Custom Scoring	Offer tailored scoring mechanisms that cater to the specific needs of various communities, encouraging wider adoption of the Gitcoin Passport platform	Increase the number of integrators by 5x to 35 Ensure at least 5 scoring mechanisms are available to communities Ensure at least 4 of the scoring mechanisms are used
Reputational Exploration	Enhance the value and relevance of Gitcoin Passport by researching and integrating innovative identity and reputation models from the broader community and industry	Three new reputation models explored One new reputation models that are successfully integrated into Passport as stamps or scorer Three communities adopting the new reputation models
Research Custom Community Experience	Assess the feasibility of providing custom-branded Passport experiences for individual communities that integrate seamlessly with their existing platforms	Roadmap determined, beginning execution on new features

Budget Breakdown

Breakdown staffing, contracting, operational expenses

We have tried to be as comprehensive as possible for expenses we foresee without also padding our budget beyond what is necessary. We have a core team of eleven people (not including Kyle who is also supporting) for Passport across Product, Design, Engineering, Devrel and Ops support.

		Budgeted	Budgeted	Budgeted	Budgeted		Budgeted	Budgeted	Budgeted	Budgeted
Expense Statement		2023.05	2023.06	2023.07	S18		2023.08	2023.09	2023.10	S19
Passport
Staffing
	Passport Core Contributor	98,336	98,336	98,336	295,009		98,336	98,336	98,336	295,009
	Passport Leadership / Ops	41,771	41,771	41,771	125,313		41,771	41,771	41,771	125,313
Total Staffing		140,107	140,107	140,107	420,321		140,107	140,107	140,107	420,321
DevOps
	DevOps Consulting	12,000	12,000	12,000	36,000		12,000	12,000	12,000	36,000
Total Contracting		12,000	12,000	12,000	36,000		12,000	12,000	12,000	36,000
DevRel
	DevRel	10,075	10,075	10,075	30,225		10,075	10,075	10,075	30,225
	Hackathons	5,000	5,000	5,000	15,000		5,000	5,000	5,000	15,000
	Content Generation	5,000	5,000	5,000	15,000		5,000	5,000	5,000	15,000
	Bounties	5,000	5,000	5,000	15,000		5,000	5,000	5,000	15,000
	DevRel Engineer	6,667	6,667	6,667	20,000		6,667	6,667	6,667	20,000
Total DevRel		31,742	31,742	31,742	95,225		31,742	31,742	31,742	95,225
OpEx
	Infrastructure	10,000	10,000	10,000	30,000		10,000	10,000	10,000	30,000
	Audits	0	0	0	0		0	0	0	0
	Events/Travel	2,000	2,000	2,000	6,000		2,000	2,000	2,000	6,000
	Professional Development	1,000	0	1,000	2,000		1,000	0	1,000	2,000
	Incentivizing User Interviews	100	100	100	300		100	100	100	300
	Deployment fees	0	0	0	0		0	0	0	0
Total OpEx		13,100	12,100	13,100	38,300		13,100	12,100	13,100	38,300
	Total GP Budgeted Spend	196,949	195,949	196,949	589,846		196,949	195,949	196,949	589,846
	33% Buffer				196,613					196,613
	Past Season Treasury Balance				249,447					0
	Total S18 & S19 Request				537,013					786,459

* Any and all revenue generated during the past season will flow back to the DAO treasury or will be rolled over to the next season.

_During the season we will transparently report to CSDO and Stewards on revenue plus efforts to remediate currency fluctuations and report on these in the next budget request. _

We look forward to your comments, thanks for your consideration!

[michaelgreen06]

I’m excited for the next 2 seasons at Passport.

Specifically I am excited about all of the different value capture experiments we can run. I am bullish on GTC staking & or charging for api access & the possibility of charging for custom community experiences. I think the custom community experiences option could be modeled after what PGF is doing w/ self serve grants vs a services model for grants.

[DisruptionJoe]

I’m mostly in support, however, I would like to see the staff breakdown other workstreams have provided.

What I Like

Great job last season

The one-click all stamp update is golden. The score showing is even better. This team really delivered a great experience.

Strong objectives which push innovation

The objectives are well stated and inspiring.

What Concerns Me

No focus on the tool working for sybil defense or providing corruption-free capitol allocation

• None of the goals include actually proving that Passport sybil defense is effective. (This is not me saying that it isn’t effective, only that the goals don’t seem to keep our eye on the ball)
• How do we take sybil scoring legos and turn them into useful stamps?
• Acknowledgement of the ethical concerns of ONLY providing gating for sybil defense
• Some way to understand the friction passport places on participation when used as a gating mechanism vs using it as transparent ETL layer for retroactive sybil discounting (squelching)

People aren’t listed like other workstreams

I don’t think the numbers are too high, but I’d like to know how many and who are full and part time.

