[S14 Proposal] Decentralize Gitcoin Kudos - Budget request

📜 Proposals
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AMENDMENT (as of 05/08/2022) — in light of comments from stewards and other offline conversations within the Gitcoin community, we are requesting to be an official Gitcoin workstream with a much smaller amount of funding to do product discovery. To make sure that this initial post still flows well for any newcomers to this post, we have rewritten the post entirely, but kept the original proposal at the end.

This is the official funding proposal to take over Gitcoin Kudos as a workstream. The initial proposal was here: https://gov.gitcoin.co/t/request-for-proposal-decentralize-gitcoin-kudos/8115/4.

Timeline: Season 14 (May, June, July 2022)
Steward Responsible: @kyle
Official Team: Kei, Catherine, Cody, Tracy, Kathy

:star: Vision

MintKudos provides a platform for people to recognize community contributions in the most delightful way possible. These Soulbound recognition tokens, which range from peer-to-peer appreciations and endorsements to formal attestations of contributions, become the foundation for an individual’s decentralized reputation.

Our motivation stems from unlocking the Contributor Economy, a world where people can fluidly work for communities that they’re mission-aligned with and get paid in ownership by creating the building blocks to contributor identity.

For more information, check out our Twitter intro thread:

https://twitter.com/mintkudosXYZ/status/1511010716421001217

Mission alignment with Gitcoin

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 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

:white_check_mark: Initial Target

Instead of trying to incorporate the Kudos system from mintkudos.xyz into the existing Gitcoin Kudos system as we mentioned the initial proposal here (https://gov.gitcoin.co/t/request-for-proposal-decentralize-gitcoin-kudos/8115/4), we will focus heavily on product discovery in S14.

What this means is that we will spend the season talking to various Gitcoin initiatives (like Internet of Jobs, PoPP, dCompass, etc) and figure out where we may be able to use Kudos and/or build something else that can provide more “context” to someone’s online identity within the Gitcoin ecosystem.

In addition, we would like to invest in building design mocks for suggested solutions that arise from our product discovery.

To summarize, here are the expected outcomes:

  • a comprehensive report of how we can help build a “reputational layer” within Gitcoin by working with the various initiatives. This may or may not involve the usage of MintKudos or Gitcoin Kudos.
  • design mocks that outline the flow & solutions for how we might implement this in the next season. This may end up being more technical than visual depending on the solution.

:rocket: Budget

The following table breaks down the potential budget spend to execute on the initial target detailed above (assuming 1 GTC = $6 at the time of writing). Note that the proposed budget takes into account working closely with community members willing to partake on this journey with us.

Initiative Outcomes Budget
Initial Product Discovery (Leads: Kei, Catherine) 1) Co-create product discovery goals and questions 2) Recruit users from the community to perform user interviews with 3) Conduct user interviews 4) Co-synthesize interview learnings + insights $20k (3.33k GTC)
Initial designs (Leads: Kathy) 1) Co-creating designs based on distilled feedback from the product discovery phase. $20k (3.33k GTC)

This brings our total budget request to 6.6k GTC for Season 14 (May-July 2022).

:running_woman: Milestones

Milestones can vary significantly on the outcomes of the product discovery and user interviews within the Gitcoin ecosystem. However, given what we know now, these are the proposed milestones:

  • 6 weeks of product discovery
    • 2 week for interview script creation & recruiting user interview participants
    • 3 week for conducting interviews and interview synthesis with various Gitcoin initiatives
    • 1 for prioritization & roadmap creation + MVP definition
  • 6 weeks to test and iterate on designs
    • 2 week for brainstorming, creating low-fidelity designs, and user testing recruitment
    • 2 week to user test, synthesize learnings
    • 2 week to iterate on designs and compile findings for S15

Original Proposal from April 29th :arrow_down:

Below is the original funding proposal for context. We omit some of the vision sections because those exist in the amendment.

