Proposal - Request to fund FDD workstream Q4 2021 budget

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FDD Workstream Q4 2021 Budget Proposal

On Snapshot 10/29/21 - 11/5/21

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

Budget Request

Request to send 76,500 GTC to the FDD-WG multisig to fund their Q4 2021 budget.

Gnosis Safe address: 0xD4567069C5a1c1fc8261d8Ff5C0B1d98f069Cf47

Video Statement from Disruption Joe

High Level Budget Breakdown

Q4 Budget Total = 56,500 GTC ($10/GTC)

PLUS Q1 2022 Defense Reserves = 40k GTC (Typo of 2024 on snapshot)

Total Needed = 96,500 GTC

MNUS Current Reserves = 20k GTC

Total Amount requested at this time = 76,500k GTC

Q4 (11/1/21 - 1/31/21) Total Expenses Estimate = $565,000

Breakdown of the Q4 budget estimate by Initiative/Squad

We will add the final Q3 numbers to the snapshot vote. (Quarter hasn’t ended yet)

Both defense and dao support are seeing an increase in budget amounts because Q3 was a period of finding new contributors and allowing them to develop broader plans. These squads will all be functioning from day 1 of Q4 rather than starting part way through the quarter. Additionally, Q3 only had 10 weekly epochs where Q4 and forward will have 13 weekly epochs.

Defense = $398,000

The defense budget has been raised by $150,000. These increases are primarily in three areas. The Blockscience contract will have 3 months of payment rather than 1 this quarter. The anti-sybil pipeline is developing a contributor run algorithm which will run parallel to the Bsci algo. Lastly, we have developed a plan for our research initiative to begin finding new threats.

  • BlockScience = $105k (+$70k)

    • Increase because only one month of Q3 was paid by FDD. Gitcoin Holdings had paid before.

  • Anti-Sybil = $86k (+$60k)

    • Adding a community run algorithm to run alongside Bsci algo
    • Adding open source feature engineering pipeline
    • Adding on-chain forensics to features

  • Evaluation Squads = $41k (+$5k)

    • Increasing to 350 human evaluations for ml supervision

  • Policy = $33k (+$13k)

    • Expanding to design full appeals process
    • Maintaining policy in the new DAO Knowledge Base

  • Research = $76k (+$60k)

    • Having 4 GitcoinDAO researchers participate in TE Open Science studying compensation models in other DAOs
    • Developing stream with bottoms up model from the start
    • Study of curation game incentives
    • Study and topology list of governance considerations for new squads

  • FDD Workstream Leads = $57k (+24k)

    • Christine from PTE on Trial to FTE Standard
    • No increase for Disruption Joe
    • 3 more weekly epochs in the season than Q3

DAO Support = $167,000

The DAO support budget continuing to be administered by FDD was ratified by the crossStream DAOops Governance Squad on 10/19/21. This group has representatives from all the GitcoinDAO workstreams. FDD will help accelerate these squads to maturity and transfer any unused funds budgeted at such a time that the streams “spin-out.” More details can be found in the State of FDD document.

  • Community/Onboarding = $40k (+$30k) Potential community stream
    • Decrease time to value for new contributors
    • Improving the onboarding UX
    • Develop stakeholder engagement plans for token holders, stewards, contributors and community
  • Cross Stream DAOops = $44k (+$21k) Potential DAOops stream
    • Support of CrossStream DAOops Panel to align on changes which affect more than one workstream
    • Ensure all streams have access to the subject matter experts and owners of software with access & knowledge of dependencies
    • Providing a “one stop shop” to find the part of the DAO you need

The community & cross stream DAOops both are a unique situation. While FDD supported spinning out the Data & DevOps stream, we do not support spinning out these functions until there is a clear governance model which provides equal voice to the other workstreams of the DAO. This is because the decisions made by this group will directly affect ALL of the other workstreams.