[eugyal]

I appreciate the thoroughness of the project plan, which includes specific outcomes, projects, and milestones. While the budget of $1,323,472 may seem excessive without a detailed breakdown of staff expenses, I think it is reasonable when spread across two seasons, considering the seven initiatives proposed. I support this budget and hope to see these initiatives succeed, specifically the expansion of passports userbase, revenue generation for the DAO, custom scoring, and integration with external platforms to become the go-to ID/reputation solution.

I have a highly favorable opinion of Gitcoin Passport. The potential for web3 Identity/Reputation is immense, and I believe that Gitcoin Passport has the potential to play a crucial role in this narrative.

[ccerv1]

I was happy to see a number of passport improvements rolled out in time for Beta round, and am very excited about Passport becoming an essential identity primitive.

That said, I’m not in love with the measurement metrics as they currently stand. More passports x more stamps x more scoring mechanisms does not necessarily mean better Sybil defense, better QF allocations for communities, etc. Furthermore, being able to measure the value-add of Passport feels critical to generating upside from it.

I will vote YES for this proposal because I believe in this team and the product, but urge more effort go towards measuring what matters vs capturing vanity metrics.

[kevin.olsen]

Thanks Carl. I agree with you (and Joe earlier in the thread) that the efficacy of Passport is key.

We can’t have a product that isn’t delivering on its core value prop. That said, this is a notoriously difficult thing to measure, and the best we’ve come up with so far is done in post-round analysis, where the complimentary post-round sybil discounting work takes place.

I’m keen to get some outside eyes from ODC and others to help us evaluate the efficacy of Passport, but also we can continue to improve and standardize the analysis that comes out of @ale.k and the nascent data guild at the end of the rounds.

But beyond improvements to the status quo analysis work, I believe the goal should be to eventually productize these analytics as they’re proven out and they themselves are shown to be effective measures. My belief is that there’s a home for that in the scorer app. I propose that we commit to keeping you and the community informed as we continue to investigate this space.

[azeem]

Big fan of the Passport team. Recently started working with Jeremy there and I’m really excited what the next six months look like. Fully supportive of this proposal.

[CoachJonathan]

I am in full support of this proposal and the people behind this team.

I think the only amendment I might make is to carve out additional budget for an IRL activation in the fall.

[ale.k]

@kevin.olsen

I believe the goal should be to eventually productize these analytics as they’re proven out and they themselves are shown to be effective measures.

Triple underlines on this.

Very excited for way forward in not only creating a score that works for our own environment and sybil-defense, but also operationalizing that process so that others can protect distinctive communities with problems not faced by Gitcoin rounds. Perhaps that didn’t make it into the budget explicitly since it’s a cross-functional initiative, but this fits into a few different core intents:

• Advance and protect the Grants Program’s reputation and Allo’s reputation for fairness [PGF] - working in public and being transparent about our score weighting means that we earn trust and our grants program earns trust as fair and free from sybil manipulation.
• Growing adoption [Passport] - Passport won’t be adopted if teams don’t see gains in sybil-defense metrics during trials (to me it is our role as a thought-leader to aid them to define and understand these metrics, too)
• Gathering a plurality of Scoring Mechanisms [Passport] - Right now - we have seen that devs and teams who approach us don’t know where to start in terms of scoring. There is interest in using our score, but the capacity to create and retrain a unique score over time for their own unique community is daunting. As a result, interest in creating new scores has been minimal since we do not provide clear guidance as to best practices and methods. As a data capacity (and perhaps soon an MLOps capacity) - this is somewhere where Gitcoin can lead by example.
• Find x# of new integrators for Passport [MMM] - Again- this is hard to sell when we can’t share success metrics in an operationalized way. So far it’s been very hands-on work to show our integrators the proof-of-concept after they add Passport as a gateway. We need to standardize this so we can arm MMM with the success-stories they need to carry the product forward.

[0xZakk]

Excited to support this proposal. I’m really excited about the product’s direction, as outlined in here, and really excited about the focus on Passport utility through number of passports and stamps and further adoption.

[bobjiang]

I am so excited to see the next 2 seasons budget proposals for Passport.
I agree with the proposal which is detailed in different work (although not mentioned the people), if anything needs to do, definitely I would promote Passport to every potential customers/participants.

[kyle]

Hey all - Given the commentary from 5 stewards and duration of 5 days on the forum, I am going to move this to snapshot for us to start our voting.

[shawn16400]

For reference - cast your vote here!

https://snapshot.org/#/gitcoindao.eth/proposal/0x021d4acc12e77da4834c066dcf2008f428a0e97bb695391d42187a444c60bb16

End date May 9, 2023, 10:00 AM EST

[J9leger]

I’m excited about this proposal and the direction of passport. I’m particularly excited to see Jeremy get involved. The proposal clearly articulates this teams goals and I am excited to see further adoption of the protocol.

[shawn16400]

Quick update, this snapshot vote has passed with ~82% approval rate.

Metrics:
1867 unique votes
~7.2M GTC tokens cast.

Thank you to all the voters for participating in our governance and the proposal reviewers for going deep on these budgets!