[S15 Proposal] - Gitcoin Product Collective Workstream Proposal & Budget Request

[tjayrush]

I’ll start the comments, I guess.

1. Very well done. Thorough, clear, detailed. Excellent job.

2. As I was reading this, I kept thinking to myself that I wanted to know who the people are – their names – who makes up this working group? I don’t remember that being part of previous rounds’ budget proposal. I’m very glad to see the list of names included, and I think every other budget proposal should included the names of the primary people on the team as well as information about how many contributors are involved (for easier calculations of how much people are being paid).

3. Again, as I was reading this, I kept thinking – this is a lot of money – but it’s also a lot of work. I wondered how much of this work removes work from other work streams? In other words, is this proposal adding brand new money to the total budget or is this proposal moving money (and therefore work) from one work stream to another – and if so, how much and from which work streams?

4. As I read this, I felt that this work stream has a broader mission than some others – the comments about reaching out to MMM and Moonshot. It would be good if those referenced work streams (and others) noted this work stream’s mission and co-ordinated to eliminate duplicative effort and would show a consciousness of the need to work together.

5. As has always been the case, I’m concerned about the comment that the budget is denominated in dollars and yet is paid out in GTC. I’m certain I don’t need to explain what happens if the price of GTC goes in half. Not good. Also, if the price doubles, is the US dollar ask still prioritized? Also – I probably don’t need to point this out, but there are other reactions to a change in the exchange rate – a lessening of the work load, for example.

All in all, a very well done proposal. And, as will always true for me, I reserve the right to make no further comments.

[lthrift]

Thanks for taking the time to review and comment @tjayrush. Here are some answers to your questions:

@tjayrush

is this proposal adding brand new money to the total budget or is this proposal moving money (and therefore work) from one work stream to another – and if so, how much and from which work streams?

There was previously a “Decentralize Gitcoin” work stream that built an early prototype of the Grants 2.0 protocols (referred to as dGrants), but that work was all merged together with the rest of the protocol and software development being done by the Holdings team to take a more comprehensive and aligned approach. There was no DAO budget in Season 14 that covered this work. Therefore, this is new work and budget for the DAO in Season 15. There are no other groups doing this work at this time.

@tjayrush

the comments about reaching out to MMM and Moonshot. It would be good if those referenced work streams (and others) noted this work stream’s mission and co-ordinated to eliminate duplicative effort and would show a consciousness of the need to work together.

Tagging @DisruptionJoe @GTChase @seanmac as workstream leads for FDD, Moonshot Collective, and MMM to see this comment from TJ, as well. These are conversations we’ve been having with these groups for multiple months now, so none of the referenced collaboration is a surprise and most work is already in progress. Alot of this is the result of the overall DAO aligning around essential intents, of which GPC’s work is at the core of the protocol EIs.

@tjayrush

I’m concerned about the comment that the budget is denominated in dollars and yet is paid out in GTC.

This has been a CSDO decision as it enables the workstreams to plan according to the way contributors need to be compensated in order to retain them. There are efforts underway to diversify the treasury and address the pain points you’ve mentioned. I just want to highlight this denomination in the GPC budget request is not a unique decision on GPC’s part.

[kyle]

I am really excited to have GPC joint he DAO. This is a really robust proposal, with great insight into a team that has really started to fire on all cylinders.

The Passport launch has been great to see, and I look forward to more protocol launches and development.

I am usually less worried about how much a team needs to accomplish their goals and more worried about the goals they are trying to accomplish. This holds true here and I am excited to see GPC make progress in the DAO. I am supportive and have appreciated having these workstreams leads partake in CSDO and other key aspects already.

[lthrift]

@tjayrush I actually just did a quick look back to give a more complete look on this question

@tjayrush

is this proposal adding brand new money to the total budget or is this proposal moving money (and therefore work) from one work stream to another – and if so, how much and from which work streams?

You can see the two Decentralize Gitcoin Workstream budget requests here:
August 2021 - Requested 41.3k GTC
October 2021 - Requested 127k GTC (total 138k GTC budget)

These requests do not denominate at all in USD or other stable coin to give an indication of how they got to these numbers, so a rough estimate of the potential spot price in each of these months would give you the following USD denominations:

August 2021 - @ $9 USD spot price, $371,700 USD

October 2021 - @ $9 USD spot price, $1,143,000 requested of a budget of $1,242,000

So, while there was no budget for this work in Season 14, Seasons 12 and 13 the DAO did shoulder budget for similar work.

