Proposal - Request to fund FDD workstream Q4 2021 budget

📜 Proposals
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Here’s why I’m going to vote yes on this proposal:

I’ve applied to join the Gitcoin DAO and while I didn’t receive any answer from other workstreams, @DisruptionJoe followed up immediately and gave me an overview of the current state of the DAO and gave me different options on how I could contribute. The onboarding process was very smooth.

On one of the first FDD community calls, Joe talked about his ultimate goals and the missions and values of FDD.
I saw this workstream as a democratic and meritocratic safe garden that not only takes care of the security aspects of the Gitcoin DAO through its anti-sybil mechanisms but it also empowers talented and dedicated contributors to have an impact at their own scale by taking initiatives in complete autonomy without compromising the workstream or entire DAO if those initiatives were to fail…
Some mechanisms to deal with off-boarding which is a complex topic were already well thought out within the FDD (eg: forking an existing squad and then resolving the conflict between the two squads by voting on the continuation or discontinuation of those).

After that call, I knew I could trust Joe and felt confident that devoting a good portion of my efforts to contributing to the Gticoin DAO was the right choice to make.

FDD is a pillar of the Gitcoin DAO and @DisruptionJoe is a truth-teller, serves the common good rather than his own interests, and is an OG steward of the DAO’s missions and value.

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I David Dyor, aka Blazingthirdeye, fully support this proposal.

Gitcoin is non-excludable. Gitcoin is open to all, while still maintaining high quality of work. The bar is set high in the emergent GitcoinDAO and its Fraud Detection & Defence (FDD) workstream, and we encourage you to join us and push it higher still. But you should know it is a ‘labour of love’ for most of us. It is true that intrinsic motivation is the only kind that endures.

Thanks for putting this together Joe, while also managing the build-out of the dao like a mastermind.

Just a few thoughts in no particular order:

As GR10 & 11 played out we saw bigger and more complex sybil-rings attempting to exploit Gitcoin. This will increase with general crypto adoption. It is a given that n number of humans will attempt to game a system for personal benefit. As the system grows so does n. This suggests, at minimum the budget for the Gitcoin FDD should grow at the same rate as the system containing it - the overall digital asset space.

This article from Chainalysis states Global Adoption to be 880%.

The FDD is not requesting anything close to 8x on their budget.

Gitcoin FDD must also face the threat caused by ‘mercenary capital’ aka speculating. Most novice investors in the cryptocurrency space are focused on gains, not building community.

This suggests we will see growth of the mercenary-investor threat in the future just like the threat from the growth of the bad-actor population. It takes experience to focus on building community not yield. Learn more about the vulnerability of digital assets to emotion-based risks from this USA SEC article.

The rapid adoption of digital assets around the globe requires big investment in anti-fraud infrastructure & human resources. Gitcoin does this with its FDD.

Please Support the FDD Q4 proposal

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Like @Huxwell I’ve applied also for other Workstreams, but Joe was the first one to respond, reach out and explain what the the ethos and goals of Gitcoin Dao. After that Bob onboarded me officially and David was there to answer any of my questions(and I had a lot :smiley: ).
The FDD naturally became my home here at Gitcoin Dao.

I am not new to the Dao space, I actually have over one year experience as a contributor in Daos(1hive, Uma, TEC, etc) and I can say that the FDD is based on meritocracy and everybody here supports each other. Altruism is the first thing I search for in a Dao and altruism had it’s home in the FDD.

The FDD’s Grants Review Squad was my first interaction with Gitcoin DAO and now at the end of my first quarter here I have to say that it was an amazing and rich work experience and it still is. My detective skills have at long last found a home and I can’t wait for the next round of grants to start!

Now I am also part of the Policy group at the FDD, in Q4 I will co-lead my first stream of Grant Reviewers. This just goes to show that in *three months you can evolve your skill set by a considerable factor of magnitude if you work with the right people in a good work environment enforced by the open source ethos *.

The shift to web 3.0, open source and the collaborative economy is accelerating (part of the Third Industrial Revolution) and the Dark Web will be the biggest threat to it’s success. The work that we do here at the FDD could really be at the fore front of the defense against Anti Sybil and the personal profit scenarios.

