Rewarding the Community - Gitcoin Citizens Round #1

🌱 Gitcoin Grants
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TL;DR

(1) We are inviting the community to reward Gitcoin Citizens who supported & engaged the Gitcoin community, through content, data analysis or support initiatives. Find out how to nominate candidates below!

(2) Gitcoin is adding 20K DAI (13.3K GTC*) in Matching pool funding!

(3) Open to applications meeting our eligibility criteria on Grants Stack as of Monday May 15. Apply now!

(4) Round donation dates: June 13th to June 27th.

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Yet again, another season of Gitcoin Grants is coming to a close, and yet again, even with its challenges, it has been epic. During this period your inbox and social media feed becomes a daily reminder that Public Goods are Good, with people promoting the inspiring projects they contribute to, and others sharing why and how they will be supporting them. It’s also the period when the connectooors, the ambassadors, the Gitcoin Citizens come out and bring us all together: Gitcoin, round operators, supporters and grantees.

Gitcoin Citizens are our connective tissue, they remind us all that we are more than the sum of our parts: we are a community. Today we would like to celebrate these unsung heroes and are kicking off the first Gitcoin Citizens Round, through which we will reward people & projects by allocating a matching Pool of 13.3K GTC (20k DAI), you can nominate them here or apply now!

As you can imagine, for us at Gitcoin the rounds season is quite hectic, as our grants, support, marketing, and product teams are working around the clock to support the wider community. Many of our heroes who don’t wear capes are going well over their limits in surfacing issues and collaborating until late into the night to find last-minute solutions to improve the community’s experience (Mathilda, Michelle, Jon, Daniele, Jaxcoder, Josef, Thelostone, Gravityblast, Mo, and so many others, we see you! 🙏❤️). What motivates them and keeps them going despite all known challenges? The knowledge that we are not alone; we are moving mountains with the strong support of a mycelial network of Gitcoin Citizens, supporting our ecosystem during this intense period of transition from our legacy platform towards our decentralized Grants Stack future.

The Gitcoin Citizens Rounds aim to reward people and grassroots projects that have contributed to Gitcoin’s success. Specifically, these contributions involve engaging with the wider ecosystem and community. An umbrella term could be ‘Gitcoin Community Engagement’. More specifically, we aim to reward work contributing directly to Gitcoin’s ‘most important things’ and our Purpose and Essential Intents. For example, contributions in the areas of educational content, data analysis and support-oriented initiatives.

Applications for the Citizen Round officially opened on Monday May 15, and you can apply now!. Applications will run for 3 weeks, ending on June 4th, and the Gitcoin Citizens Round will be open for donations from June 13th to June 27th, with a matching pool of 20K DAI (13.3K GTC*). There will be 3 Rounds in total, each with a distinct matching pool and updated criteria. You can read more here.

Today we would like to invite you to share this post within your community to surface all the unsung heroes, and let us know who deserves to be nominated for this round.. You have three options for nominating yourself or someone else to apply to the round. Pick one!

  1. Fill out this form
  2. Comment below with details on the initiative and a link to more details
  3. Apply on Gitcoin Builder (Coming Soon)

Awarded projects & people should have a high focus on community engagement and contribute directly to Gitcoin’s ‘most important things’ and our Purpose and Essential Intents. We intend to reward projects that primarily focus on improving Gitcoin’s community experience. Some examples of topics:

  • educational content, eg. a guide on how to donate on our platform
  • promotional content, eg running a twitter space to cover our rounds
  • data analysis, eg. a data analysis of previous donations
  • support-oriented initiative, eg. helping out users in our discord

With this first round we will focus exclusively on rewarding projects which happened in the past, i.e we will use retroactive quadratic funding.

This method does not require extensive proposals, only proof that valuable work has been done. Grant proposals will need to prove the impact they had on the community, by adding as much data available as possible, e.g. listeners of a Twitter space, reference to posts written and number of likes and views. The more data available, the easier it is for the team and the community to evaluate impact. You can find full eligibility criteria here.

Starting with retroactive funding showcases to the community how we believe Gitcoin can fund Gitcoin. Below you can find some examples of contributions we imagine to be funded this way:

This is a very non-exhaustive list, we would love for you to add more, and tell us what happened during this round!

After the first round, we hope to see more proactive initiatives and will experiment together with our community on what is the ideal process to make this as effective as possible.

A lot more info is coming soon, but now first of all, we want to hear from you. Calling on all Citizens, make yourselves known and apply now!

* Based on GTC price at the time of writing

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I am totally biased - but I am really looking forward to this series of experiments. Historically, I have been a bit passive about retroactive funding, it seemed a bit unbalanced and favored those who has the financial means to contribute without compensation, but this podcast helped me think about public goods funding as a cycle. Said another way, what mechanisms do we have to fund public goods 1. before the act 2. during the work and 3. after the work is complete and we can verify impact.

