Abstract
Proposers: @annika @ceresstation @Fishbiscuit @vgk
The goal of the public goods funding workstream is to help increase the interest in and funding for public goods within web3, principally by leveraging quadratic funding and other related mechanisms (e.g. retroPGF).
Over the course of Season 13, we made significant progress towards this goal, and we are requesting 198K 185.5K GTC as budget for Season 14 to continue scaling our efforts.
S14 Budget Request (in GTC) - AMENDED
Season 14 budget = 152,500
60 daysâ reserves1 = +95,000
Current reserves2 = -62,000
Total Amount requested = 185,500
[1] Adding 60 daysâ reserves to budget requests is a new standard that was first proposed and ratified at CSDO on 2022-04-19.
[2] Current reserves is the PGF Gnosis Safe balance as at time of posting, rounded to the nearest thousand. The reserves total will be adjusted based on the value at the time this proposal is moved to Snapshot and Tally.
[3] A denomination in dollar amount will be prioritized in budget proposals over GTC - so if the spot price assumed at posting of a budget changes between then and when the budget executes, the GTC amount will be readjusted to reflect the dollar amount at the time this proposal is moved to Tally or the 20 day moving average (whichever is lower) is moved to Tally.
Current Multisig: PGF Multisig: Gnosis Safe
Full Budget Breakdown: PGF Budget S14 2022 Final - Google Sheets
Budget Category | Description & Assumptions | Amt USD | Amt GTC |
---|---|---|---|
Public Library | Hold a space to inspire people interested in working on Public Goods | $90,000 | 15,000 |
PG PR | Create accessible dialogue for people new to Public Goods | $30,000 | 5,000 |
Publication | Nurture ideas and grow awareness on Public Goods | $60,000 | 10,000 |
ImpactDAO | Community cartography of the ImpactDAO landscape | $30,000 | 5,000 |
Grants Ops | Ensures sustainable operations for Gitcoin Grants | $270,000 | 45,000 |
Fundraising Contributors | Source and close long term pools of capital for grantees | $247,530 | 41,255 |
Comic | Experiment with fundraising around collectively-owned art IP | $45,000 | 7,500 |
Auction | Create collectively-owned art IP | $45,000 | 7,500 |
Strategic Partnerships | Work with new and existing mission-aligned orgs by creating a Mutual Grants Committee | $108,000 | 18,000 |
Travel/Events | Get our core contributors to important events to work connect with future partners | $34,470 | 5,745 |
The initial workstream proposal was successfully passed on 7th August 2021 through a snapshot vote, and allocated 45k GTC to instantiate the Public Goods Funding workstream (PGF).
On January 4th, 2022 a further vote was passed for 100k GTC as we continued to scale the workstream and achieve PGF objectives within three key areas:
- Grassroots Community Efforts
- Gitcoin Grants Operations
- Strategic Partnerships
This has also allowed us to focus our KPIs around increasing the GMV of Gitcoin Grants and related public goods funding mechanisms, both by scaling the right people into grants ops related roles, and by forming relevant strategic partnerships to further solidify Gitcoin as a credibly neutral public goods funding mechanism.
Our Journey So Far (S13)
The following aims to summarize what the PGF workstream has achieved since our last budget while spending ~50k GTC of the Q1 budget (50% of budget requested). We hope this progress will help showcase that weâre ready to scale the workstream and improve the efficiency of the grant funding flywheel. In turn, we hope this helps us continue to be one of the most important impact DAOs in the Ethereum ecosystem and beyond.