We solved this by creating a CrossStream DAOops Governance Squad with representation from all the workstreams, however, we have not developed a structured governance mechanism for it capable of handling contentious decisions. Here are the requirements FDD would suggest to be enacted prior to spin out:

1. A decision making process for how to change the decision making process of the stream in a legitimate way. (Peaceful transfer of power)
2. Have demonstrated the ability to administer dynamic payments to contributors. (At this point even if spun out, FDD may have to administer the payments)
3. A governance model that equally represents all the workstreams and has an adaptation process for new workstreams to participate.

Please debate here. If not contentious, FDD will continue with the snapshot vote for the full amount of this budget. If there is disagreement, we will take these streams off the FDD budget.

The risk of this decision includes:

1. Contributors having consistent payments
2. The crossstream executive functions being governed by a small group that does not represent the entire DAO.


User support is on the progressive decentralization plan below. Estimate spin out Q1-Q2 of 2022.

  • User Support = $83k (+$38k) Potential community or support stream
    • Double the number of Discord support contributors
    • Incentivize content adding and curation for Knowledge Base
    • Expand translations for knowledge base & API docs
    • Develop comprehensive ambassador support plan

Spun Out During Q3 - Will join dGrantsGitcoin workstream

  • Data & DevOps = $139k (+$119k)
    • Realized the need during GR11
    • This stream will allow BlockScience to hand off ML algo
    • Hire ML Operations Manager
    • Hire DevOps Cloud Engineer
    • Hire Data Engineer
    • Running microservices for ml algorithms
    • Creating a community data lake for open science (Non-PII)
    • Developing reporting and analytics framework

During Q3 many of the roles were filled partway into the quarter. For Q4, we will have these contributors consistently executing from the beginning of the quarter in almost every stream.

See the State of FDD workstream Q3 2021 with details on the following TL:DR points.


Key points from State of FDD Q3 2021 below:

Categories of Serving Our Mandate

We see two broad categories of how the FDD workstream has served this mandate during Q3.

Defense

Anti-sybil, grant policy, user policy, policy enforcement, and research. These were the original streams anticipated in the Q3 budget which are directly related to defending the network.

We estimate the quarterly value our defensive actions have provided to the GitcoinDAO to be in the range of $150,000 - 400,000 and growing.

The anti-sybil efforts have saved the community $55,000 since GR9. This doesn’t include the amount that was deterred, the attackers who gave up, and the attacks made no longer possible by our increasing of the cost of attack

Unmitigated it wouldn’t be unreasonable to think the amount FDD anti-sybil work alone saves the community is most likely in the range of $100k to $250k or per quarter (napkin math). And that number grows every round.

Additionally, through the grant approval and disputes processes, we now have community oversight of all content moderation decisions. This manifests itself in the community being able to establish norms like Tornado Cash and MatrixETF being flagged for having raised funding and voluntarily giving up their match eligibility.

These two simple acts returned over $50,000 to the community during GR11.

Lastly, we must also consider the value that is generated by maintaining legitimacy.

DAO Support

Data & DevOps was on the Q3 budget. User Support was added just after it passed. DAOops was added to ensure contributors getting paid. Community spun out of DAO ops. These are the streams the FDD decided to support financially due to critical need for the function and/or for administrative support.

All of these streams will have the autonomy to direct their own budget with oversight from FDD.

They will reserve the ability to “spin-out” when they have shown their model has reached a needed level of maturity for critical functions. This may include a roadmap for decentralization as a structured stream which will the apply to the DAO directly for its future funding.

Maturity of the stream “spin-outs” will be based on the consensus of the stream itself, FDD, the DAOops Governance Panel, and finally a steward vote to approve their next seasonal budget. At the time of approval, FDD will transfer any unused budget the stream has.

Progressive Decentralization Roadmap

The stream structure guides how value flows within the workstream. These will be progressively decentralized across five phases.

Exploration (Q3 2021 - Q4 2021)

Leads are appointed to make the decisions with autonomy at each level of organization. The higher level leads ensure budget is made available for critical functions and the multisig oversees the stream leads. Payments are made directly from FDD ops to contributors.