Cyclical public goods funding was a a small part of the conversation, but give it a listen if you are still on the fence.

oh and bonus - it features Gitcoin Steward @ccerv1

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How do you define ”citizens”?

Is this referring to GitcoinDAO citizens?
I am asking this, because I was under the impression that the GitcoinDAO citizens were to help identify and prevent sybil attacks.

However 5 minutes reviewing this last round I count MULTIPLE violations that would be counted as sybil attacks that went unnoticed.

I also have to wonder about this platform itself. This platform has been proven to invite sybil attacks.

Just last week, a DAO contributor noticed that the DAOs governance was under attack by a group, when this group manipulated the situation (of course) the contributor showed them areas of exploitation - along with this platform. They then BANNED her without any authority.

There are also projects that have not been properly vetted.

So what citizens are you looking for? The ones who over and over again exploit the system or the ones trying to make the entire ecosystem better?

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Hey, thanks for your reaction.

Yes, exactly, you can read more about Citizens here

Yes, this is definitely a perfect example! If you or peers took any action to prevent sybil attacks and can document this, this would be a great submission. As you can see in the eligibility criteria, we have kept this pretty open on purpose.

Sorry to hear about the experience of this friend of yours, we appreciate the help of anyone pointing out exploits and abuse. I am also not sure who you are referring to when you say ‘they’ banned her without any authority. My dms are open, feel free to reach out here or on other platforms about this incident so we can look into this. (same user name)

In any case eg proof of anti sybil actions, or eg the vetting you mention: you could create a proposal for better vetting if you think improvement is needed here. Our next citizens round (coming very soon after this one) will be more ‘proactive’ (so not just retroactive funding), so proposals to improve the community’s experience are extremely welcome.

Our protocol and our entire decentralized stack is in beta so we are all very much aware much needs to be done. And we welcome all help.

So with this I hope I answered the above. We are looking for you. Making the entire ecosystem better (to help improve all the systems) is in my opinion why Gitcoin exists.

Looking forward to your proposals.

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Yes! Would also recommend this massive greenpill on coordination mechanisms with @griff to anyone who wants to dig deeper.

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Thanks for such a quick response.
I very much appreciate your opinion, however I have found that opinions don’t count when it comes down to it.

So I find that verifying any information is best practice.

In trying to do this, I can’t verify Gitcoin’s citizen information. There is no access to the channel in the discord.
(I am not allowed to upload a screenshot of this)

Personally, I did have access to this channel previously, along with the citizen roll tag. However it appears to have been removed.

This could be because I could never get any direction on how to participate other than to attend the weekly call, that I unfortunately could not.

While I am happy to submit a proposal, I also wonder if the operations of Gitcoin are transparent, as I am unsure that the foundation of Gitcoin is working towards decentralization, as it seems centralized to the core.

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@griff @shawn16400 @krrisis @DisruptionJoe
Is there a proper procedure that ya’ll have to demonstrate a vulnerability in your Governance System that leaves it exposed to sybil attacks and 51% attacks ?

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Not sure how to define “centralized to the core” but it is true that the Gitcoin decentralization journey is nowhere near complete, and we have a long way to go. That said, I am pretty confident that our processes allows for a wide variety of ideas to be presented, debated, and those ideas that have merit, stand a good chance at funding. For examples, have a look at the past 7 or 8 GCPs recently passed.

But, if you want to have a go at it - here are the guidelines and in this case section 3 is likely most relevant.

Same here - this case does not sound familiar but it is absolutely possible we made a mistake. DMs are open and happy to work through any issues. shawn16400#5507

Not sure what scope you are looking for here. A known risk of quadratic funding/voting is the sybil attack and most DAOs governed by a tokens have a a 51% attack risk.

Thanks for the questions and I encourage you to nominate anyone you see helping tackle those issues for Gitcoin.

We know we have a TON of amazing people who give freely of their time because they believe in what Gitcoin is trying to do. The Gitcoin Citizens round is an attempt to thank them for their work, and we ask your help to find those stars.

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There are a few bounty systems out there for this sort of thing… but in general, responsible disclosure to a responsible party is the way. DMing a community manager or some other person is usually the right way to go about these things in lieu of a formal system.

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Could you help me understand how DMing someone would be the right way to maintain transparency?

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Firstly, I’d like to applaud the use of the phrase ’ mycelial network of Gitcoin Citizens in a paragraph. Awesome! :robot: :green_heart: Love it.

Nextly, I have a list of people I’ll be nominating. This is a great initiative (even though I was a bit skeptical of it at first).

To the conversation above about DAO-ification - this research was just released about DAO voting (also in light of the current Aragon 51% attack, perhaps timely). ‘To inspire innovative design thinking’ Researchers in Singapore design new ‘more efficient’ DAO scheme

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Nominating Harris for their deep dive into the gas fees.

Hope they apply!

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@a33titude also sent you a dm, we hope you’ll apply, 3 more days!

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