Grassroots Community Efforts
Leads: @Fishbiscuit @Maxwell
- Onboarded and oriented more amazing contributors across multiple workstreams via library discussions (e.g. Ale Borda, Ben Percifield, Colton Orr, Gary Sheng, Jason Cook, Jim Chang, Maxwell Kanter, Michelle Ma, Sarah Drinkwater, Madison Adams, and many others)
- Continued exploring further partnerships with KERNEL to help onboard new entrants to the space into their first DAO
- Created a Public Goods Starter Pack to introduce the concept of public goods with different levels of complexity so that anyone can start engaging in deeper conversations on public goods
- Ran a session and wrote a thought piece with Crypto, Culture, & Society on the solarpunk movement, leading to opportunities with multiple university publications (e.g. Harvard Tech Review)
- Held sessions with speakers such as Amber Case (micropayments and calm design), Ale Borda (public goods ecosystem synergies), Bhaumik (designing inspiring learning communities), and more
- Continued holding our Twitter Space, Public Goods are Good. Our guests included Tina He, Jasmine Wang, Cyn Bahati, Lauren Luz, Eva Beylin. We also ran multiple events to support ecosystem and cause rounds in GR13.
Gitcoin Grants Operations
- Successfully executed on GR13 with $4.6M in GMV (30% above the 3 round moving average) in collaboration with MMM for marketing and FDD for grant reviews
- Executed nine ecosystem rounds for ZK Tech, Open Gaming, Polygon, ENS, Algorand, OlympusDAO, NFTs, Uniswap, & Radicle and three cause rounds for Climate solutions, Longevity, and Support for Ukraine
- Built an Ecosystem Round run book to be able to run rounds in a more repeatable way
- Partnered with the product team in defining early requirements for Grants 2.0
- Onboarded two new full-time contributors to the Grants Operations team
Strategic Partnerships
- Increased grants matching funds raised to $3.2M in GMV (67% of total funds) across multiple types of rounds (main, cause, ecosystem) in GR13
- Brought in a number of long term recurring ecosystem funders including a [9 figure announcement](* Closed the first 3 Gitcoin Aqueducts to enable recurring public goods funding for ecosystems) by Fantom
- Closed the first 3 Gitcoin Aqueducts to enable recurring public goods funding for ecosystems
- Began formalizing and scaling types of partnerships including general donations, NFT sales, and mutual grants
- Brought in a number of new strategic partners:
- Crypto, Culture, and Society (a learning DAO studying the impact of crypto on culture and society) are running through Season Two! Gitcoin will be playing a key role in helping build a liberal arts education for crypto
- DeveloperDAO (a place for new devs in web3 to get started) is bringing tons of amazing coders into the space to help us build new types of public goods
- DreamDAO (a regen guild bringing gen z builders into web3) is continuing to help push forward the solarpunk + regen narrative to show the optimistic futures we can create together
- Kudos (a soulbound NFT reputation protocol) has been quickly building a following and use-case for their tooling
- Verses (a collective of writers, researchers, technologists) who have some of the best writing in the ecosystem about what it means to be a pluriverse
Continuing Activities and Proposed Budget
Grassroots Community Efforts (42.5k GTC)
We believe that a strong grassroots effort around public goods can help to increase the number and quality of potential partners and contributors working together with Gitcoin to achieve our mission. This can be broken down into achieving 5 objectives:
[1] Inspiring Spaces: Sustain and grow the Public Library community as a gateway for new contributors
- Continue regular Public Library sessions and invite salient thinkers on Public Goods and Web3 as our speakers and moderators while inviting new participants interested in Gitcoinâs mission
- Develop and operationalise an onboarding flow for reliable participants to contribute to the Public Goods Funding workstream or other workstreams around GitcoinDAO
- Kickstart initiatives hosted by our Public Library participants beyond Gitcoin to discuss Public Goods
[2] Accessible dialogue: Host the âPublic Goods are Goodâ Twitter Space consistently
- Maintain a regular space for people curious about Public Goods and interact with key organisations and people through Twitter Spaces
- Support GR14 by hosting discussions on cause rounds and showcasing grantees
[3] Nurture ideas: Kickstart a publication on Public Goods
- Grow awareness of Public Goods and inspire action to contribute
- Create a public good (non-rivalrous, non-excludable open publication) about Public Goods to move beyond synchronous community interactions
[4] Community Cartography: Support and grow the ImpactDAO mapping initiative
- Complete an initial map of ImpactDAOs in the space to provide a baseline for evaluation and insight generation
- Explore mental models, narratives, relationships, and culture around ImpactDAOs to help foster the growth of the Public Goods ecosystem through educational material and research
[5] Community Lore: Create art for Gitcoinâs lore with collectively-owned IP
- Grow a collective of lore-builders, creatives, and builders shaping a solarpunk future through the Gitcoin mythos
Gitcoin Grants Operations (45k GTC)
Gitcoin Grants is the heartbeat of the DAO and is our primary product offering. Over the past six months, weâve been gradually decentralizing Gitcoin Grants Ops and moving the execution of the program from Gitcoin Holdings into the DAO. Season 14 is expected to be a monumental milestone in that transition, with members of the previous Gitcoin Holdings team moving into the PGF workstream full-time.