:white_check_mark: Initial Target

The overarching goal for this workstream in Season 14 is to incorporate the Kudos system from mintkudos.xyz into the existing Gitcoin Kudos system. The benefits of this is explained in the previous section, “Mission alignment with Gitcoin”.

We suggest the following initial target, keeping in mind that it’s subject to change largely after product discovery & communication with the Gitcoin community:

  1. integration of the existing Kudos contract (on Polygon) with the Gitcoin Kudos website (Build and Fund the Open Web Together | Gitcoin)
    • Show “original” Gitcoin Kudoses in conjunction with “new” Kudoses. In the future we can consider porting them over to our contract if necessary.
  2. Revamp Kudos detail page to show new Kudos metadata for newly minted Kudoses, and continue to show older metadata for existing Kudoses.
  3. Kudos search capability to search across both existing and new Kudoses
  4. Revamp the main Gitcoin Kudos page content to match the new system (ex: talking about the non-transferability of Kudos tokens and our thoughts towards decentralized reputation)

Note that with this tentative target, the following features will no longer be a part of the Gitcoin Kudos experience (although this is up for discussion and they can always be added back in later):

  • a Kudos marketplace (since the Kudoses are non-transferable, one should not be able to buy/sell Kudos)
  • artist marketplace (where users can request for artwork and an artist creates art)
  • a feed of Kudoses in the main Kudos page
  • email notifications pertaining to minting / claiming of Kudos

While not part of the initial target and this grant proposal, here are other items that are on our mind that we may want to build with the community in the future:

  • minting on other networks
  • auto-minting of Kudos tokens (or similar tokens) upon things like bounty completion, quest completion, hackathon participation, and even grant contributions

:rocket: Budget

The following table breaks down the potential budget spend to execute on the initial target detailed above (assuming 1 GTC = $6 at the time of writing). Note that the proposed budget takes into account working closely with community members willing to partake on this journey with us.

Initiative Outcomes Budget
Initial Product Discovery (Catherine, Kathy) 1) Co-create product discovery goals and questions 2) Recruit users from the community to perform user interviews with 3) Conduct user interviews 4) Co-synthesize interview learnings + insights $20k (3.33k GTC)
Initial designs (Catherine, Kathy) 1) Co-creating designs based on distilled feedback from the product discovery phase. $20k (3.33k GTC)
Initial engineering architecture (Kei, Cody, Tracy) 1) Co-creating the initial engineering architecture for the revamped Kudos (ex: storage, contract design, etc) 2) Decide on path for migration of existing Kudos data 3) Work together on designing external-facing APIs and/or SDKs for third-party use of Kudos $37.5k (6.25k GTC)
Engineering implementation (Kei, Cody, Tracy) 1) Decide together how to best implement engineering items together with community members in a distributed manner 2) Co-implementing the engineering items discovered in the initial engineering architecture phase $112.5k (18.75k GTC)
Marketing & revamp of Gitcoin Kudos page (Catherine, Kathy) 1) Update Gitcoin Kudos page content based on product spec 2) PR & communications within and outside of Gitcoin community $10k (1.66k GTC)

This brings our total budget request to 33.4k GTC for Season 14 (May-July 2022). It is expected this budget will grow as we meet our goals (defined outcomes) and continue to expand our workstream.

:running_woman: Milestones

We estimate just over a quarter to perform product discovery, iterate on designs, and deliver the MVP with the community. It is worth noting, we have already launched a fully functional beta product that members of the Gitcoin team have already started using.

