[S15 Proposal - INTEGRATED] PGF Budget Request

šŸ“œ Proposals
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I am not concerned about overlap outside of the naming they used for the role. We have discussed their need and I fully agree that they have a need for this role. The PGF stream is the connection to the funders and therefore should take the brunt of the policy legislation. FDD will remain working on enforcement and adjudication of platform and main round eligibility, disputes, and appeals. This role would likely be responsible for the side round enforcement and adjudication processes along with operationally driving policy updates for the platform and main round.

Ideally, we will build software based tools with the protocol to alleviate the need for FDD services around Grant Eligibility that are not connected to fraud.

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I was hoping to get clarification on a few things:

Grassroots

  • What is the high-level breakdown of responsibilities for contributors (esp. those who are FT)? Based on what Iā€™m seeing, it looks like we have 2 FT and 3 PT contributors running the Library and Twitter Spaces. Iā€™m not sure what it takes to do that, but intuitively it seems like a lot of hours to run these activities.
  • In line with the above, what have been some metrics that can be shared about # of participants at each of these events?
  • What is the overall strategy of running Library calls and running Twitter Spaces? Who are the audiences? What is it that we hope to accomplish by having people join us at each event?
  • I get concerned when I see a ā€œslush fundā€ when we are trying to lock down our spending and bring more intention to our activities. What is the purpose of the slush fund? What have been some past unforeseen costs that have come up? How large is this slush fund? How important is it that it stays here?

Grants Ops

  • How is this different than the role @Viriya is playing right now? My understanding is that this role has now been filled by her and she intends to hold this role for the foreseeable future.
  • If this is a role in additional to what @Viriya is playing, how is it differentiated?

PGF Operations

  • Iā€™d like to see more details on this - how much spending is being planned for S15 on travel? I imagine that any FT contributors that qualifies for this already has an idea of which conference they will attend, and therefore specific funds can be earmarked for them.

All in all, alongside the curiosities I am stoked on the work that PGF has been doing. I think they are bringing a TON of intentionality to everything they are working on, constantly trying to amplify and streamline all of their work and processes.

A larger question to ponder for the DAO is:

If weā€™re playing the game of ā€œbecoming profitableā€ with our work on the protocols side, how much do we continue to grow and amplify our grants program, which is purely a cost-centre? Alternatively, how do we start transforming PGF into a revenue-generating Workstream?

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Thanks for your thoughtful questions @epowell101 and @CoachJonathan.

They seem to center largely around two areas:

  • Grassroots objectives/outcomes - which Iā€™ll let @Fishbiscuit, Grassroots Lead, respond to
  • Grants Ops new hires - which Iā€™ll respond to here

On the Eligibility Analyst - As @DisruptionJoe outlined above, we have coordinated with FDD on the need for this hire. This is, frankly, a hire we probably should have made months ago before scaling up Ecosystem Rounds. A couple pieces of context here: (1) In GR14, Grants Ops spent ~80% of its time, many nights and weekends, reviewing grants for ecosystem & cause rounds. We have scaled from zero ecosystem/cause rounds a year ago to 17 of them in GR14, and each round having its own policy and group of stakeholders to manage to is a ton of operational complexity that we havenā€™t hired for whatsoever. The solving of it has been very yolo to date. We need a systems thinker who can build this from the ground up and massively reduce our human evaluations.

On the Marketing Ops Manager - As you pointed out @CoachJonathan, as of recently @Viriya is indeed stepping up and playing much of this role. We are incredibly excited by what weā€™ve seen so far in her leadership of this! Here is the original JD for context - and, as you note, a good chunk of this is now covered by her work as of the past couple weeks. To be clear, given the progress weā€™re seeing, we do not plan to hire this role prior to GR15. That said, we want to budget for it for later in the season in the event that we (and @Viriya) feel we still need more marketing ops support within PGF looking ahead to GR16. For GR15, some of this budget will go towards Coleen (who is already contributing part-time) and we hope to keep some as a buffer.

