Hello friends, explorers, stewards, thank you for your comments on the KERNEL proposal (& thank you to @seedphrase @David_Dyor @annika for your kind words on KERNEL itself).
We reach the end of the road a bit wearied, but nonetheless excited for the future of GitcoinDAO & KERNEL well beyond today’s shifting tides.
To be brief, we have made a final and substantial amendment to the KERNEL Proposal, reducing our ask to 49K GTC for our first quarter as a workstream within GitcoinDAO. This suggestion was originally made by @Fishbiscuit and has been enacted in the main proposal here.
I’d like to address a few thoughts beyond simply reducing the proposal amount, although I do hope this is a substantial gesture in our understanding that:
(a) GitcoinDAO is in a precarious position and must show wisdom as we enter a new cycle (h/t @linda for this resource), and
(b) while we feel strongly KERNEL is worth funding, solidifying our unique exploration as a smaller workstream may be healthier at this time.
One of the reasons is for (b) is posed by Annika here, in that KERNEL doesn’t quite fit the mold for a GitcoinDAO workstream or a “mutual grant” today, given it’s unique history within Gitcoin Holdings. We are starting our own entity, we have a complimentary mission (focused on a specific set of public goods, seeded around education), and are not explicitly focused on the ProtocolDAO.
While these points are true, and Annika later alludes to a gap to be filled, I think this misses the following:
KERNEL serves as a unique, important hedge to workstreams directly focused directly on a ProtocolDAO: a high-potential, independent entity experimenting with a clear, extremely high potential, win-win relationship with the DAO. This is an exercise in coordination which might serve as a model for other workstreams, mutual grants, or [insert new category] to consider as the future of GitcoinDAO & public goods funding unfolds.
While we are entering a bear market, I think it serves GitcoinDAO well to ensure experiments like KERNEL are given a real chance to succeed as public goods and that attempts to coordinate in this way are not halted completely. If not here, then where?
In closing, I am reminded of a specific, quieter part of the KERNEL syllabus on a spanish concept called Duende, which includes a poetic phrase or two.
Here is the heart of the struggle then: what we want is a miracle; what we have is a network of messy human beings. Do we have the creativity to see how these two are not any different?
It is good to know that glasses
are to drink from;
the bad thing
is to not know what thirst is for.
In moving forward, I hope that we may find ways for KERNEL to participate as a healthy member of GitcoinDAO (as a workstream today, and perhaps, in other ways in the future) dedicated to honesty, trust, excellence, heightened awareness, and the ways in which messy humans might come together to do things that otherwise may seem impossible, starting with the simplest: caring for one another. We understand we would be joining GitcoinDAO in a period of struggle, and are dedicated and intertwined with the efforts of moving through it as well as we can, together.
I close with a favorite passage from a dearest friend, the one and only @cryptowanderer:
Let’s be honest then; what we’re working for is a miracle. Many of us harbour the desire that a critical mass of people will wake up and realise that the ways we transact with one another and the ways that we organise our relationships and work surrender both power and value to a system consciously designed to extract the maximum profit it can. Moreover, that this realisation will also entail the creative and insightful use of the tools we already have, in the service of imagining new personal and political possibilities. This is the definition of a poetic hope, and it highlights the depths of the struggle which we must each face if we are to realise such a world.