Warm tidings to each of you stumbling upon this governance post for itâs last hurrah 
I hope you enjoy(ed) the full moon in all itâs glory, wherever you are today.
Iâll start with facts first and move from there into more subjective territories. Points 1, 3, 4, 5, 6, and 7 from @owocki are explicitly responded to throughout.
Due to legal process, the spinout of KERNEL has taken 8 months (which is the last time anyone at KERNEL took salary from Gitcoin Holdings). The total burn on Gitcoin Holdings in the last 8 months has never been more than $5k/mo (covering costs like Slack, Typeform, and Airtable).
To both Kevin & Andyâs points, during those eight months, we have survived almost entirely on the KERNEL Multisig, which includes a) money generated via KERNEL past Blocks and b) Gitcoin Grants rounds (this does not include any inflows from large one time donations from Gitcoin Holdings). We are cash flow positive during KERNEL Blocks, and the multisig has held us over between blocks as well well as legal things play their due course.
At maintenance levels, even with our empty KERNEL Block 6 and no fundraise, KERNEL will be fine for another 4 months with the multisig. We will not disappear if this proposal does not pass and KB6 & KB7 will happen.
However, fundraising $2-3MM for a long winter, and doing so via a web3 native fundraise allows us to move beyond âmaintenanceâ for a project that, contrary to what this forum may feel like, is very clearly growing in a healthy way. We can do work we otherwise couldnât with this more support, much of which has been described above. Starting that fundraise with GitcoinDAO (at 49K GTC this season), especially given the context, seemed a logical start.
We never would have gotten there if it werenât for the 14 months prior, where KERNEL was, with 3-4 employees, funded entirely by Gitcoin Holdings. Upon this basis, we reached an agreement for itâs spinout into itâs own entity to explore itâs own pluralistic future (will return here), though we knew it would always be intertwined with Gitcoin - starting with Holdings and ideally, with GitcoinDAO.
The biggest difference in opinion here seems to this: what is the difference between fundraising from Gitcoin Holdings and GitcoinDAO? Is it, in this scenario, âdouble dippingâ, or are the asks to two different entities that operate with different mandates? There are obviously similarities, but what is different?
More specifically, what does this GitcoinDAO treasury represent? Is it meant for furthering efforts coming from Gitcoin Holdings, or also for other projects which build with more pluralistic intents? How does the DAO balance these two important categories at an early stage and over time?
In my imperfect role as COO of Gitcoin, I once quoted a paper in a Gitcoin discourse called Liberal Radicalism. Kevin had recently launched Gitcoin Grants v1 with a much smaller team and quadratic funding, from that paper, helped bring it to life. Today, I will quote the more recent Decentralized Society, by Puja Ohlhaver, Glen Weyl, and Vitalik Buterin.
We call this richer, pluralistic ecosystem âDecentralized Societyâ (DeSoc)âa co-determined sociality, where Souls and communities come together bottom-up, as emergent properties of each other to co-create plural network goods and intelligences, at a range of scales. Key to this sociality is decomposable property rights and enhanced governance mechanisms that reward trust and cooperation while protecting networks from capture, extraction, and domination.
With such augmented sociality, web3 can eschew todayâs hyper-finanancialization in favor of a more transformative, pluralist future of increasing returns across social distance.
While KERNEL is not one of âGitcoinâs Essential Intentsâ, and while it retains the need for some social distance, may we not find increasing returns and new worlds together? Iâll explain further.
While not raising venture funding and instead choosing to raise funds from web3 donors, starting with GitcoinDAO, & via our own web3 experiments, may not seem to be mutually beneficial, it actually is.
Instead of GitcoinDAOâs expected 24% âteam governance rightsâ in KERNEL being diluted in the same hyper-financial environment being warned against in Decentralized Society by the venture capital model, it will stay at 24%. This means that KERNEL, if it is successful, will be governed by a) itâs vibrant community and b) GitcoinDAO.
This is why we felt KERNEL already uniquely fits between a mutual grant & a workstream at this time. (We are committed to our role as a workstream, given this proposal did fall in that category, and feel well positioned to play in it for S14 via @sidcode and myself).