@J9leger - feel free to add anything Iā€™ve missed. :slight_smile:

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Thanks for the breakdown in thinking here, Annika.

Just to add to @CoachJonathanā€™s sentiment here - I plan to continue in this role and I feel it falls within the scope of whatā€™s needed at the moment. That said, I am a big +1 for keeping Coleen on for strategic support around Cause Rounds - especially if weā€™re bullish on continuing to scale this area of our program (which I very much am, personally).

A separate thought re: Grassroots

Grassroots community engagement initiatives are the heart of any community-driven organization. The flag that has been raised about duplicative work between grassroots, MMM and DAO Opsā€™ community experience efforts is top of mind and Iā€™m excited to see some focus on an audience thatā€™s important to our success (i.e., Grantees). And I feel torn about having a budget this large for something for which the strategy is not clearly outlined.
That said, I think there will be a huge unforeseen impact if we were to cut grassroots initiatives entirely. I feel strongly that once we begin to align on a community engagement strategy, there will be more clarity and opportunities for grassroots initiatives to blossom towards the end of S15 and into S16.

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I love the thoughtful dialog from @CoachJonathan and @Viriya! Many of the items flagged by them are also similar sentiments I am feeling. This budget still feel really big.

The grassroots work likely needs a deep rework as we transition to launching our protocol and the grantee engagement is not inspiring as defined. Working to increase engagement and quality on the current platform should be a non-goal IMO. We would ideally build that engagement and momentum on the protocol. Overall, it feels a bit misaligned. Without the clear community engagement strategy from the DAO, Itā€™s hard to understand the value of that focus area. IMO, there is a lot of momentum that will be coming from the launch of the protocol. We may have found ourselves (and the market) growing out of the need for us to plant the regen seeds. Public goods are good - that mantra is present in many places because of our hard work. The next phase of this discussion could shift to ā€œsay not that public goods are good - say I will fund them!ā€ - but this likely needs to be deeply linked to the new protocol.

Our budget for the Partnerships work also seems large given we are pausing the mutual grants and have not been able to launch pgDAO. Round size has stayed consistent (in a bear market!) which is a great accomplishment, but we are not really seeing much gains by increasing that team size yet. I wonder if this because focus has been too spread, or that we are missing clear goals and accountabilities for the team.

I could see a budget reduction of maybe $75k-$150k and still have PGF be as effective as they are today. Those numbers assume pausing grassroots (to retool towards a protocol future and engagement strategy) and also scaling down the partnerships work given the pause in mutual grants and no pgDAO yet.

I am posting this thinking aloud to get otherā€™s thoughts. I recognize as this impactā€™s contributors roles its a hard conversation to have in public.

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Firstly, thank you for your feedback. I appreciate the guidance on helping to align our work across the DAO and to the future of the protocol. A detailed overview is in this document, broken down to a per-hourly basis. This is as detailed as it gets and even though it might not completely dictate how S15 might go, I hope this makes it clear how carefully and resource constrained we are now even as we try to meet our goals. I suggest reading this before continuing to the rest of the forum post. Iā€™d like to emphasize that grassroots has cut a lot of initiatives from last season. Weā€™ve gone from 210k to 96k while starting a pivot towards grantee engagement. In fact, every season weā€™ve had to reorient our community efforts to galvanise our community towards more pressing issues. For S15, that is grantee engagement.

To @kyle 's questions:

First, one canā€™t simply pause grassroots efforts and restart them at will. The rapport, community, and trust that goes into the day-to-day running of these safe spaces will be broken if we simply close them down.

Second, members of these grassroots efforts have gone on to be informal ambassadors of Gitcoin, helping other grantees or even being grantees themselves. Since the protocol is being built, keeping a space for potential users is key. Also, itā€™s not like we intend to close the grants program. Future Gitcoin will have both the program and protocol. More importantly, the program will be opinionated, and thus these spaces that facilitate discussions on the nature of the grants program will be even more crucial.