Now with the creation of the Research and Policy groups in the FDD we will have all the tools necessary to leave a legacy behind us that other DAOs could use and follow.

As last words, I have to say that even if our goal is decentralization and open source, we cannot achieve this without leaders and Disruption Joe is a real visionary! It’s my honor to be part of the FDD workstream in Gitcoin DAO.

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I am thankful to the FDD workstream for their hard work on the DAO, but I have a few suggestions for how to make it better.

1. Remove “Community/Onboarding” and “Cross Stream DAOops” portions of this budget

I am against the “Community/Onboarding” and “Cross Stream DAOops” portions of this budget. The reason for this is:

  1. The FDD workstream still has many unsolved (and in some cases, existential) problems related to sybil/collusion resistence that in my opinion, they should be focused on before expanding scope to incubating other workstreams. There is a lot of promising work being done, but the desired outcome - solid fraud defense at scale - still eludes us.
  2. There are multiple contributors who are in charge of the onboarding/cross-stream-ops mandates (and only these mandates) already. It would sew chaos for these contributors to have FDD managing a budget for onboarding/cross-stream ops without proper onboarding/cross-stream ops centric governance and priority setting.
  3. I have not seen most of the multisig holders on FDD multisig on the cross-stream-ops or onboarding calls, therefore I do not think it is legitimate for them to be managing a budget for it.
  4. I don’t think your point “we have not developed a structured governance mechanism for it capable of handling contentious decisions” is true. Kris started facilitating a time-tested dao governance process during the cross stream gov/ops call 2 weeks ago.

2. Remove “Reserve” portion of budget

In addition to the concerns above, I also question why the “PLUS Q1 2024 Defense Reserves = 40k GTC” is needed. Could you not just request the 40k at the start of Q1 2022 (assuming the "2024 is a typo) assuming things are going well enough to support that budget at that time? If not, can you please lay out why that budget is needed at this time?

3. Focus on outcomes

All in all, I find this workstream budget proposal to be very “what were doing” centric, but it doesnt go into depth about the outcomes being achieved. It’s easier to transparently say things are working (or not) if the proposal is outcome focused. Here are some example outcomes that a workstream like this could be focused on:

  1. Minimize the fraud tax (and false negatives) for sybil resistence.
  2. Minimize the collusion tax
  3. Develop product features for cGrants related to sybil/collusion resistence.
  4. Develop product features for dGrants related to sybil/collusion resistence.
  5. Advance the ability for the community to report mischievious behaviour.
  6. Educate the community on sybil/collusion resistence.
  7. Maintain a low DSO (days outstanding) on new grant applications or grant flags or any other work-item that needs to be processed manually.

From your existing proposal, I do not know which of these (or other outcomes) are a priority for you right now.

Summary

I believe that the FDD workstream has great people and is totally well intentioned, but I think this proposal has ballooned in scope too large. I think the most healthy thing to do is

  1. Remove the onboarding/cross-stream ops portion of this budget.
  2. Remove (or justify) why you “need” 95k of reserves.
  3. Focus the proposal more on outcomes that the workstream has achieved or plans to achieve.
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Hi Kevin!

Thank for your feedback! I think we can definitely improve many things and essentially focus on “The Outcomes”

We are currently working on the features engineering side to develop a structure with actionable insights for the Anti-Sybil portion of the FDD workstream with @omnianalytics and @dongdada to improve the false negative for example.

These above are something I am focusing on right now with other contributors.
I think I can greatly improve the educational part on sybil/collusion and merge it with the “Threat Research” existing squad to have a Anti-Sybil Wiki!

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Hi Kevin,

I totally agree with you “Focus on outcomes”, which will force us to the mission / values.

I would like to have a bit more explanation about the “community/onboarding” and “cross stream daoops” (or “community support”).

For now there are operations in each workstream, and they did well in different ways and processes. In FDD we kick off the onboarding contributor process (and then involve other stream together) and cross stream dao ops. Like what you said below:

– by the way Kris did well to faciliate the discussion and move forward, but this structure and mechanism is started from FDD stream, and move separately step by step.