  • 2 weeks focused on bolstering the team and research panel (we want to work on this in collaboration with GitcoinDAO contributors)
  • 3 weeks of product discovery
    • 1 week for interview script creation & recruiting user interview participants
    • 1 week for conducting interviews and interview synthesis
    • 1 for prioritization & roadmap creation + MVP definition
  • 3 weeks to test and iterate on designs
    • 1 week for brainstorming, creating low-fidelity designs, and user testing recruitment
    • 1 week to user test, synthesize learnings
    • 1 week to iterate on designs and prepare for engineering handoff
  • 6-10 weeks to deliver the technical changes outlined above (rough estimate, highly dependent on output from product discovery)
    • Some of the engineering architecture items can be started prior to designs finishing, so not all these items are sequential
6 Likes
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I remember when Kudos first emerged in Gitcoin back in 2018 - I think I have one of the very first ones for Infinite Energy. Great to see it come back yet I am a bit skeptical about soulbound NFTs.

Straight off the bat I think this is a relatively high ask for a new team and I’d love to understand how value will flow back into the treasury from this project. I would also like to see a bit more background on the team to better understand the level of remuneration.

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Hi Kei! In the comments following the proposal above, you mentioned looking int other funding sources through another U.S. based entity. Could you share more on the status of those conversations with potential funders and how the existing entity will interact with GitcoinDAO (if at all)?

Separately, I appreciate what you shared here in the form of a quarterly roadmap, and would love to hear more about your longer term goals within the DAO, including collaboration with other workstreams.

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Hello! thank you for putting up a proposal and signalling your support and intent to grow the Gitcoin ecosystem!

  1. I’m curious how was the response with mintkudos.xyz thus far;
  2. how does a “Gitcoin” kudo look like compared to other kudos minted in terms of what it might lend in terms of legitimacy; and
  3. if you think this will be a one-off ‘incubation’ period for the team while seeking additional sources of funding (as mentioned in a reply here)
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On targets

Would it be possible to keep this? Connecting artists with people who would like to have art made sounds like a really cool thing. Depends ofcourse if it was used or not. If it was not used then killing it off sounds fine.

How would that work? Who would take up the minting costs?

On budget

1.Could you please also add the total in both $ and GTC at the table or underneath it? You have 33.4k GTC written, which with your assumption of $6 per GTC is a total of $200,400. It’s good to have these spelled out.

  1. Is the total 33.4 or 33.32 GTC? 3.33+3.33+6.25+18.75+1.66 = 33.32 GTC.

  2. Does this include reserves like the other workstreams? I don’t see any mention of them.

  3. I see 5 distinct names, so I assume 5 people will be paid. I don’t know how much will be allocated for each person but assuming equal work, and equal pay for simplicity. So that means
    200400/5 = $40,080 per person for 3 months
    40080/3 = $13,360 per month

This is a lot of money per person. Taking it up to a yearly salary it’s $160k per year. I strongly believe this should be reduced, taking into account that this is a new workstream, we are in a bear market and there is people who do a lot more with a lot less money.

To that end I would like to request a budget reduction to $7,500 per month per person. $112,500 in total or 18,750 GTC (with spot price of $6).

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Hi everyone! Thank you so much for your wonderful questions & thoughts. We very much appreciate all of you, and we will process this and will respond to all of the above in a short while.

I will say add one thing – our biggest goal is to build a long-term, mutually beneficial relationship with the Gitcoin DAO, so we want to make sure that our proposal is modified/clarified in such a way that the DAO feels comfortable moving forward with us being a new workstream :slight_smile:

Thank you all for your patience!

1 Like
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I am not supportive of this proposal at this time. The reason is because we do not know how this connects to the rest of the Grants 2.0 protocol.

There seem to be many assumptions baked into this proposal. First is that this team is the one to hire and pay to build the kudos system. Second is that Non-transferrable tokens are the what we need.

I haven’t seen the discussion around why this vs verifiable credentials, the ethics of non-transferrable tokens, or the use case in connection to the grants 2.0 roadmap. If these three questions were to be answered, I would consider changing my current no to a yes.

Apologies if any of these were addressed and I simply missed it.

2 Likes
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That’s great to hear! I have mixed feelings for now but I would be supportive after some clarification.