We are reworking our grassroots activities based on @annika and @J9leger 's feedback that the grants programs is looking to engage grantees better. Having run and kept the community for a year, I believe this is the best place to start.

We have been designing a clearer grantee engagement strategy referencing a hierarchy of needs that utilises Heartbeat, a community platform, and a community hub at Devcon to achieve this.

The user journey of grantees will thus be.

  1. Grantee support prior to GRs that get them ready to become a grantee
  2. Grantee engagement during and after GRs so that we can facilitate key conversations that help them become better grantees on the platform and beyond, achieved through creating a community
  3. for S15 as devcon is near, we intend to host a community hub for public goods as many grantees new and old will probably be at Devcon.

To @CoachJonathan questions:

  1. What is the high-level breakdown of responsibilities for contributors (esp. those who are FT)? Based on what Iā€™m seeing, it looks like we have 2 FT and 3 PT contributors running the Library and Twitter Spaces. Iā€™m not sure what it takes to do that, but intuitively it seems like a lot of hours to run these activities.

Your intuition is right. It does take a lot of hours to run a good community. Despite this, we have accumulated a year of experience running both Public Library and Twitter Spaces, and thus have optimized to only requiring 2 PT contributors for each initiative.

It takes 8-10 man hours to curate, guide, execute, and review each Twitter Space and Public Library.

  1. In line with the above, what have been some metrics that can be shared about # of participants at each of these events? + 3. What is the overall strategy of running Library calls and running Twitter Spaces? Who are the audiences? What is it that we hope to accomplish by having people join us at each event?

The strategy is simple.

On average our Twitter Spaces have 181 active listeners and the Public Library has 20-22 attendees.

Even more important than mere metrics, our grassroots efforts have been the key to onboarding great members to the DAO. Something that DAO Ops has consistently promoted as a great way to take part in Gitcoin, and Iā€™m glad to see @safder in several Public Library calls. Over the year, Public Library attendees such as Ale Borda, Alisha, Ben Percifield, Ben West, Colton Orr, Gary Sheng, Jason Cook, Jim Chang, Juanna, June, Kris, Kyle Jensen, Madison Adams, Maxwell Kanter, Michelle Ma, Sarah Drinkwater, Umar Khan (and of course, myself) have all gone on to become valuable contributors to the DAO.

Weā€™ve also had speakers for the Public Library such as Amber Case (micropayments and calm design), Ale Borda (public goods ecosystem synergies), Bhaumik (designing inspiring learning communities), Aaron Maniam (digital public goods), Matt Prewiit (local currencies), Vivian (pluralism). You can find the full list of 50+ sessions here. During GR14 we switched our conversations to talking about the grant round itself and got speakers from Gitcoin to share about setting up the round and its challenges.

For the upcoming library sessions during GR15, weā€™ve had a great idea proposed by Sage from Grants Ops to utilise it as grantee 101s which we have cleared prior library sessions to execute on. August sessions are already fully booked with members from Taiwanā€™s g0v taking center stage.

For our Twitter Spaces weā€™ve had speakers such as Tina He, Jasmine Wang, Cyn Bahati, Lauren Luz, Eva Beylin. But since we are pivoting to focus on grantee engagement for the next season, our calendar line-up has changed accordingly.

  • August 11 (Thursday): Open Gaming Round
  • August 16 (Tuesday): Open Hours Prospective Grantee Q&A
  • August 18 (Thursday): Advocacy Round
  • August 23 (Tuesday): Open Hours Prospective Grantee Q&A
  • August 25 (Thursday): DEI Round - Host Gloria
  • August 30 (Tuesday): Open Hours Prospective Grantee Q&A
  • September 01 (Thursday): DeSci Round
  • September 06 (Tuesday): Open Hours Prospective Grantee Q&A
  • September 08 (Thursday): Climate Round - Host Ben West
  • September 13 (Tuesday): Open Hours Prospective Grantee Q&A
  • September 15 (Thursday): Community Collection Curation / Shill Your Collection
  • September 20 (Tuesday): Open Hours Prospective Grantee Q&A
  • September 22 (Thursday): Funder Panel

The Twitter Spaces audience is a diverse mix of people who are: newly entering web3, interested in funding public goods, past and future grantees, and people who are simply curious about joining the Gitcoin community. This space creates an open, welcoming environment, and top level funnel for prospective contributors and community allies.