Last but not least, although there is budget for “community ops” in FDD, we have plan to spin out such squads sooner or later. Once spin out the budget could be moved to new stream as well.

More details, maybe @DisruptionJoe could do it.

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I support this proposal, and we could add outcome (not output) listed in the proposal as Kevin suggested.

I believe that FDD team did very well in Q3, and improved the results for anti-sybil as stated in Gitcoin Grants Round 11 Governance Brief - Gitcoin's Blog

So I would like to invite the stewards to continue to support FDD stream.

Thanks lot for every DAO contributors!

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You think FDD team did “very well” based upon what outcomes? What are the outcomes and KPIs that show they did very well?

by the way Kris did well to faciliate the discussion and move forward, but this structure and mechanism is started from FDD stream, and move separately step by step.

Last but not least, although there is budget for “community ops” in FDD, we have plan to spin out such squads sooner or later. Once spin out the budget could be moved to new stream as well.

Why did the FDD do these things? Doesnt seem like its part of their charter of fraud defense. And Fraud Defense is a very unsolved problem AFAIK.

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11

I appreciate you taking the time for this detailed response. Here are my answers:

1. Remove “Community/Onboarding” and “Cross Stream DAOops” portions of this budget

  1. I believe it is an iterative process where we get better and better each round. Our outcomes have shown this (fraud tax reduction). Not only that, but we aren’t happy with just TRUSTing the results. We are taking multiple steps to VERIFY. These include adding statistical validation during GR11. During GR12 we will be starting a community run algorithm which will give more insights into the accuracy of our current process. We are also working on DAO proposals to share feature insights (for the ml pipelines) with other protocols starting with BrightID.

  2. FDD is currently managing this budget because the soft consensus earlier was that the DAOops wasn’t ready to be it’s own stream. We did not decide this, we only offered to fund and administer the funds for the meantime to make sure contributors would get rewarded.

  3. The multisig keyholders of the primary FDD multisig function more like a board as explained in our first budget request. They are not asked to partake in day to day operations. Outline of FDD Multisig Keyholder Responsibilities

  4. The process you describe that Kris brought was used to determine that FDD should continue administering this funding. This was decided by the CrossStream DAOops Governance Squad which consists of reps from all workstreams. The notes to this decision can be found here.

2. Remove “Reserve” portion of budget

We set that precedent with our first budget request and are rolling over 20k GTC of the 25K GTC reserves that we had for Q4 2021. It was beneficial for us to have the reserves this time because we were able to support the CrossStream DAOops while the situation setting it up was still somewhat chaotic. It also allowed us to fill in the gaps for the User Support functions.

Reserves for defense should be available because we don’t want to risk our ability to continue functioning based on political, technical, or other unknown issues which may arise. If this wasn’t contested before, and the outcomes have been useful to the DAO, should we not continue?

3. Focus on outcomes

FDD has a primary role that is inherently judged on outcomes. These outcomes were listed in detail both in relation to GR11 in the GR11 Governance Brief and in detail concerning Q3 Accomplishments and Q4 Deliverables in the State of FDD Q3 2021 document linked in the proposal.

In response to the specific outcome focused items you listed.

  1. Fraud tax was reduced by over 50% from $14k to $6k in GR11. But we know having one data source saying that is… questionable. Therefore we added a statistical validation which will be improved on during GR12 and another entire ml pipeline to doublecheck and compare results. It will also allow for open source feature engineering which will advance the communities ability to report mischievous behavior (Outcome #5)

  2. Collusion tax is not something we have consistently measured in the past. We agree that it should be studied in more depth. Let’s fund that research. We have two initiatives in the research part of FDD focused on this!

  3. We have consistently delivered more transparency and community involvement in the process of reviewing the grants. In addition to the ML improvements discussed above, we have also developed an appeals process that follows best practices and will be implemented for GR12.

Another piece that will help is the creation of a community data lake which is budgeted into the Data DevOps stream which we have spun out, but will work closely with FDD going forward.

