Interesting Idea Graven. Thanks for sharing!
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Hi, Shout out to the awesome folks at Gitcoin doing all the heavy lifting.
Being part of the Climate Round working group, I must acknowledge my bias towards continuity.
That being said - personally - having seen the immense help ( community more than money ) that every round generates, I would vote in favour of Option 2.
Thank you once again for having the community weigh in on this.
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Thank you to all of the Gitcoin team! Not only is the grants platform a critical funding mechanism for public goods, but this is one of the most important communities in web3. The vibes, the heart, and the passion for public goods flow into the rest of crypto.
I am both a grantee and a grant reviewer on @M0nkeyFl0wer âs team. The funding from Gitcoin has helped me to work full-time in this space this year. It has also helped fund several solar projects in Uganda. I began working on Benâs team between GR14 & GR15. Helping the cause rounds team gave me a new appreciation for all the work that goes into the grant rounds.
Canceling the round with only 6wks between now and GR16 would be a disaster. This will look bad to existing grantees and many who plan to submit grants (particularly in the DEI round). If this was the plan, it should have been communicated weeks, if not months, ago. I believe canceling will have a huge reputational impact on Gitcoin.
As noted in many of the comments, many projects depend on this funding. I fully respect the amount of work it will take to run GR16, and I understand the desire to push all of the DAOâs energy to the new platform, but there has to be a win-win, and canceling the round is not it.
As suggested by others, I would like to see a smaller round run with the main round and three cause rounds (climate, DeSci, DEI). I wonât speak for all of the cause rounds teams, but I, for one, am willing to work to help make this happen. I also agree with others that there be an early cutoff for grants and that the community can do most of the marketing to lower the burden on the core teams.
Regardless of the decision, I think it is essential to get the word out that this discussion is happening so that the wider community can comment and be heard before making a final decision.
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Iâd certainly be down to help coordinate this.
As you mentioned, clrfund / MACI does have some limitations in terms of scale. The primary limitation in this context is that it is capped at 125 recipients.
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Thank you so much for all the work that all of Gitcoin DAO and the remarkable work you do, and thank you for the thoughtful responses that have already come,
Whatever is decided, zooming out from this first era, the work you have done will be seen as so consequential!
I tend to agree that cancelling GR16 at short notice would put many projects in a difficult position and would negatively impact Gitcoinâs reputation; a narrowed scope of GR16 (option 2) sounds like the most pragmatic way forward but only if it will provide the space and rest required for the work to be done in the future.
I wonder if a more public (Twitter) conversation could take place, with some Twitter spaces and polls to explain and include the community in this conversation.
I think itâs also fair that the Gitcoin DAO make the decision regardless of public opinion; you are the people that have to put in countless hours of work, you know the system and the work to be done better than anybody on the outside, I trust that the core DAO members will have their heart and head in the right place whichever decision is made.
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Catching up here after a couple weeks out and wanted to say how great is that weâre having this conversation in public. Thank you @J9leger
After reading this post, I became tentatively supportive of Option 1 because I think itâs better to focus on nailing the next version of Grants instead of being pulled in the other direction so hard it slows progress.
However my biggest concern, shared by many others I see posting, is that not having a GR16 in December will upset the financial runway of projects relying on Gitcoin. But I wasnât sure how many projects actually rely on Gitcoin as a consistent and significant source of quarterly funding. There is intense variability among the over 1k+ grantees we get each round. I took a look at the data from the last year (rounds 12 to 15) to see if I could answer: how many grantees raise at least $X thousand from gitcoin every round?
Over 5K every round: 18
Over 10K every round: 12
Over 20K every round: 6
Over 50K every round: 2
Of the grantees who raised at least 5k in every round during the last year, the average total yearly raised was $206k and the median was $190k. There is great variability from round to round with one grantee going from raising over 400k in one round to less than 10k the next. This is why the average is so high despite these being a small number of grants raised over 50k every round.
These results indicate there is a small, but important, number of grantees who do rely on Gitcoin as a somewhat steady and significant source of funding.
These grantees are significant and (by virtue of their QF results) well-liked members of our community. However, this does not consider what other funding sources these projects may have. Still, I think it could erode trust we have built over time with Grantees (and their supporters) if we were to rug them by not holding any round without greater advance warning.
I also asked: how many grantees raised over 5k in X of the last 4 rounds?
3 or more of 4 rounds: 56 (Average Yearly Fund: 136k, Median: 113k)
2 or more of 4 rounds: 141 (Average Yearly Fund: 86k, Median: 53k)
After seeing these results, my suggestion would be in-line with what others raised above about an Option 3: hold a single, stream-lined, and curated round during GR16. I would include only grantees who have raised at least 5k in 2 of the last 4 rounds. This smaller pool of grantees who have already been vetted will significantly reduce resource strain as they should not require reviews.