You mentionned multiple times that you’re willing to work with Gitcoin contributors, however this budget request doesn’t seem to reflect your will as we mostly see your core team on the payroll.

I’ve heard that you are already working on the project, is the repo open-source now ? Do you have a Trello board or something similar where we can see the progress ?
Do you have a product roadmap ? How did you estimate that you will be able to deliver all the outcomes at the end of Season 14 ?

Which solutions did you already consider? How much will it be decentralized?

Regarding your timeline and budget request, I would suggest a smaller budget request, with a focus on product discovery and user interviews with a prototype.
Then share the outcomes of the product research with the community, and if you have a confirmation that this should be developed, then you could go for a bigger budget request for S15.

2 Likes
9

Personally, I think this is a very reasonable budget for a starting workstream that aims to continue an existing Gitcoin product concept (kudos) in a more decentralized and arguably more sustainable way. In my view dCompass was the first workstream to do this, and we are already seeing the potential there as we start to discuss the idea of a mutual grant together.

I would definitely recommend that we set precise metrics around outcomes, and answer some of the questions @DisruptionJoe posed though w.r.t. how we fit this into the rest of the product roadmap though.

With respect to the why of soulbound NFTs as an approach, I recognize this is a bit of an appeal to authority but I think it would be natural for Gitcoin to consider them given Vitalik’s support of them here. Ultimately, much of our success has come from bringing ideas that Vitalik has championed to life (such as QF itself) in a way that is practical and meaningful for the Ethereum community. In my view it is worth the risk of experimentation to do that again.

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Keep in mind that any amendment you make to the budget request should appear at the top of the current proposal with AMENDMENT so everyone is clear on what the vote next week will be on

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Hi everyone! Thanks for all your wonderful & insights comments. We absolutely love that these discussions are being done transparently and in the open :slight_smile:

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!

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Thanks for your comment Simona!

Straight off the bat I think this is a relatively high ask for a new team and I’d love to understand how value will flow back into the treasury from this project. I would also like to see a bit more background on the team to better understand the level of remuneration.

Very fair points here! As far as value-add goes, we foresee at least two things:

  1. We’ve adjusted our funding proposal to make sure we take more time to do product discovery to maximize value-add for the DAO.
  2. In the future if we ever issue tokens, some kind of token swap where the Gitcoin DAO treasury owns a % of our tokens would feel apt.

As for the background of our team, we’ve provided a little more on our team in the amended proposal and we’d be happy to answer any questions you have :slight_smile:

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Hi Jodi! :wave:

Hi Kei! In the comments following the proposal above, you mentioned looking int other funding sources through another U.S. based entity. Could you share more on the status of those conversations with potential funders and how the existing entity will interact with GitcoinDAO (if at all)?

For sure! We’re all about transparency so we’re happy to share this information. We’ve raised a small round of seed funding for our US-based entity from mostly angels and some VCs who are fully aligned with our vision.

We have so far used this funding to hire & build Kudos, and we are also starting to build other products related to building out decentralized reputation outside of Kudos. The way our team would like to work together with the Gitcoin DAO is for the DAO to just consider us as internal contributors that happen to work together as part of a US-based entity and have experience & knowledge in building web3 products related to reputation.

This means that any amount of funding we ask for should be work that we do for the DAO and not for the sole purpose of funding just our own product (ie avoid double funding because that doesn’t make sense!).

This is why we decided to take a step back from the initial proposal and would love to do product discovery & designs as an official DAO workstream, so that we can all make sure that the value-add to the DAO is extremely clear.

Separately, I appreciate what you shared here in the form of a quarterly roadmap, and would love to hear more about your longer term goals within the DAO, including collaboration with other workstreams.

For S15, we will for sure have a proper quarterly roadmap after doing product discovery & user interviews in S14. I also amended the original proposal to include more thoughts about our longer-term goals within the DAO :slight_smile: Let us know if you have any further questions!

