@kyle & @lefterisjp - thank you for your feedback and engagement. We’ve taken the time as a Collective to review your feedback and our budget. Below is our narrative response to your questions and concerns. We have also amended our budget in the original post of the proposal above to incorporate the feedback.
First of all, we candidly recognize that in prior seasons we have been taking opportunities as they come and experimenting without necessarily having a strong conviction on any particular key directions or outcomes. Over the last several weeks we’ve been working to refine this approach so that we could be more tightly aligned with the overall GitcoinDAO mission. A key part of this has included more explicitly forming an organizational operating system and we were just finding our legs as the time to finalize a budget proposal for season 14 arrived.
At the time of writing objectives and the budget, we felt that IoJ was a priority to explore as a potential moonshot. Since then, the priorities for the DAO have become more evident in that all workstreams need to support Grants 2.0. Development of Grants 2.0 has also picked up significant momentum giving us a more clear picture of when we could actually begin experimenting with plugins/mechanisms to go alongside it. The collective agrees that we should refocus season 14 to prioritize GTC utility and front running Grants 2.0 plugins in place of IoJ.
We realize what we’ve called the “governance initiative” here is not as clear or helpful a description as it could have been for assessing our budget request. This initiative is intended to explore how we can enable greater utility of GTC in the governance of our DAO and grants program. Conviction voting is a powerful mechanism design that can be applied in many different ways, including curation of grants and more dynamic capabilities in governing Gitcoin treasury. Since we are just assembling a team to fully dive in on the opportunities, we attempted to not be prescriptive about what they would build exactly. We are committed to ensuring that experimentation in this space is in service of the priority to increase the utility of GTC.
For Season 14 we plan to have 12 full-time core contributors (6 employed by MC, 4 employed by holdings, and 2 additional hires by MC) and have forecasted 7 additional contributor spots for our current initiative commitments. Those 19 contributor roles are a mixture of part-time to full-time (meaning 40 hrs/week) expected contributions and the hourly pay breaks down to an average of $70/hr.
We have taken another pass at our planning to see where we can slim things down and have reduced our budget for Season 14 by more than 20%. These are the changes we made:
- Decided not to rollout providing a minimal base pay for “Trusted” contributors. We will use Season 14 to hire and onboard a community manager before setting expectations for the minimum contributions of this role as described in our MC Operating System.
- We will not hire an additional designer to the core team in Season 14. We will seek to find designers from the community to work on a project basis. If we’re able to identify someone who is a great fit and we have a clear need for this additional commitment, we will choose to hire into the core team in Season 15.
- Slimmed down the budgets for the thematic initiatives (renamed to Conviction Voting and GTC Utility/Grants 2.0 Plugins).
- Eliminated budgets for custom software development and additional R&D opportunities. We will rely on workstreams having budgets for these projects themselves and if this is not the case we will revisit adding a budget for this in Season 15.
Amendments have been made in the proposal, as noted.
Please let us know if you have further questions or feedback. We appreciate your support and feedback.