There is also a question underlying these results but tangential to this conversation: Why does funding change so much from round to round for some grantees? can/should we enable more consistent funding? The variability experienced by grantees is significant although it still allows them to raise large sums over time.
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Great points @umarkhaneth. Thanks for sharing and thanks for digging up the numbers for context. One further thing to consider is the location of projects. I suspect many of the projects raising what seems like smaller amounts to us in North America or western Europe may in fact be critical amounts of funding for projects in the global south.
That being said I do think its possible for us to find a middle path that allows projects a way forward through Gitcoin running a smaller round in January on the new platform as well as bounties and other ways to get involved and potentially earn some funding as we are in the midst of this transition.
Its fabulous to see so many thoughtful and detailed responses to this thread. Its an honour to work with you and everyone else on this team.
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Hey all! Has a decision been made on this topic?
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Thank you for the response. Complaints are definitely not the primary reason weâre rethinking GR16. There will always be complainers and complaints are good - they help us build something better for all. The primary reason for this discussion is to ensure a successful launch of the protocol. By running the c-grants platform, weâre not focusing on building and launching to help our community and other communities easily scale in the future.
Appreciate the suggestions!
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Over the past few weeks, weâve heard from many of you on the forum and others through personal outreach (even in person in Bogota). Iâm going to synthesize feedback into one response.
First of all, THANK YOU to everyone who helped us arrive at this decision. Your feedback is invaluable and weâll have a stronger decision because of it. This discussion proves the value of building in public and how collective input can get to better decision making.
After connecting with many of you, weâve recognized there is ultimately more than an option 1 or 2, there is an option 3. We believe this option better aligns with the majority of responses and intend to move this to a DAO-wide vote as a Y/N decision. If this vote is successful, we will begin preparing for a protocol-driven, streamlined and tightly-scoped GR16.
GR16 Option 3
Gitcoin will run a streamlined alpha round on the protocol in mid-January 2023 for our oldest running rounds: Open Source Software, Ethereum Infrastructure, and Climate.
Each round will run with a subset of existing grantees to ensure those that rely on us for funding and have helped make a significant impact in the ecosystem continue receiving support (refer to @umarkhaneth analysis above for more details on data about our grantees), that we have the capacity to provide support during the transition, and that we are able to work with the community to intentionally receive feedback and build out operational services to support scaling future rounds soon.
This option takes into account the desire to run a streamlined round in GR16, not lose momentum, and ensure when we launch at scale in early Q2, 2023 on the protocol that it is more stable and reliable for grantees, both technically and operationally.
In addition we will be running a number of design partner rounds between now and the full protocol launch in early Q2, 2023 that will provide both partners and grantees with opportunities to engage with our grants protocol.
While weâre always optimizing for impact, itâs sometimes important to make short term trade-offs - progress is not often linear. Rather than run a sub-par GR16 on c-grants or risk going too big too soon with the protocol, weâve opted to make tradeoffs to ensure long term growth and sustainability for Gitcoin Grants, our partners and our grantees. Weâre optimistic that this approach will help hundreds of additional communities fund their shared needs, and thousands of new grantees get the sustainable funding they need. Stay tuned for more details and communications about next steps.
Additional Summary of Findings
In the interest of full transparency, here are some of the key points from the community:
Gitcoin grantees survey responses suggest we should prioritize the protocol transition
40 grantees responded to a survey that went out to all GR15 grantees about what they wanted to see for GR16 and majority would be supportive of the option weâre positioning (see data from responses below).
To the question: âHow would you react if we shifted GR16 to focus on a successful protocol launch in Q1, 2023 instead?â
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51% said they would prefer if you ran a small round with only a few key causes in GR16 and delayed the protocol launch
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23% would be excited about and support the prioritization around the protocol
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8% said they would be upset and leave the Gitcoin community if we donât run GR16
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18% said they were not sure
Summary of differing opinions and how the option detailed above addresses these perspectives
Keep the current format until weâre sure of protocol stability
Some expressed reasonable concerns and cautionary anecdotes about leaving the current c-grants platform too soon. Weâre cautiously optimistic, but want to make consistent, reliable, and incremental progress.
Run something streamlined vs nothing at all
It is clear that the majority would like us to run a round in GR16 to continue supporting our core community and not lose momentum, all while realizing the risk of potential protocol delays. Many recognize the tension between running a round on c-grants and how that pulls us in a different direction to where our priorities lie: successfully bringing a new version of grants to life.
Run all or no grant rounds for GR16
A few of you suggested that we would impact the community if we did a selective round and should either do the full round or nothing at all. We believe in concavity â the best policy decisions are often somewhere in the middle. In addition, we are hard at work putting in plan an approach to support our extended grantee community even if it isnât in the traditional grants round capacity.