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Hello! thank you for putting up a proposal and signalling your support and intent to grow the Gitcoin ecosystem!

  1. I’m curious how was the response with mintkudos.xyz thus far;
  2. how does a “Gitcoin” kudo look like compared to other kudos minted in terms of what it might lend in terms of legitimacy; and
  3. if you think this will be a one-off ‘incubation’ period for the team while seeking additional sources of funding (as mentioned in a reply here 1)

Hello!! These are great questions!

We’ve learned a lot from shipping MintKudos and working with our wonderful partners. We’ve observed many use cases of Kudos, which further solidified our thought that people really need easy ways to mint & capture context related to online identities. We’ve put together a simple graphic detailing some of the observed use cases:

kudos_observed_use_cases
kudos_observed_use_cases2000×1103 157 KB

As far as comparing a Gitcoin Kudos from a MintKudos Kudos in terms of legitimacy, I think that’s generally up to how the viewer / consumer of the Kudos perceives it. For example, if the consumer of the Kudos is part of the Gitcoin ecosystem and see a Gitcoin Kudos related to one of the internal initiatives, then that Kudos is worth way more than an unrelated MintKudos Kudos.

We do have some plans in the future to use some sort of endorsements to indicate people who endorse a certain Kudos, and using some relative weighting of how endorsed they are by the wider network, we can calculate some “score”. If anyone has any further ideas on how we may quantify reputation scores, we would love to chat.

As far as funding is concerned, please take a look at my previous response.

15

Would it be possible to keep this? Connecting artists with people who would like to have art made sounds like a really cool thing. Depends ofcourse if it was used or not. If it was not used then killing it off sounds fine.

In the amended proposal, we are modifying our S14 goals to focus heavily on product discovery. At this time, we will make sure to find out whether the artist marketplace for Kudos is being widely used!

How would that work? Who would take up the minting costs?

Currently in MintKudos, we are fully paying for gas as the system is built on Polygon. If we decide to adopt Polygon (or some cheaper chain) then I think proposing a fully-subsidized system is reasonable (we can always provide an option to re-mint the same token on another chain). If we go with Ethereum or more expensive chains, then we will have to consider other options to have the user pay for at least part of the cost.

To that end I would like to request a budget reduction to $7,500 per month per person. $112,500 in total or 18,750 GTC (with spot price of $6).

Thank you for the calculations! We agree that we are a new workstream without a track record within the DAO. Our amended proposal tries to address that by spending S14 doing product discovery so we can make sure that the value prop to the DAO is clear for S15. Would love to have these specific budget discussions again for our next proposal!

16

Thank you for your questions & your thoughts - these are all completely valid!

There seem to be many assumptions baked into this proposal. First is that this team is the one to hire and pay to build the kudos system.

As you can see in our amended proposal, we want to focus on product discovery so that we can make clear what the value proposition is to the Gitcoin DAO. We expect that we will have a clearer idea of how to work best with the various initiatives and contributors in the DAO through the many conversations we’ll have throughout the season. Our goal is to build a long-term working relationship with the DAO and be active contributors, and not just paying ourselves.

Second is that Non-transferrable tokens are the what we need. I haven’t seen the discussion around why this vs verifiable credentials, the ethics of non-transferrable tokens, or the use case in connection to the grants 2.0 roadmap.

We’ve had many conversations with folks in the ecosystem about non-transferable tokens vs verifiable credentials. Our current opinion on the matter is that while the verifiable credentials standard offers everything we would need, it will take a while to be adopted in the ecosystem and for people to build on top of it. We would like to meet where the market is, and the market understands NFTs quite well. On top of this, there are a lot of tooling around NFTs (NFT viewers, easy integrations, libraries, etc) but not so much around verifiable credentialing solutions.

To capture these reputational building blocks as a non-transferable tokens makes it easy for integrations and usage, and we feel that it’s a great starting point. As usage of verifiable credentials increases, we are completely open to migrating data from soulbound tokens to VCs — ultimately these are just form factors and what we care about is capturing this data and push for widespread adoption.