Our focus is shifting and expanding to encompass grantee engagement to better support grantees who are new to the ecosystem. We believe that the Twitter Spaces foster a sense of genuine connection and meaning to those who attend. Twitter Spaces are a vehicle for storytelling and provide opportunities for each guest to share their own pathway, perspective and experienceā€”to help educate and inspire the community to think outside the box and dream big! Beyond supporting the grants rounds, spotlighting grantees, and highlighting funders, our core intention is to illuminate innovative projects within our community that probe the edges of what is possible and explore the ways in which blockchain tech can support communities in funding and sustaining their shared needs.

  1. Library Slush Fund
    I get concerned when I see a ā€œslush fundā€ when we are trying to lock down our spending and bring more intention to our activities. What is the purpose of the slush fund? What have been some past unforeseen costs that have come up? How large is this slush fund? How important is it that it stays here?

The slush fund is USD 2k per month. It is important because we use it for onboarding contributors during our trial period. It is a small slush fund but has brought on writers that have ended up in MMM such as @umarkhaneth and @kylejensen .

edit: I agree with @M0nkeyFl0wer 's suggestion to not use the term slush fund, however that was a policy tool that Loie left us as a flexible fund that was agreed during the CSDO call sometime inā€¦ Novemberā€™21 and hence we use this term.

To @epowell101 's questions:

  1. To nit pick - objective 3 is listed as ā€œleverage grassroots efforts toā€¦ increase grantee quality & engagement.ā€ The objective here is ā€œincrease grantee quality & engagementā€ and the excellent work of grassroots would be considered a means to that end IMO. We put a tactic into the statement of an objective - unless Iā€™m off base here. What do you think?

Firstly, welcome to Gitcoin :slight_smile: Iā€™m glad to see a fellow WildfireDAO person here, and I welcome your feedback.

We have been designing a clearer grantee engagement strategy that utilises Heartbeat and a community hub at Devcon to achieve this. Those would be the tactics. The reason why itā€™s not on the forum is because itā€™s being designed as we go, as we talk to more members of the community. This is because excellent grassroots work must come ground-up!

  1. Continuing on that thread - and here comes an actual question :slight_smile: - am I right that we currently lack metrics that are agreed upon that measure ā€œgrantee qualityā€ and ā€œgrantee engagementā€? Could we set for example an imperfect metric such as ā€œhost at least X grantees in weekly Twitter spacesā€? What about success metrics for past cohorts? Do we have such metrics and would it be useful to look at how many grow and prosper over time? I wonder if it will be a powerlaw like distribution, what do we expect?

Youā€™re right, however setting metrics that are merely counting how many times we do things bears no meaning. If you look up at the rest of the post, it is clear that weā€™ve been hosting regular Twitter Spaces and since itā€™s publicly hosted, weā€™re all held accountable.

Now, analyzing grantee success is practically a research topic in itself. However, we are willing to attempt this challenge this season too and kickstart the conversation of what a successful grantee is as it will inform our community strategy.

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Thanks so much for your feedback here, @kyle! I appreciate your call outs, and the opportunity to clarify the importance of partnerships.

Regarding Mutual Grants, we are targeting 1-2 mutual grants a quarter. Youā€™re correct, weā€™ve decided to slow down this initiative for now, but itā€™s still an ongoing priority. As Owocki has talked about, we still think finding values aligned partners throughout the bear market is important, in addition to continuing to level up the structure of our relationships with key partners.

Regarding pgDAO, the launch has been moved to a key priority for S15 as we continue to explore the best partners for the initiative. Itā€™s important that we do pgDAO right, and thus we didnā€™t want to rush it during S14, and want to make sure we give the formation and launch adequate energy during s15. While getting capital is important, having the right partners on board, and launching it in a way that is aligned with an ethos all of us would want to get behind is more important than getting something done a few months sooner.