Lastly, there are three open Jira tickets for the core team engineering to get to to help improve the transparency here including sending grant flags and user sanctions to a public DB similar to how new grants are handled now. We can build part of this, but we do have dependencies for the cGrants product. Additionally, it is probably best to MVP design these, test, then build a product.

  1. We began reviewing dGrants this last week. (Only 3 so far.) The curation research is closely aligned with dGrants as well.

  2. Discussed above in points 1 & 3

6.Our initiatives led by Bob Jiang in user support included creating an open source knowledge base (SourceCred) and providing translations in Chinese, French, and Spanish. This has been done in a couple months and shows the capabilities of the DAO!

In addition, the knowledge base is being spun out into the dCompass proposal at this time. User Support has a clear roadmap to it’s spinout expected in Q1 2022.

  1. This can get better. While we averaged 2-3 days during the round, post round it falls a week or two behind while we are working on the round closing priorities. There is a plan in place to improve this metric.

(This is not a fault of the FDD contributors because I personally am the bottleneck. The system isn’t built in a decentralized way yet. The contributors review, then I personally have to input this into the cGrants system. This seems reasonable at this time because it provides transparency and accountability while training new contributors during this first season)

Summary

Our outcomes are fairly clearly listed at the low level in the State of FDD Q3 2021 document. Here are the high level goals driving them.

  1. Legitimacy - Decrease the fraud tax, Establish Grant & User review process and sanctions which follow Ostrom’s 8 Principles, vigilance in assessing potential platform biases both algorithmic and human.
  2. Credible Neutrality - Increase community participation, process transparency, and accountability
  3. Sustainability - Conduct research and develop reporting to understand and communicate the threats Gitcoin faces (Grants & DAO)
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I think that all the actions FDD took in Q3 were within the mandate of "Defending Gitcoin from threats to its legitimacy, credible neutrality, and sustainability.

Here are the items we took on that weren’t specifically listed in the Q3 budget.

Onboarding

This was taken on because FDD developed a system that was working and the rest of the DAO wanted to converge on a solution ASAP. We offered to expand the system we were using to accomodate the DAO level needs. In doing this, we specifically pushed for the creation of the DAOops Governance Squad as to not have FDD in control of these efforts.

Not rewarding the contributors who took part in this process was seen as a threat to Gitcoin’s legitimacy.

CrossStream DAOops

Similarly, the CrossStream DAOops sprung out of this effort and we recognized the same issue.

Data & DevOps

Although it is already being spun out for Q4 2021, this need was originally on the FDD Q3 budget because of our need to run microservices for the anti-sybil ml pipeline. We developed a plan to make these services available for the full DAO while working closely with the dGrants stream.

User Support

Gitcoin Holdings team was behind on tickets going into GR11. The need was identified by Scott and FDD decided to fund this function seeing its failure as a threat to our legitimacy and sustainability. Additionally, many of the support tickets where related to the FDD responsibilities. We were able to provide a layer of Discord support for 3 time zones which allowed the core team to catch up on tickets and provided users a quicker response time.

Another defensive issue was how long phishing and malicious links would stay up in the Discord. We have drastically reduced that time.

Summary

What a workstream is “allowed” to do based on strict or narrow controls seems antithetical to the idea of a DAO. We intend to use a reinforcement style of learning with the majority of our budget. That means iterating and improving our defense of KNOWN threats.

However, we also see the need to identify new threats and research to discover unknown ones. I’d recommend this conversation continue over the next few seasons as all of the streams find their place.

I would ask though, which stream is responsible for finding and fixing these issues if it wasn’t FDD?

Also, if every stream only took the most narrow view of their mandate, how would we evolve going forward?

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I urge us to vote YES on the proposal! I’ve heard Joe speak about the mission, values and goals of FDD. He’s a great leader and I think the requested resources are imperative for the success of the Gitcoin DAO. Onward!

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Update: I had a great call with Joe this morning to talk through some of this stuff. As a next step we are going to talk to crossstreamops about breaking out that portion of the budget. Thanks @DisruptionJoe for the discussion so far.