As for the “ethics of non-transferable tokens”, would you mind elaborating on what this means? Did you mean that turning off non-transferability seems to go against the original NFT spec?

Lastly, trying to clarify and concretize how we can build with grants 2.0 in mind is exactly why our amended proposal suggests taking a step back and doing deep product discovery.

Looking forward to hearing about any additional questions / concerns / opinions that you may have!

17

You mentionned multiple times that you’re willing to work with Gitcoin contributors, however this budget request doesn’t seem to reflect your will as we mostly see your core team on the payroll.

You’re totally right, and we should’ve clarified this point! The people attached to each of the budget items is a suggestion of project leads who can help drive each initiative, as opposed to purely who will do the work & get paid. We want to figure out how to best work with the DAO members as we continue this conversation as an official workstream.

I’ve heard that you are already working on the project, is the repo open-source now ? Do you have a Trello board or something similar where we can see the progress ?Do you have a product roadmap ? How did you estimate that you will be able to deliver all the outcomes at the end of Season 14 ?

Indeed we have been building MintKudos for about 2.5 months now! The repo is not yet open-sourced but we have plans to do this soon. One of our original plans was to quickly open-source our codebase if the proposal to work with Gitcoin is approved! However, we now have a new amended proposal where we focus on product discovery and figuring out what exactly we should do to provide the biggest value to the Gitcoin DAO. We expect during this process that we will figure out who we should work with as well for S15.

Which solutions did you already consider? How much will it be decentralized?

In regards to storage solutions, we are currently storing all of the smart contract metadata in the contract itself, and any images/assets on S3. Were we to decentralize this, we are open to using solutions like IPFS, Arweave, Ceramic, etc. We are open to all kinds of solutions, and we think this is a conversation to be had with DAO members.

Regarding your timeline and budget request, I would suggest a smaller budget request, with a focus on product discovery and user interviews with a prototype.

Then share the outcomes of the product research with the community, and if you have a confirmation that this should be developed, then you could go for a bigger budget request for S15.

Thank you for this suggestion, and this is exactly what we’re suggesting as part of the amended proposal. We look forward to working with you and learning more about how we can help dCompass too :slight_smile:

18

Jumping in to provide my two cents as I go through all the proposals.

I’ll start by saying that I think the work mintkudos.xyz is doing is super high-potential and exciting, and I would love for there to be a relationship between the two entities.

That said, I really don’t think this is a good candidate for a DAO workstream proposal. As a result, I will be voting no on this budget request.

There are a few reasons I don’t believe this is appropriate to be a workstream, but the show-stopping one is the existing US-based entity & venture funding raised. Given that mintkudos.xyz is an established corporate entity and, as a result, has existing investors with expectations around financial returns - I don’t think it makes sense based on corporate structure alone.

In addition, the above articulation does not sound like a workstream proposal to me - this sounds more like a contracting relationship.

For context, all current GitcoinDAO workstreams are teams that grew organically from within Gitcoin and are marching towards the DAO’s collective mission - rather than having the DAO as just one of many affiliations.

I would love for us to explore the potential for a mutual grant - or a contracting relationship, if/when it makes sense - and think the relationship between Gitcoin & mintkudos.xyz would be a lot more viable in one or both of those contexts.

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This really stands out to me as a reason to not fund as well. When Scott and I were first courting the mintkudos team, this was not yet the case (funding and corporate definition IIRC). Am I wrong @keikumata?

I do believe in the work mintkudos is doing and see soooo much potential, but I don’t think I will be voting to fund this initiative given the flag that Annika mentioned. I do wonder if there are ways to stay close and partner as an informal workstream instead of a funded workstream?

As a steward, we are really asking the DAO to focus on protocol development to grow our impact. This feels like a “not yet” type funding decision.