Rewarding the Community - Gitcoin Citizens Round #2

đŸŒ± Gitcoin Grants
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Key info:

  • Applications: September 12th to September 26th (23:59 UTC)
  • Donations: October 10th to October 24th
  • Matching Pool: 15k GTC
  • Chain: Public Goods Network (PGN)
  • Focus: New or ongoing work, full eligibility criteria here
  • Live round: here

Gitcoin Citizens: the public goods of the public goods community

At the heart of Gitcoin lies a deep belief in public goods: we want to support initiatives which normally struggle to get funded, but matter enormously to their community. With the Gitcoin Citizens Rounds, we are starting a tradition to celebrate the people who rarely get any time in the spotlight. We’re zooming in on the bridge builders, educators, dune wizards, communicators, the unsung heroes who we want to reward more - Citizens are the ‘public goods of the public goods web3 community’.

With our rounds we would like to specifically reward the people directly impacting Gitcoin’s success to achieve its long-term mission, with a special focus on new and ongoing work during this second round. For example, contributions in the areas of educational content, governance, operations, data analysis and support. The grant proposal should explicitly outline how your work supported or will support the Gitcoin community.

Read our full eligibility criteria, and apply here.

We’ve seen a very positive response and enormous enthusiasm from our community with Citizens Round #1, making it Grants Stack’s most successful round to date in terms of crowdfunding versus matching, with a quadrupling (!) of matching funds in donations. We can’t wait to see what you will do for Round #2!

Proactive Funding: a new chapter in our experiment

At Gitcoin, as a DAO, we need to ‘dogfood’ our own solutions - we ourselves are continually experimenting with capital allocation. We do this through the semi-annual workstream budget requests, with Gitcoin Community Proposals (GCPs), and of course by running our own rounds. Citizens Round #2 is the second and final part of a passed community proposal which is an experiment focusing on Gitcoin using its own funding mechanisms to fund its community. Due to market conditions, this second round will conclude the experiment outlined in our initial GCP.

Our first round was fully retroactive, with this second round we want to support individuals running new or ongoing projects, and zoom in on what the DAO expresses as crucial needs in terms of community engagement. Additionally, we want to listen to what you as a community feel is useful to Gitcoin and are very curious to see what you will propose.

Why are we trying this? We’ve seen evidence that the community sentiment aggregated by QF can be a leading indicator for future success (as in the case of past Gitcoin grantees like Yearn Finance, Optimism, 1inch and more). One of the things we hope to begin to identify is whether a community receives a more positive impact over the long-term from funding work proactively or retroactively. While it is undeniably easier to measure impact retroactively, for many people financial reality can hinder their ability to have an impact unless they first have support.

Future Citizens Round formats will be based on the results of these first two and a future GCP.

What would you like to see in the round?

We hope that many Citizens will bring their own ideas for what they believe creates value for themselves and other members of the community. At the same time we recognize that it can be easier for individuals with higher context who have been in the ecosystem or DAO longer to know what is or will be valuable. To that end, we invite and encourage you, both core DAO and community members to communicate under this post what work you would like to see achieved to support Gitcoin in achieving its mission! These comments can serve as an inspiration for grantees to draft their proactive grant proposals.

In Closing

We look forward to requesting funding for future rounds and continuing to serve our community.
It’s very likely retroactive funding will return as an integral part of this future proposal.
But before we get there, our original experiment first needs to be completed.
Help us kick off round #2 by commenting below, and applying as of today!

Umar & Kris

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I find this incredibly accurate


The term “You should never pour from an empty cup.”, comes to mind while reading this discussion.”

Many nonprofit organizations, start ups, and independent builders or small teams are known to sacrifice their time, effort, and energy with little to no reward for the work that they have accomplished knowing they may have to eventually fold the deck on development & move on or completely hang up the towel when pursuing a career in web3 development.

Innovation at the leadership level is rarely rewarded beyond the efforts of being a social icon or moving past that status quo to become hands on within the community. This activism is necessary to make an impact or gather the much needed support from the community to succeed with a plan related to quantitative or qualitative data displaying the intent to benefit others who are part of the ecosystem the builder contributes towards.

Some of the most mind blowing innovations occur at the lowest level of the spectrum when it comes to visibility on some of these forums and grant programs.

The new focus that this Gitcoin citizen program has shifted into is a very integral part of how the health of the ecosystem will continue to improve over time through a regenerative approach. Iterating & experimenting along the way.

As well as attracting others who share the same values or align with the mission and vision of Gitcoin.

Highlighting those who are here not only to share their own vision, but the vision of others is a very noble stance to take. Allowing for blossoming visionaries to bring their ideas to life.

I think it’s important to have a good way for other participants of the gitcoin ecosystem to see these citizens that apply for the upcoming round.

Personally, I would love to see something in comparison to gitcoin radio. I am not sure if that same level of awareness on social media can be achieved which was a 24/7 x spaces allowing others to network together or inform the public about the Gitcoin ecosystem & their personal project.

With the right formula and planning, I’m sure the process could be put together for an event in this nature.

Depending on how many people apply and are accepted there could be a lineup throughout the weeks of the campaign timeline with 1 on 1 interviews for each person.

Creating a potent open conversation to expand upon with those who are listening is something that we like to do best. We are happy to contribute in our own ways here on the forum and other discussions as well.

Citizens will help pioneer the way into the future.

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Thanks @krrisis and team for giving clarity on eligibility and aligning it to essential intents.

As a general output it would be great if we are able to find some sort of classification for the work folks are doing so we can better allocate matching pools where there is most work being done with the highest impact. Ideally if we can identify high level categories of work, perhaps these can be separate sub-rounds inside the main citizens round in the future.

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The answer from our community has come via the amazing Jokerace run by @koday

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I’d also like to make a suggestion for the upcoming gitcoin citizen round - create a project called “Gitcoin citizen round matching fund” so that i can add it to my cart when donating !

Would be curious to see how much community support it receives

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Thats great and Gitcoin Community is awesome, but
 Why dont you create a better UX more friendly to newbie users like me with some kind of a resumed FAQ or simply things, less buttons and less websites behind other websites . I tooke some time to get used to gitcoin staking, donations, delegate, grants etc, etc (much names, website, spread informations )
 We shall onboard more ppl into this space doing the same job to onboard people from web2 to web3. DOnt get me wrong, I am a big fan of Gitcoin and its community , but I really mean on this word above. Sorry for bad english btw. Wish You all a great week and greetings from Brazil.

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Hey Diego,

Thank you for this feedback!
The Gitcoin team is constantly working on making its sites & apps more user-friendly.

The main reason for the complexity and UX issues you mention is that we rebuilt Gitcoin from scratch, but now in a decentralized way, making it fully permissionless. Which means you could now just fork the code and make it better. This has had quite some impact on user friendliness but I think the team has made huge progress in the past year to improve this.

A few things.

If there are specific issues you see, please let the team know directly by opening a chat window when you are on one of gitcoin’s applications and explain what you encounter. Every chat opens a new ticket. More tickets helps the team prioritize.

Know that there are a lot of FAQs available, our main one is support.gitcoin.co, here as well, if you see info missing, do let us know by opening a ticket.

Next to this: you can help us make it better. This round (post above) exists to support the Gitcoin ecosystem, meaning you can get rewarded (=paid) if you create guides, log feedback, basically anything.

So help us support you by supporting our community.
Hope you’ll apply for the next round!

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