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I am confused and I have some concerns regarding this request:

The Cross Stream DAOops, originally known as the FDD Ops workstream, requested to have a budget proposal on its own about 3 weeks ago during an ops call because there was a common need from different workstreams (eg: automated onboarding, a decent Notion structure, devOps, etc.)

During that same call, @owocki suggested that we should first figure out what exactly a cross-stream ops workstream would imply. So @krrisis facilitated the demonstration of the potential solutions to solve the different needs through the community experience squad (originally under the cross-stream ops workstream, along with the Notion1337 crew and so on).

In my opinion, for the safety of the DAO we should keep incubating the Cross Stream Ops under the FDD until the decision making process has been proven to be democratic. No offense but Gitcoin holdings members giving the direction to Gitcoin employees that are then taking key decisions for the DAO, is not democratic and very centralized.

UPDATE: I just saw the last message and I’m glad you and Joe came to an agreement.

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The Cross Stream DAOops, originally known as the FDD Ops workstream

What? The name of this proposal is “FDD workstream”.

The FDD workstream is not chartered to do crosstream-ops nor does it have the legitimacy of a blessing from the stewards to do so. The FDD incubating cross-stream ops is not a democratic or legitimate starting place.

As a matter of making sure we’ve been moving things forward until a legitimate structure can be blessed by governance, the Gitcoin company is happy to float the ops workstream with some amount of budget, but we want no governance control of the workstream during this time. It sounds like FDD is also willing to do the same.

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The cross stream DAO ops originated from the FDD Ops (level 2 workstream) and saw interest from coordinators across the DAO thus the initative to “extract” it from the FDD by moving FDD Ops to Cross stream ops.

That’s a good point, I just assumed it was safe/legitimate to have it incubated by the FDD but ideally it should be a workstream on its own.
That brings us to another important point, which is how Gitcoin founders & employees will transition and find their place in the DAO.
You guys built this and you have more legitimacy than anyone else to transparently lead such a workstream.

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Thanks for the history. I think I was confused between level1/2 here.

That brings us to another important point, which is how Gitcoin founders & employees will transition and find their place in the DAO.

I am giving a presentation to the team on the same tomorrow. Happy to share it here or in a DAO context sometime in the weeks after that.

That’s a good point, I just assumed it was safe/legitimate to have it incubated by the FDD but ideally it should be a workstream on its own.

Yeah we should figure out how to structure it. Letes discuss on the Tuesday call perhaps.

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I am fine with the FDD budget as I had also seen the presentation of same budget from Joe before. No opinion on cross-stream stuff.

Not sure on how we want to handle the different streams and communications between them though. The arguments on the “Cross stream” work here shows there are open questions.

How can they be handled? Is there any protocol/guideline on how/when the various streams should communicate coordinate?

And a small note.

As Joe said the FDD multisig keyholders simply join a few calls, observe few things and ratify results by doing on-chain transactions. And that’s already a lot of work for most of us who also have full time jobs outside of this :wink:

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Legitimacy Discussion

I do think your issue of “Gitcoin holdings members giving the direction to Gitcoin employees that are then making key decisions for the DAO.” is a legitimate concern, but I don’t think that is currently the case.

It does strike me that having FDD continue administering payments to contributors while the governance model is decided upon would be a MORE legitimate way to move forward.

However, that is my opinion, but I am not the decider here. Neither is Kevin, or Gitcoin Holdings. The stewards will ultimately decide!

That is why I EXPLICITY invited this conversation in the proposal even AFTER the CrossStream DAOops Governance Squad (CSDG) voted on the proposal last week deciding they thought it was best for FDD to incubate these streams.

That meeting was to ensure that the CSDG was aware and in agreement that it was a legitimate step, but in no way was intended to bypass the stewards. The next step was to bring it to the forum here. I would like to thank Kevin for pushing this conversation.

To be honest, there has been more than just the conversation with Kevin about this. Our FDD multisig keyholders suggested the same, but were willing to support either decision. I think it is great that we can have the conversation in public like this.

Now, based on Kevin’s public feedback and other private feedback, we will bring this back to the CSDG again to consider a restructuring.