[Pop]

This is great historical context, @lthrift - thank you for surfacing it and illustrating the pattern we saw for this work in prev seasons.

I would also love to know if any of the budget from prev seasons remains at all? And if so, can it be moved across to this new workstream?

[kyle]

The budget that remains is fairly small (Price has dropped 75% since funding). I don’t think we should plan for moving that over, but I dont feel strongly.

The current plan is to move those funds to the Foundation controlled Gnosis safe. We have used those funds for a few small expenses to date (paying for HubSpot migration, Steward compensation, etc.).

[DisruptionJoe]

I highly in support of this budget. It is one of the most important things GitcoinDAO will do!

[ZER8]

Great 2 see this happening! Welcome to the DAO Our collective success depends on the success of Grants 2.0 and I’m sure that we will all contribute in making that happen.

Happy to help with anything I/we as the GIA can. Be it general info around grants, grant eligibility or anything else. I’m also very eager to try to find how the GIA will fit into this Grants 2.0 and Passport future. A simplistic vision would be a future in which we can be a sort off add-on to the round manager
.

@lthrift

Research how to further leverage Grant Hub project metadata to support building project reputation and niche curation. Long term, this enables more automated grant round eligibility curation.

@lthrift

Allow Round Manager to ingest verified spam and fraud signals from Grant Hub and filter projects based on those signals

These are the key areas that I would love to help in. Tagging @David_Dyor also.

[Jodi_GitcoinDAO]

I’m supportive of this budget and thrilled to have the team driving our protocol development in the DAO. I look forward to working with GPC on the User Support commitment shared above and other priorities.

[epowell101]

Thank you for the clear budget. Very excited to see the continued progress on Grants 2.0!

I would second the comments about preferring to see yet more clarity in terms of overall impact to budget - I think your response as I understand it is that this was more or less net new work and as such we should not expect any offsetting reductions from other workstreams?

Another question along similar lines - metrics - is there a way for interested observers to track typical development metrics so we can begin to get a feel as to the maturity of the process? Typically I’ve seen these in burn-down charts and so on out of ye ole Jira… I looked around in Discord however likely am not looking in the right spots.

Lastly - you mention the importance of partnerships to provide feedback for all aspects and the interaction w/ the other work streams in this effort. Can you shed more light on how these partnerships w/ potential users and other partners are being recruited, prioritized, and managed? As a Wildfire representative, we are working in meta governance and related roles w/ 12+ web3 organizations - I’m wondering again whether we can learn more about this effort and potentially contribute if only by educating the other organizations w/ which we are working. Is there a write-up or thread on this product partnership strategy you can point us towards?

Again - this was an extremely clear and encouraging budget request. I hope the above few questions help shed further light on it.

[linda]

Thanks for the detailed proposal, it was really helpful in understanding the purpose and scope of the workstream.

While it is a significant amount of requested funding, I think this is important work for Gitcoin and I’m supportive of it.

My only request given this large amount is in order to help make the DAO treasury long-term sustainable for all workstreams, where possible this season and future seasons to try to be conservative with spending on nice-to-have vs requirements along with leveraging work done by other workstreams as to not have duplicative work (as @tjayrush mentioned).

[ceresstation]

Biased of course, but strongly in support of this proposal! Especially excited to find ways to collaborate around DevRel and to see how these tools enable utility across the Gitcoin ecosystem.

As others have mentioned this is a high budget, but one that’s absolutely critical to our success long term. Even in a bear market, we need to put energy and time towards the futures we want to see.

[seanmac]

Highly supportive of this proposal, very well put together. On behalf of MMM we are super excited to have you all join the DAO and continue ramping up our protocol marketing team & efforts!

[lthrift]

@epowell101

I would second the comments about preferring to see yet more clarity in terms of overall impact to budget - I think your response as I understand it is that this was more or less net new work and as such we should not expect any offsetting reductions from other workstreams?

That’s correct. There will be no offset from Season 14 budgets.

@epowell101

is there a way for interested observers to track typical development metrics so we can begin to get a feel as to the maturity of the process? Typically I’ve seen these in burn-down charts and so on out of ye ole Jira… I looked around in Discord however likely am not looking in the right spots.

