Public Goods Funding- Workstream Budget Request

Hey Everyone,

Below is some motivation for this proposal:

  • There was general sentiment in the seasons proposal that we need ways to reward work done for the DAO more than just stewardship as first order of business
  • Workstreams are good in theory for rewarding contributors, but don’t yet have teeth in the way Simona proposed in her governance process post here
  • Initial funding for workstreams gets us on the path towards and builds muscle around the concept of workstreams as scalable and meaningful groups within the DAO in the future
  • Funding workstreams gets as one step closer to full time hires to the DAO. As others have mentioned, we have to make room for full time contributors to the protocol to really level up

Through this proposal, the Public Goods Funding workstream is requesting to formalize its efforts and requesting a governance reward budget of 45,000 GTC to be deployed over Q3 2021 to help further the mission of GitcoinDAO by executing on the following objectives:

  • Helping to manage the GitcoinDAO treasury and ensure we have sustainable funding for public goods well into the future (with help from the team at Llama)
    • Budget: 15k GTC
    • Deliverable: Holistic treasury management strategy document + legal review
    • Key Person(s): Shreyas, Ken, other substream members
  • Grassroots efforts for increased collaboration between community members and level up new participants and increased matching pool donations
    • Budget: 15k GTC
    • Deliverable: 2-3 amazing community managers to help onboard new contributors and structure community events to promote public goods funding across Ethereum
    • Key Person(s): Yalor, Toby, 2-3 full time community hires to work across the DAO
  • Moderating shared governance spaces and summarizing key results for stewards and others to review
    • Budget: 10k GTC
    • Deliverable: A detailed moderation policy + consistent checks / balances on relevant DAO channels + continued weekly DAO summaries
    • Key Person(s): Yalor, Simona, other grassroots community members
  • Getting community input and creating proposals around round sizes, themes, and parameters prior to vote (e.g. the Building Gitcoin side round)
    • Budget: 5k GTC
    • Deliverable: Proposed round structures for GR11 including novel improvements on the “Building Gitcoin” trial round
    • Key Person(s): James Waugh, Fire Eyes

Funds for the above will be managed by a public 3 of 5 multisig managed by the DAO stewards below. Let’s start incentivizing participation and take GitcoinDAO to the next phase of its development.

Please note: this is only an initial draft, and we welcome any and all feedback!

Signed,

@Yalor :space_invader:
@Pop :popcorn:
@ceresstation :socks:
@ken :unicorn:
@James :fire:
@HelloShreyas :wave:t4:

21 Likes

These goals can be seen clearly, but the purpose of these goals and the impact of the goals can be explained in detail.
How to divide GTC for each target job.

3 Likes

Wow this is so great! I have no feedback to suggest right now but Thanks for this initial draft @Yalor
:+1:

1 Like

Quarterly funding feels a bit long as a time horizon out of the gate. It seems super hard at this point to tell what type of work is going to be done in October and how much it’ll cost.

I think a 1 month time horizon would be more realistic in terms of cost and deliverables right now, and would give us a chance to assess and iterate a bit more frequently as this DAO transition is getting started.

2 Likes

What if we did quarterly funding into OBD’s Outcome-Based Donations for GTC Governance ?

I think asking people to engage monthly in a funding cabal might be to much overhead for anyone to manage, but if the OBD are setup quarterly we can focus on defining outcomes for the workstreams and approving payouts, not necessarily who does the work or micro-managing how they get there ?

4 Likes

Personally I think having quarterly budgets makes sense and is still relatively low commitment with these amounts of GTC (consider that the treasury has over 50,000,000 GTC so we’re talking about a 0.09% distribution). Ultimately the folks that have taken the time and energy to structure workstreams have some level of trust within the community (at least at this stage in the DAO) and can be held accountable for delivering on outcomes.

Definitely down to explore OBDs too but to me it makes sense to have a structured quarterly process of some kind so that people feel like they can focus more on executing and less on planning. Allowing people in workstreams to get to know each other and build together the same way smaller DAOs do seems like a welcome addition to more ad-hoc OBD related payments.

6 Likes

similar as the problem about the education fund, I`m concerned about how GTC will be handled when payments are actually made.
Will it be converted to USD by OTC trade?

I know this is a bit far from the topic, but I think it is necessary to discuss how to improve the value of GTC in the medium and long term.
This can strengthen the finances of Gitcoin.

Please see the attached proposal that I just created outlining how a native stable coin might work to strengthen the finances of the DAO Proposal: $GTC-Backed Economy

3 Likes

Yeah I think both quarterly budgets as both inputs for OBDs and using the output of an OBD as an input for the quarterly budget creates a good funding mechanism. I’d also agree that quarterly budgets are a good mechanism on it’s own.

One of the things on our roadmap for the future is to allow users to sablier stream into an OBD or Outcome. Definitely a future consideration but I think there are composable funding pieces we can put together to enable sustainable governance funding once we create the framework on how to decide what to be funding.

1 Like

Yeah, out of experience I can say: quarterly is more than enough. :slight_smile: Budget talk takes up sooo much time and if you do it monthly the only thing the org will be doing is talking budget. And that’s not what this is about.

2 Likes

As this proposal has reached the requirements to move into phase 2, 5 comments from Stewards and 5 days under review I have moved it to a snapshot vote:

Public Goods - Snapshot

Please get your votes in by the 6th of August when the proposal closes :call_me_hand:t3:

3 Likes

Just saying that I support this proposal and voted as such in the snapshot.

I like the quarterly budget ideas, but would also love to see some sort of KPI mechanism to evaluate whether the given budget helped the responsible people achieve their goals.

2 Likes

This is a good point, I worry about being over-prescriptive short term (since we’re all still navigating what it means to be involved in the DAO), but medium to long term I do think there should be a clear way for us to understand whether a workstream is “doing well” so that approving / denying continued budgets is easy.

Personally, my hidden assumption in my support of this budget is that for now, it will be relatively obvious to most stewards whether the results a workstream reports are meaningful, but this is a bit of a leap on my part.

3 Likes

echoing @lefterisjp here, would be nice to see more KPI granularity in the proposal for the next round. Quarterly funding makes sense to start though - one month is far too much overhead, and anything longer than a quarter feels like it could lose relevance without reassessment. In the future, it might be possible to extend this to 6 month instalments.

Additionally, would be good for future budgets to specify whether it will be liquidated for a stablecoin or paid out directly as GTC, in a lump sum, or as streamed.

Thanks everyone for putting in effort on this!

3 Likes