Clearly Laying Out the Options

The issue that is being presented to stewards is about how the CrossStream DAOops, which makes decisions that affect the entire DAO, should be governed. Second, what is the best path forward to get us to that point.

Option 1 - CSDG restructures with a plan to apply directly to the DAO for it’s funding. Part of this process includes aligning on a governance model prior to the funding request. (May not receive funds until late November. Gitcoin Holdings or FDD could fund and administer payments in the meantime.)

Option 2 - CSDG applies direct to the DAO with a multisig without a governance framework ensuring fair representation for all streams. Who makes the decision for who is on the multisig or leading the stream? Are they Gitcoin Holdings employees or strong DAO contributors? (I think it is ok to have both as long as the decision is made together.)

Option 3 - DAO supports FDD proposal as is. FDD is responsible to fund and administer payments for CSDG for Q4. FDD has already shown that it will allow this squad to self govern. FDD only continues this until the fair governance model is agreed upon. At that time, FDD would tranfer balance of budget to the new stream’s multisig.

Are there other options we are not considering?

Another Consideration

Part of the DAO of DAOs vision is a modularity and composability that allows streams, initiatives, roles, and squads to seamlessly be reassigned from one workstream to another. I do think the workstreams should have autonomy to continue using their funds to support any initiative, squad, or contributor they like, but they shouldn’t take this power lightly.

Instead, we should work to find acceptable compromises and move forward together.

I’d be much more worried if there wasn’t any pushback on a proposal like this.

I will start another thread focused on the minimum requirements for CSDG to ensure a public conversation on workstream representation in how CSDG is governed.

Final Note on FDD Operations & CrossStream DAOops

This is part of the chaotic learning in our first season. FDD developed ops processes quickly because of a need execute during GR11. When the other workstreams were ready to join the operations discussion, the FDD Operations squads were heavily drawn on to implement their solutions.

FDD needs its own stream operations still, however, these squads could be funded by the CSDG and provide ops services for all the streams!

It isn’t clear to me that FDDops became CSDG or that one is “in control” of another. I think those boundaries and definition of scope are being defined in this conversation. It’s a process.

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I am happy with where we left the conversation this morning. I think bringing this to tomorrow’s cross stream call is the right thing to do. If we don’t have a consensus there, maybe we open it up to a snapshot vote with the options I outlined in a previous response to @Huxwell

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UPDATE

FDD Q4 Budget Proposal will be moving to Snapshot after healthy deliberation. Owocki expressed concern about CrossStream DAOops & Community initiatives being included in FDD Budget.


What Happened

  • FDD brought the issue to the CrossStream DAOops Governance (CSDG) last Tuesday and passed proposal to include these streams funding.
  • The reason for this was to not interrupt contributor payments, but intending to spin out these streams in the future. Multiple CSDG reps were in Lisbon last week and missed the vote.
  • After Kevin’s post on proposal in the Governance forum, FDD brought the proposal back to CSDG again this Tuesday to align on the reasoning behind these decisions.

Where We Needed Alignment

  • CrossStream DAOops (Stream) isn’t governed by FDD, FDD has only been administering payments and providing budget during Q3.
  • CrossStream DAOops Governance Squad is a group that meets Tuesday afternoons. If a decision will affect all the streams, this group has reps from each stream which vote on the proposal before changes are made. They hand it off to a specialist squad to drive a solution, which then is approved by the CSDG before implementation.
  • Understanding when funds would be available and who would administer them if FDD were to apply for the budget.

RESULTS

FDD will include these streams budget, however, we will expedite the creation of a multisig with one rep from each workstream to govern the CrossStream DAO Ops funding and FDD will immediately send the full budget to the separately governed multisig. FDD will administer payments if needed.

CrossStream DAOops will spin out of FDD entirely. This will partly be enabled by moving the FDD Legal & Accounting Squads to the CrossStream DAOops which was passed by CSDG on Tuesday.

The spinout would require the stewards passing the CrossStream DAOops budget for Q1 2022. We will create a proposal before Dec 1st, 2021 to give ample deliberation time for Stewards and to allow FDD to include on their Q1 budget OR for the stream to be discontinued.

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