You can follow along progress in the #gpc-demos channel. We are currently maintaining lean, single priority backlogs that drive towards outcomes rather than scrum style sprint commitments with burn down charts. We’ll be adding a monthly public chat on the roadmap with progress reports and upcoming work starting the first week of August.

@epowell101

Can you shed more light on how these partnerships w/ potential users and other partners are being recruited, prioritized, and managed?

We have kicked off the design partnership program for Grants specifically with the PGF Partnerships team. Here is a deck that outlines the program. For Passport we are just shaping up the details and don’t have anything public to share just yet. It will be focused on partners who are interested in integrating their dApps with Passport for sybil resistance and identity verification. I’m happy to hop on a call to answer questions you might have and see if there’s a fit to work together on it.

[lefterisjp]

Hey guys,

Thanks a lot for the proposal. I was expecting this at some point though as I wrote in discord, please ping us early enough for comments.

The proposal is well written and structured.

The project is a must to have since gitcoin grants 2.0 is what will be built from this workgroup as I understand. This brings the obvious question to me. If GPC builds gitcoin grants then why do we need MoonShot collective and generally would GPC also pick up work from other workstreams? And if yes, which ones and what work?

With the addition of yet another workstream, and the market being the way it is I think we really need to ask hard questions and perhaps restructure the workstreams even further. I am pretty sure there will be overlaps, and as such we will end up wasting funds as a DAO. Let’s try to frontrun this problem by thinking ahead. If we spend $1.5m on each workstream every 3 months, and we have 6 workstreams the money is gonna run out fast.

@lthrift

In Season 14, we will have built a foothold for the protocol by enabling Grants Round Operators to manage grant applications and review through the Round Manager dApp.

Was that done in S14? Because from what I saw it was a bit chaotic with round managers not knowing who applied where.

@lthrift

contributors to take a once per year conference trip,

This $55k is for how many contributors? And since this is for 3 months, are we to assume you need $220k for OpEx/travel expenses in a year? So for 16 people ~$13,750 for such expenses in a year? Isn’t that very high for travel expenses and all the other things you mentioned per person in a year if you only do one trip per person?

@lthrift

The Passport hackathon has just ended and we plan to continue trying this approach with the rest of the development areas in Season 15.

Hackathons and attracting talent to play with the SDK is a good thing. But do you have any ways to measure effectiveness of this budget? What are the KPIs with which you judge these were money well spent?

[kevin.olsen]

Hey Lefteris thanks for jumping in with your questions!

@lefterisjp

If GPC builds gitcoin grants then why do we need MoonShot collective and generally would GPC also pick up work from other workstreams? And if yes, which ones and what work?

We’ve already been engaging with moonshot, with our folks collaborating on some projects (passport had moonshot team members). We primarily see MC as evolving to be the first “3rd party” builders on top of the grants protocol. Their S15 roadmap is shaping up to have a few squads who will run out ahead of us, finding interesting problems they can solve on top of the core protocol we are shipping.

To the second part of your question, we certainly hope the grants protocol will alleviate some of the toil other groups in the DAO experience delivering our grant rounds, it’s too early to set explicit targets for efficiency gains, but there are conversations ongoing with PGF and FDD to find effective ways to automate work and scale their operations more effectively.

@lefterisjp

Was that done in S14? Because from what I saw it was a bit chaotic with round managers not knowing who applied where.

GR14 was run with the same centralized platform, but the season (S14) is still ongoing and we have working MVPs for the grant hub, and the application flow to the round manager is under development now. I couldn’t find the source for the original line you quoted in this post, but I would note that we have shifted some of our delivery targets to prioritize supportting our design partners (alpha users) to allow us to launch with and learn from some smaller scale grants programs before migrating the gitcoin rounds as first users of the protocol.

@lefterisjp

This $55k is for how many contributors? And since this is for 3 months, are we to assume you need $220k for OpEx/travel expenses in a year? So for 16 people ~$13,750 for such expenses in a year? Isn’t that very high for travel expenses and all the other things you mentioned per person in a year if you only do one trip per person?

Good question, the travel portion of the request here is for half the annual travel budget (not a quarter) with an estimate of 5k per contributor (13 * 5k) / 2 = $32,500, the remainder of the requested budget should cover our payroll fees (utopia labs), a coworking stipend to help folks that have existing coworking arrangements in holdings to cover those fees in the DAO, and a small tech refresh stipend.