Workstream

  • Participation Decisions = Joe (Multisig veto)
  • How budget is split between initiatives = Joe (Multisig Veto)

Initiatives

  • Participation Decisions = Lead (Joe veto)
  • How budget is split between squads = Lead (Joe veto)

Squads

  • Participation Decisions = Lead (Joe veto)
  • How budget is split between initiatives = Lead (Joe Veto)

Family (Q4 2021 - Q2 2022)

Self governance experiments start in the squads. This means squads will track a mechanism design model via excel or use of a tool and act “as if”. Payments are still sent directly from FDD payment wallet to contributors.

Workstream

  • Participation Decisions = Joe (Multisig veto)
  • How budget is split between initiatives = Joe (Multisig Veto)

Initiatives

  • Participation Decisions = Lead (Joe veto)
  • How budget is split between squads = Lead (Joe veto)

Squads

  • Participation Decisions = Self-Governance Experiment (Joe veto)
  • How budget is split between initiatives = Self-Gov Experiment (Joe Veto)

Community (Q1 2022 - Q4 2022)

Squads use algorithms to guide payments and manage governance decisions using non-transferrable governance shares. The initiatives aggregate squad contributions and experiment with self governance.

Workstream

  • Participation Decisions = Joe (Multisig veto)
  • How budget is split between initiatives = Joe (Multisig Veto)

Initiatives

  • Participation Decisions = Self Gov Experiment (Joe veto)
  • How budget is split between squads = Self Gov Experiment (Joe veto)

Squads

  • Participation Decisions = Self-Governance
  • How budget is split between initiatives = Self-Governance

Ecosystem (Q3 2022 - Q4 2023)

Squads with individual sustainable goals are ready to release tokens which may or may not be linked to governance decisions. This allows the market to find the balance between labor and capital and for the squad to have permissionless operation.

Workstream

  • Participation Decisions = Self Governance Experiment (Multisig veto)
  • How budget is split between initiatives = Self Gov Exp (Multisig Veto)

Initiatives

  • Participation Decisions = Self Governance
  • How budget is split between squads = Self Governance

Squads

  • Participation Decisions = Permissionless
  • How budget is split between initiatives = Permissionless

Metaverse (Goal State)

Every level of the FDD is fully permissionless, open, transparent, modular, composable, and autonomous. All initiatives and the workstream itself either disolve or become permissionless catalysts of specific impact & collaboration goals.

Workstream

  • Participation Decisions = Permissionless
  • How budget is split between initiatives = Permissionless

Initiatives

  • Participation Decisions = Permissionless
  • How budget is split between squads = Permissionless

Squads

  • Participation Decisions = Permissionless
  • How budget is split between initiatives = Permissionless

Multisig Address & Keyholders

Gnosis Safe address: 0xD4567069C5a1c1fc8261d8Ff5C0B1d98f069Cf47

Workstream MultiSig is a Gnosis Safe 4/7 setup with the following keyholders who act as board members representing the four primary substreams and other key stakeholder groups.

  • Disruption Joe - Coordinator (Communications & Coordination)
  • Michael Zargham - Data Science (Anti-Sybil as a Service)
  • Angela Kreitenweis/conectopia - (Research & Policy)
  • Trueblocks - Data & DevOps (Technology Operations)
  • Bob Jiang - Community Contributors
  • Andrew Penland - Academic Oversight
  • Lefteris Karapetsas - Gitcoin Users

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

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

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

In Conclusion

By the end of Q3 (10/31/21), FDD will have distributed over $200k in rewards to contributors. These participants are dedicated, hard-working, and values aligned.

We also want to be sure that they are being fairly compensated. During Q4 we will investigate how an external pay audit could work to ensure that our contributors are properly recognized.

This workstream needs the funding to protect both the grants mechanism and the GitcoinDAO while we work to solve these complex issues.strong text

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Thanks for the update @DisruptionJoe!

I think the FDD team have worked pretty hard since the last 3 months and demonstrated their interest into progressively decentralizing GitcoinDAO while keeping a concentration and dedicated time to protect the grant system and the ecosystem VS Sybils and Moloch…

Thank you to everyone who participated so far!

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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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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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