Regarding grants fundraising, I agree - that we havenā€™t seen much increase in the round size by increasing the team yet, with yet being a keyword. I am confident that during GR15 and GR16 our team will be able execute above expectations, and that we will be able to positively steer the future of the program in combination with Grant Ops. I donā€™t think our focus has been too spread, but I do agree that we historically havenā€™t done the best job of tracking goals and accountabilities. This is an ongoing priority for PGF as a whole, and something we will remedy in S15.

But to zoom out, why do we need to raise these funds? The future of Gitcoin Grants relies on a protocol, but it also relies on showcasing the success of a canonical instance: the program. This is because the program is where many existing design partners have started, where are brand equity comes from, and in turn where a substantial amount of GTC utility could arise from. In addition, while it might be easy to see only the final number of whatā€™s raised, itā€™s also important to take time to consider Gitcoin doesnā€™t take money from just anyone. We are highly particular about the kinds of organizations we would like to take capital from for grants rounds, this ensures that we have the best possible partners in a protocol world.

Again, to emphasize, there are lots of companies and individuals within the ecosystem who would be happy to brand align with Gitcoin allowing us to launder their reputations in exchange for tens of millions of dollars, but doing this in the wrong way would be short term thinking and reduce our long term success. Partnerships is about strategy as much as it is about execution.

Finally, itā€™s important to note that we are in a challenging macro environment, and the pool of companies we can raise money from continues to diminish given budget constraints. This will likely change over time.

With all that said, Iā€™d like to push back on your call to reduce the partnershipā€™s budget. Weā€™re currently a lean team, and if you look across the web3 ecosystem, ecosystem and partnerships leads have extremely generous compensation packages (nearly 2-3x what we currently offer). People who come to work here are mission are aligned, but itā€™s important to remember itā€™s extremely valuable work we do that should be compensated in a fair way.

In an ecosystem so small, Iā€™d hope everyone would understand how hard it is to find the right people for this, which is made even more difficult if we arenā€™t able to compensate those people well. Especially when getting another role would be extremely easy for them to do. Individuals who are able to raise funds within web3 need to have high context, understand the nuance of the space over the course of many years, typically have pre-existing relationships they can lean on (cold to close in sales for this work is impossible), and also have the ability to do sales.

Excited to work more closely with you to continue ensuring our future success.

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Couldnā€™t agree more with this. The hires PGF has made have been strategic and targeted in terms of expanding our network, reach and effectiveness.

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I wish we would stop using the term slush fund. :slight_smile: It implies a lack of planning and intention which is clearly not the case. Itā€™s good to have flexible funds allocated of course but they are allocated with intent and measurables attached to them.

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Kyle Iā€™m loving the open dialogue about these issues. Thank you.

Have to disagree with this sentiment. I am, of course, totally on board with coordinating our efforts towards grants 2.0 but that needs to be an iterative process that flows from our existing grants program regardless of the platform. I feel we have a responsibility to continue to try to support our grantees and donors. Even more so in fact as we roll out new tools and there are bugs and other issues that need dealing with.

The Gitcoin community is growing to include many people who arenā€™t developers and this shift has brought some challenges with it that are worthy of attention.

Its worth noting that by running large cause rounds we have invited many n00bs and even people without their first wallets to engage with us and our brand. I think we need to do more engagement as our products are not fully built, not less. This has impacts on our ability to spread the adoption of the platform, which is a core strategic goal.

Furthermore, this is extra important as we are moving into the space of celebrity involvement and more non web3 brands (Serena Ventures, Schmidt Futures, Kimbal Musk etc). This will mean more scrutiny of our user experience and how we support our users. Our brand should be associated with positive web3 experience so our partners are happy to continue sponsoring rounds and we can leverage their positive response to bring on more high profile partners.