To that end, we will continue to build towards the H1 2022 objectives we set out at the beginning of the year:
[1] Scale: Grow grants program
- Increase number of high quality grants that raise >$5K/quarter by 50% (pending market condition)
- Increase the number of side rounds by 100%
[2] Sustainability: Set ourselves up to execute grants on a larger scale
- Minimize the number of hiccups during the round
- Achieve NPS for participants, partners, and donors of >70
- Test at least two new constructs for funding grants (e.g., public goods coalition, aqueduct)
[3] Decentralization: Continue to decentralize grants program
- Move grants ops completely out of Gitcoin Holdings & into the DAO
- Increase role of stewards/community in grants strategy & decision-making; define governance surface area
Additionally, in Season 13, the Grants 2.0 product vision was outlined. In Season 14, as we start to work towards this vision, we want to test some assumptions we have around the future of the program. We are adding these new GR14-specific objectives to the above more macro-level list:
[4] Ecosystem Funders: Test Grants 2.0 assumptions
- Run a new Ethereum Infrastructure round in GR14 and solicit funds from ecosystem builders
- Run 15-20 Ecosystem Rounds in GR14
- Assess which ecosystem funders are equipped & motivated to self-run rounds
- Share survey / interview results from post-GR13 partner discovery work
Community Partnerships (72.5k GTC)
Fundraising and other forms of strategic partnerships are critical to the sustainability of Gitcoin as a DAO. These activities include bringing in matching funders for grants rounds, creating new ways to sell / auction NFTs, making small scale partnerships (or large scale via mutual grants with newly emerging organizations in the ecosystem, and experimenting with other new mechanisms like RetroPGF. Our objectives are as follows:
[1] Scale: Grow the size of matching rounds executed by the DAO
- Increase the number of net new partners we work with by 20%
- Increase the average size of side rounds (with emphasis on cause rounds) by 50%
- Continue to level up new full time and part time contributors towards the above
[2] Sustainability: Tighten processes to scout and execute partnerships
- Refresh partnerships process to handle a larger load of potential partnerships while ensuring that we seek out the most aligned partners to work together by growing the partnerships teamâs capacity
- Continue to build out new documentation to ensure members of the team have full context on each otherâs responsibilities and current objectives (e.g. robust relationship tracking)
- Formalize our evaluation process to support partnerships across the DAO with support from Stewards via the mutual grants committee
[3] Measure impact: Help set the stage for new cause rounds that augment our mission
- Fundraise for the Ethereum infrastructure round to bring Gitcoin back to its roots
- Focus on bringing in new values aligned web2 partners like Fifty Years and double down with other existing values aligned partners like Protocol Labs
[4] LARP together: Experiment with fundraising efforts around art, open-source partnerships, and collectively-owned IP
- Kickstart a new team focused on experimenting with different methodologies to raise funds for Public Goods
- Raise at least 20 ETH through 1-3 net new NFT sales
If you have any questions about this budget proposal, please comment below!