We sense other web3 protocols will respect and appreciate these two communities retaining the two governance voices in KERNEL, and that itâs a sign of strength to have GitcoinDAO be the anchor partner. (As previously mentioned, the Nomic Labs fundraise is our example here â they went back to the Ethereum Foundation for anchor support of $8MM after having their early support since their inception, and then raised $22MM in donations successfully from protocols, DAOâs, and other stakeholders. This was not a sign of weakness.)
In summary, we decided to make the proposal here first because:
- KERNEL is a place where mutual benefit will financially accrue to GitcoinDAO, perhaps as a home for a variety of âplural network goods and intelligencesâ
- The use and norms of the GitcoinDAO treasury have long term ramifications for KERNEL and web3 in general, regardless of whether this proposal passes or not
I understand and empathize that we make this proposal in a time of immense strain. Opening the hatches in a bear market is not the suggestion we make. There are many ways in which this proposal was imperfect, perhaps most notably picking a workstream flow, although the other options for exploring funding were not so clear.
We do, however, want to speak out against the precedent not funding KERNEL suggests â against a pluralist vision for the use of GitcoinDAOâs treasury.
Specific to Kevâs points, this requires the hard position of balancing What would a Lean/Effective Gitcoin look like? 
with A Vision For A Pluralistic Civilization Scale Infrastructure For Funding Public Goods?
As Kevin states, more eloquently in my opinion (minus a typo or two ), in the latter:
I envision a web-scale public goods funding infrastructure replacing some of the places where nation states are receding in their support for public goods (or were never good at supporting public goods in the first place). in the old world, public goods were oriented around nation state. in the new world, theyâll be based upon your online niche/community you belong to. were in the middle of a great re-indexing from nation-states to niches. niches are the new nation-states insofar as as this public goods funding spreads outward, niches (not geography) will be the aqueduct that carries the liquidity outward to the world.
KERNEL is most directly described here as a âniche communityâ â one that is partially public, but decidedly focused on plural outcomes â âhelping the world by caring for KERNEL Fellows and their communities.â I do not suggest that funding all niches like KERNEL is within GitcoinDAOâs mandate, but I do sense that funding a high potential âaqueductâ for niche funding that is intertwined with the DAO and could use the support mindfully is a reasonable path forward. This can be done without requesting more governance control, though we understand the paradigm from which the suggestion comes (we respectfully decline this suggestion). It can be done by allowing many pies to grow.
We are grateful that one of the KERNEL fellows weâve spent time with is @krrisis, who I canât thank enough for his words on the forum today. It has always been a joy to be with you, in Metaspace, in juntos, in firesides, and here. His words on KERNEL and on the considerations of GitcoinDAO both ring true to me and I respect his judgement however he chooses.
The largest gift KERNEL has given me is a sense of security in service â that in web3, and in life, if I can find it in my heart to serve without boundaries, there will be compounding rewards and benefits. I have failed many times in this effort, and I will again. In the process, I will never find perfection, but I may find my way to good.
Iâll end with thoughts on the word âgoodâ, which may have tangential relation to the rest of this post and what âpublic goodâ might mean. From the inimitable @cryptowanderer, helped by Henry Zhu, and the special Mary Oliver:
Happily, the language of the good is also a language of self-imposed limits, which seeks perfect expression only as a means towards realizing a convivial life lived together in the golden mean. This golden mean, or middle path, is akin to the program of least complexity, because it requires no additional symbol, only a kind of rhythmic harmony; a balance of the whole.
Balanced by Mary Oliver:
You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
For a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
I love KERNEL, and am grateful that it is my ever-moving home today and will be into the future. It will remain focused on people and poetry, even when ill placed within long governance threads (lol).
We will remain amicable with GitcoinDAO regardless of outcome which intertwines with our story in a plurality of ways. We do not depend deeply on each other, but we are stronger together.
I trust that the vote tomorrow will play out as it is meant to and wish you all well.