I agree we shouldnā€™t prioritize spending money or developer time on the existing platform but lets not conflate that with the efforts that are needed to continue to successfully build partnership and to run increasingly effective grants rounds.

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Yeah, I very much so agree with this, @M0nkeyFl0wer. tl:dr of my response would be +1.

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That is the best news ever! I could not be more stoked about both you and Jonathan stepping into these roles and there being more overall capacity in these areas. :slight_smile:

Feels to me like much of what we are doing in multiple workstreams is grassroots organizing. Its really a core part of the DNA of any public goods focused organization. Perhaps what is needed is more organic cross work stream coordination. There are some epic talented people in each of these work streams. It would be a shame to lose the momentum that is growing. Lets make sure @lanitrock and @Fishbiscuit and other epic team members know they are valued and appreciated.

I would LOVE to jam with all of you about how we dive deeper together as an efficient grassroots outreach machine even under less than favourable market conditions and belt tightening.

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Very supportive of this request. Iā€™m very keen to advance pgDAO based on initial convos with Scott and BitDAO. I believe this could likely be a separate proposal when ready.

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I agree with this sentiment. Iā€™m not particularily happy with the way we are blessing DAOops community experience initiative, and MMM community initiative, and deciding this is the one to cut.

Iā€™d really like to see them all merged under a leader with a vision for our future community engagement combined with a co-lead who has the operational chops to execute. (I am not trying to express an opinion here about whether or not people currently leading these initiatives should or shouldnā€™t be that leader, only to express a desire for a thoughtful conversation around how we structure it going forward.)

I do feel like there is overlap, but from my perspective, I donā€™t think it is being thoughtfully resolved.

Couldnā€™t agree more. We really need to be investing in subDAOs and microservice DAOs that are born out of our efforts. Our business plan is not yet strong and this kind of experimentation with funds to come with it is a step in the right direction.

Iā€™d support this budget simply based on the funding partnerships has brought in to date.

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I share some similar concerns to what others have raised about the amount of money thatā€™s being spent here. I wonā€™t cover partnerships as thatā€™s outside my domain of expertise/I donā€™t have a good intuitive sense of how much ā€œshouldā€ be spent on these activities, but feel like itā€™s fair for me to raise these with Grassroots spending.

Let me start by saying I really appreciate the work PGF Grassroots does - Iā€™ve really enjoyed the Library sessions and Twitter Spaces that Iā€™ve been able to attend, and I think theyā€™re adding a lot of value to the ecosystem. I 100% believe these efforts are worth dedicating time to, especially with a new focus on planting protocol seeds.

My concerns are two-fold:

  1. I feel like close to $100k/season is a lot to be spending on these activities.
  • I went through the detailed budget shared by @Fishbiscuit and Iā€™m still not convinced that we need this much time and resources. I also donā€™t fully understand how it has been labelled, for example for the first Public Goods Library column it says :

Sessions: 4h* 8* 40usd = 1.28k
Planning: 4h* 12* 40usd = 1.92k

What are the ā€œ8ā€ and ā€œ12ā€ numbers and why are they different? Iā€™m assuming this is to be read as 4h per month * 8 (whatā€™s this?) * 40USD/hr (contributor salary). Is this consistent throughout the document?