Donât run a grants round and spend the time focusing on protocol launch
Similarly, there were a few people who suggested going with option 1, to ensure our focus was on the potential future benefits to new grantees and not existing ones. We believe this approach allows us to take care of both.
Run a round with community support
We appreciate the few cause round grantees who volunteered to involve the community to help run GR16. Itâs hard to solicit help for the centralized platform. When we launch the protocol, weâll be able to decentralize grant rounds further and look to our community to help us run rounds and make a larger impact than we could with just a small internal team. Weâre excited to get to start bringing this future to life and involve more of our community in our program design.
Once again, I canât thank you all enough for your engagement in this discussion and your feedback. Weâre excited to keep building the future of funding communities shared needs with all of you.
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I really enjoy the way you write and articulate how you reached specific decisions.
As I already wrote above I was okay with either result so for the vote that is now open I am going to vote FOR as there is no option for a multiple choice vote 
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Very clear summation of options. I voted for the proposal.
That said, as per my original post, I think shutting off the grants round to jump into the future was risky for reasons that we didnât understand completely; otherwise - these reasons wouldnât have been risks.
I hope we work to learn more to derisk our transition, for eg focusing on:
- protocol delivery - although we currently have experienced and motivated engineers and product folks in Gitcoin afaik the team is saying the process has not converged yet, for eg points are not predictive; i.e. we cannot look at history to predict when code will be delivered on time and on quality
- community-centric self-adoption - DevRel isnât something that can easily be bolted onto an organization that has a somewhat insular culture & that is relatively unfamiliar with being self-adopted by technical users
- GTC utility and value - at some point the ongoing decline in the value of GTC could impact our ability to execute our transition or pivot
Organizations grow in value in large part IMO by identifying & addressing risks to their success. We have all the ingredients to address these and other risks and opportunities. Hopefully, we can use some of the breathing room gained by this proposal to build a more solid foundation.
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Huge thanks to @J9leger for spearheading this discussion, and to the community for engaging in such a thoughtful, constructive manner. As the product lead for the Grants Protocol (and formerly of the cGrants platform), I have spent the better part of a year deep in the weeds of both tech stacks and firmly believe that this option presents our best path forward. I love that this enables us to provide funding our most dedicated grantees, while also giving us an opportunity to learn and continue building the protocol alongside the community.
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Hi @J9leger
Thank you very much for your summary!
There are some questions from the community as following:
- Are there main round or ecosystem round in GR13?
- What are the oldest rounds: Open Source Software, Ethereum Infrastructure, and Climate?
- a subset of existing grantees? how to choose the subset?
looking forward to see more clear description for the option3.
thanks again!
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Love the third option. As long as the team that is actually doing the work supports this option, I support it too!
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This discussion is fascinating on how is it unfolding. It shares the care community stewards put into making the best decision possible.
I have one concern. Is money the only data input to be considered? Why should 5 K be the bottom line for vetting a project is trustworthy?
There are projects that have participated in at least 3 rounds but may not have raised that much due to different factors such as the Polygon network having problems, or not having the traction that others had due to its marketing strategies, influencers, and so on.
What about those projects that are relying on GR and that are in an early stage? If these projects do not have the chance to participate they most likely will be killed.
My suggestion is: Take the number of rounds participating and the promised delivered value of the project. These factors are way more important than raised money to distinguish those projects that are building public good from those not.
Excited to see the decentralized platform happening. It will enable new ways of funding the commons. Also, looking forward to Option 3 hopefully considering my suggestion.
Blessings to all, and thanks for the great work youâve put into making QF and the social movement of GR.
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This is a really good point, it would be great to have an edge case solution where projects that have been part of at least the last 2 rounds can apply to be included if they are excluded⊠honestly there will be lots of projects that will demand a way in and there should be some sort of way to include the ones that really were counting on this funding, so its not just nepotism and squeaky wheels that get their projects included at the last minute.
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Its moved to a snapshot vote this week Snapshot
Lets talk soon about how best to involve the ReFiDAO community.
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Weâve been talking about having some grants that would drip to a group of related projects so that we can deal with the needs of running the alpha rounds and still include grantees in some meaningful way.
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As a new Steward here 
and in support of Option 1. Leaning in on the fact that we should support the focus of becoming a decentralized protocol and program as stated in the recap. I agree that while this is a hard decision to make, overall it will lead us to the North Star which is the future success of Gitcoin. Thank you to @J9leger for the recap and also for providing the context on the Ideal State Vision and going into detail where we are today. I am very impressed with this robust discussion and it reflects all aspects of Gitcoins values, a big shout out to the Gitcoin team.
I do agree that messaging will be key in all of this no matter what the final outcome is. The MMM team indeed has a monumental task ahead of them in launching the Grants Protocol successfully. All eyes are on Gitcoin, and this should be handled with kid gloves.
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