@lefterisjp

Hackathons and attracting talent to play with the SDK is a good thing. But do you have any ways to measure effectiveness of this budget? What are the KPIs with which you judge these were money well spent?

Another good question, so far we’ve just concluded our first hackathon for the Gitcoin Passport, and saw some great contributions. Our hypothesis here was that we could bootstrap our devrel work first by engaging via a hackathon to receive quick feedback on our SDK and documentation. This so far looks like a success. Secondarily, we hypothesized that we might be able to source devrel talent that we could engage with outside the hackathon, we haven’t had the chance to close the loop on this, but given some strong contributions I’ve got my fingers crossed. Lastly, we were pleasantly surprised that we also received some great open source contributions that could be used to extend our products and documentation. The results here are promising (4 new stamp integrations submitted, and some strong educational content).

Given this was a first experiment that was run within holdings with holdings’ budget we didn’t have the request for KPIs, the experiment framing was sufficient to kick this off.

Going forward I’d be game to formalize some of these experiments, perhaps via the forum here, or in discord to help provide some goals and outcomes to the DAO as we progress the devrel function for the protocol and ensure we’re using these funds effectively.

[kevin.olsen]

The snapshot vote for this Budget Request is live here: Snapshot Vote

Thank you all for your participation in this process

[lefterisjp]

So I will vote a reluctant YES in this proposal.

It seems that GPC is the actual product arm of Gitcoin and it finally joins the DAO and if anything is to ever get funding it’s this workstream.

What I would like to see in the near future is to understand what each workstream should do because initially I thought moonshot would do dev stuff but now it seems that GPC is what will create the Gitcoin 2.0 grants.

We have too many workstreams and not all of it makes sense to keep being part of the DAO. Bear market is here and Gitcoin should not be a fat cash cow to be milked.

[GTChase]

@lefterisjp

his brings the obvious question to me. If GPC builds gitcoin grants then why do we need MoonShot collective

This question is one we have been expecting at Moonshot, and I think a fair one at that. I appreciate your willingness to ask these kinds of questions.

@kevin.olsen’s response was pretty spot on, but figured it wouldn’t hurt to give some direct insight to MC’s planning for s15.

It’s clear you see the importance of the Grants + Passport protocols. MC’s priority is to help GPC make these protocols more accessible by being the first community to build on top of them, i.e. dog fooding. MC has a diverse community of builders to mobilize which enables us to provide rich feedback on the protocols. This allows GPC to quickly iterate on documentation/SDK’s/features, which in return will provide confidence across the board that these protocols are indeed approachable and ready for primetime.

The second value add here is, MC can expand the development opportunities for the protocols. What MC builds on top of the protocols should be valuable solutions to key problems that have been identified/heard from key design partners. In fact, what you will see in our s15 budget proposal are items that were prioritized in collaboration with GPC and key stakeholders to ensure we are working on high impact items. Not only can we expand on the development opportunities, but also mobilize talent that can contribute directly to the teams and work of the core protocols. This is already happening today as we mobilized product and engineering help for Passport, and short term engineering help for Grants 2.0.

TLDR: GPC = core protocol work / defined products. MC = Dogfooding + experimentation + innovation (aligned with EI’s)

@lefterisjp

pick up work from other workstreams?

This is actually something MC is aiming to help with in future seasons as well, planning/strategy calls are happening on what this best looks like. Essentially becoming the trusted source of software development for the DAO workstreams that have a need for software outside of the protocols to solve key problems, but don’t have devs or dev capacity. An example of this is working with the Public Goods Funding ws to help build partnerships or help build products that facilitate and scale their fundraising for public goods (aqueducts and fee swaps). To capture more of these opportunities we will roll out an idea/problem submission form for WS’s to submit areas they need help with and prioritize those against other problems/ideas that help achieve our EI’s.

The reason that is coming in future seasons is we want to stay hyper focused on ensuring the protocols are approachable and are built with the needed solutions to be successful. We will continue to work with other WS’s to have a solid plan on what becoming this trusted source of development looks like and how we best scale that effort to ensure we are capturing those ideas and prioritizing them accordingly.

[Fred]

Visualization of the budget request above. Please reach out if you have any questions or input.