  • I feel like thereā€™s a lot of overlap between the goals and efforts of the Library + Twitter Spaces, and I feel that this could be counterproductive. Why have both Library calls as well as Twitter Spaces with the goal to increase grantee engagement? Shouldnā€™t they have distinct goals? From what I know of community management, you want to decentralize community leadership but centralize plaftforms/channels for community as much as possible, otherwise you risk distractions and information overload of the community you are trying to engage.
  • The biggest part of this budget is the Lead salary ($36k) at a very generous rate (higher than what some workstream leads are getting paid), but it isnā€™t clear what the Leadā€™s day-to-day responsibilities are? There seems to either be a full-time or a number of part-time contributors dedicated to owning and running each initiative - what sort of leadership duties are required at a Grassroots-wide level and if these are vast, why arenā€™t the 6+ other contributors being empowered to take on some of these responsibilities?
  • Thereā€™s $25k dedicated to experimental grantee engagement which hasnā€™t been tested, adds yet another channel for communication with grantees (adds to level of overwhelm), and doesnā€™t seem to have been planned with any consultation with DAO Ops or MMM community building efforts - why couldnā€™t this be completed with the current DAO Citizens strategy being planned at DAO Ops? Which leads me to my next area of concern.
  1. A lot of grassroots work is community engagement work, but there has historically been little to no collaboration with other community efforts in the DAO, and there doesnā€™t seem like there is any plan to include this in this budget. The DAO Ops and MMM community initiatives share many of the goals as PGF Grassroots, and Iā€™d love for us to share resources and distribute some of the important work of community engagement.

Just want to close by saying that again, I really appreciate the work that PGF has done so far for the DAO, and couldnā€™t think any higher of this team. That being said, other workstreams have really taken the ā€œleaner DAOā€ approach very seriously, often in ways that hasnā€™t been very pleasant and has required us all to reprioritize and hold each other to higher levels of accountability. Iā€™m just not seeing the same sentiment in this proposal.

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Thanks for the really thoughtful post, @Fishbiscuit :raised_hands:

this is a really valid assertion, if we believe we have the right community in our sessions today. I think I am envisioning a shift in who shows up and the content we present. As we shift to a protocol, I could see us shifting these space to be more focused on helping people understand why the protocol exists, how to use it fund shared needs and encouraging people to get started, experiment with the funding mechanisms, etc.

grantee engagement is a subset of who matters in the protocol world (ie, we need high quality grantees, but we also need ecosystems who care deeply about funding their shared needs, and to explore what those shared needs might be).

I am less certain we are targeting the right community on these calls (just grantees?) and that we are not aiming our sights high enough (not just grantees).

This seems slightly askewā€¦ though Devcon may have many potential grantees, a single event as the culmination of activity doesnā€™t seem aligned. Is there work planned to build this community outside of DevCon too? Our Grantees likely need more tools on platform, more info in docs and more guidance during a round - none of which are handled via support at an event.

This is helpful, but also seems to be silod. I know the DAO Ops group is working to improve our documentation and knowledge base. Are you proposing working with them to improve the experience for Grantees there?

my .02 weiā€¦ The Devcon thing seems like a waste. We already have an event planned (Schelling Point), it feels silly to really budget anything extra (time or energy) to engage grantees there.

ā€“

This has been such a huge strength to the DAO over the last year. And this is exactly why I feel being more ambitious and focused on the protocol would continue to attract the next wave of contributors with the mindset and skillset to be successful here. As we move from impact DAO to protocol DAO, increasing our technical capabilities within our community would be a boon to our creativity and success.

ā€“

He and I disagree on the value of doing this. I will hodl that debate for another convo, but I do want to note I appreciate the thoughtfulness in slowing these down as we evaluate our own sustainability.

This is really helpful context and I appreciate you sharing. We often grow the most when we can admit and recognize where we have made mistakes.

I really do appreciate the dialog. I am really torn on how to vote for this season. Given the added accountability I am inclined to vote yes, but the Grassroots work still seems aimed a bit offā€¦ I am interested in continuing to learn more though.

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Thanks everyone for your thoughtful feedback, questions, and statements here. Iā€™m very grateful youā€™ve all taken the time to provide such thoughtful feedback.

I think that generally, to your most recent concerns Kyle around Grassroots being a bit off, I believe that S15 is in a critical period of transition for Grassroots.

Historically, Grassroots has been focused on creating extremely high-quality and rich community experiences through our Library and Twitter Spaces. These spaces are consistently well attended, and those who attend meaningfully and authentically participate. Our Library calls are run like intimate reading groups made up by a group of best-friends (thanks to @linht.tran and Madison), and our Twitter Spaces are run like exceptionally well-crafted podcast episodes (thanks to @lanitrock and Vermeer).

