Hi everyone! Thanks for all your wonderful & insights comments. We absolutely love that these discussions are being done transparently and in the open 
Before I respond to each of your comments, I want to give more insight into who we are, what our team has discovered running MintKudos and how that has shaped our view of the world and longer-term vision with the Gitcoin DAO.
Note that a lot of this response is repeated in the amended proposal for any newcomers reading this forum thread for the first time.
Our Team
Background
The MintKudos team has developed market insights from shipping and operating mintkudos.xyz and working with various DAOs and partners to increase adoption within their community.
We’ve repeatedly heard that it’s important for community managers to find meaningful ways to recognize members for their time and effort, where their goal is to track and increase community engagement and retention. This is because based on market research and being involved in the space, we’ve found that the polyamorous inclination between individual and communities increase the competition for a community member’s time and attention span.
Ultimately, we believe that turning people’s contributions and recognition on chain will help provide ‘context’, which eventually leads to building that individual’s decentralized reputation. This mission and our approach is what sparked the conversation with @kyle and @ceresstation initially, and we all felt that there could be synergy between many of the Gitcoin initiatives and ultimately where we’re trying to go.
Given this, our longer term vision with the Gitcoin DAO is to help build out the “reputational layer” that feeds into various decision making across initiatives, such as funding & grants, internet of jobs, Proof of Personhood Passport, and more.
We’d love to work directly with the community to further understand project reputation needs and integration strategy. Simultaneously, we’re working with other communities outside of the Gitcoin ecosystem and hope to source all of this information into a launchpad to build cross-community reputation. Ultimately, we strongly believe that this will strengthen the incentives and decision-process making behind public goods funding.
More on who we are
We are a team of 3 engineers, 1 product manager, and 1 designer that are deeply invested in helping communities and individuals provide context around their decentralized & online identity.
Kei (technical lead)
- previously a software engineer on the blockchain division of a large US-based tech company and afterwards led engineering efforts and built a 20-person engineering team at a venture-backed early stage startup
Catherine (product lead)
- previously product manager at a US-based tech company that’s deeply rooted in the future of work
- Kei and Catherine worked closely on launching a new product together at her previous startup gig before deciding to go all in on web3
Kathy (design lead)
- member of VectorDAO & designer of a US-based tech company that deeply thinks about creating intuitive & beautiful web3 product experiences
Cody (software engineer)
- frontend engineer specializing in making our designs come to life seamlessly
Tracy (software engineer)
- engineering lead of a US-based large tech company building PaaS on the cloud
We’d be happy to share more detail or answer any specifics about our past work and credentials (company, projects, experiences) if anyone is interested!
Amended Proposal
We understand that the stewards are cautious about giving a large sum of funding to a new external team where the ultimate value proposition to the Gitcoin community is not entirely clear and outlined.
As mentioned in the previous section, our goal is to build something impactful for both Gitcoin and the broader ecosystem. In addition, we want to build a long-term working relationship with the DAO and to do this, we understand that we need to build trust (and reputation!).
To address the various concerns, we’d be happy to take a step back from the aggressive goals we’d outlined and prioritize incrementally building trust with Gitcoin. I have modified the initial proposal at the very top and added an amended proposal with modified targets, budget asks, and milestones.
TL;DR is that we would be doing product discovery and designs throughout S14, with budgets only reflecting that work. As an official Gitcoin workstream, we would like to assess “reputation needs” and integration strategy with various Gitcoin initiatives, and help build out a “reputational layer” to strengthen the incentives and decision-process making behind public goods funding.
We look forward to the continued conversation around this proposal and increasing our engagement with the DAO!