Iā€™d consider our grassroots efforts in PGF to be a huge success, I think our key two faults up until this point have been:

  • Not collaborating super closely with other workstreams
  • And not doing the best job telling our stories or re-purposing content

I agree with Saf that in the past we havenā€™t collaborated closely with other workstreamā€™s in our efforts. But to defend Grassroots a bit, up until S14 DAO Ops and MMM werenā€™t principally focused on Community Efforts.

Given the other workstreams new interest in supporting community, Iā€™m confident that Grassroots will collaborate closer with MMM and DAO Ops in S15 and beyond. The Grassroots team is highly motivated to align our efforts across the DAO. Over the past few weeks, weā€™ve begun aligning efforts with DAO Ops (by opening up our Library sessions to all Gitcoin Citizens) and with MMM (by continuing to explore how Twitter spaces can be leveraged to ā€˜spread the good wordā€™ about grant rounds and help onboard grantees).

As Joe said,

I couldnā€™t agree more here. I find it a bit odd that folks generally feel very dismissive of the success Grassroots has had building community over the past year. Many folks seem to be over-indexing on the novel DAO Citizen initiatives, and MMMā€™s increased desire to focus on community as well.

While we begin shifting our focus as a DAO to the protocol, Iā€™d argue that Grassroots community efforts will becoming increasingly critical to our success. As we begin to help other communities fund their shared needs, we might begin considering the shared needs of our own community. I believe that Grassroots is in the best position to lead this charge, and I believe that Grassroots is in the best position to figure out how we might, as @kyle wrote here, ā€œfocus on helping the world understand why the Grants protocol is such a game changer.ā€

That being said, I think Grassroots will look substantially different during S16, and I think in order to get there, Grassroots will spend S15 transitioning our efforts and aligning ourselves with the DAO.

To address your concern around compensation, @safder, Grassroots has a degree excellence Iā€™m quite proud of. $100k/season is a healthy amount of funding, but as @Fishbiscuit wrote,

In response to @CoachJonathanā€™s budget concerns, QZ also succinctly said, ā€œYour intuition is right. It does take a lot of hours to run a good community.ā€ Despite the expense of funding Grassroots during S15, Iā€™m confident that we can ā€˜stretch our tokensā€™ to the fullest extent possible and produce immensely positive externalities through Grassroots community endeavors during S15. Weā€™ll produce these positive externalities in the service of both the program and the protocol, and weā€™ll, as Iā€™ve mentioned, align ourselves with other workstreams.

All in all, it has been a bit frustrating to see everyone pushing back on Grassroots. Community is not a means to push forward protocol adoption or increase impressions on social media, community is the bedrock of trust and care within the Gitcoin ecosystem. As we shift our focus to other communities funding their shared needs, and I do think its critical that our community efforts remain well funded in this DAO.

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Loved the robust conversation that happened here. Iā€™m voting yes to this budget request because I think PGF continues to drive some of our most strategic partnerships in the ecosystem with consistent success in our grants rounds.

With that said, I am looking forward to seeing cross-stream partnership on a DAO wide community engagement strategy. I think PGF is uniquely positioned to make this initiative a success, and I would love to hear a stronger commitment to working with DAO Ops and MMM on that initiative.

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Just want to add here that the pushback is not on community efforts - in fact you could argue that the DAO is leaning more towards community this season with at least three workstreams having very clear community-based objectives instead of just one. The concern is more the amount of money that is being spent on this specific effort, and the hope is that through more cross-stream collaboration and a better distributed community focus, we can achieve many of these same goals with a much smaller drain on our treasury.

Another thing I want to add: I feel the $216k number for past Grassroots budgets isnā€™t a very good one to anchor to. I wasnā€™t involved in discussing previous budgets, but I have no idea how we were spending that much on Library calls and Twitter Spaces before and how it was justified (unless there were also other activities that got discontinued/Iā€™m not aware of).

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Really appreciate this clarification, Saf. I definitely agree, and see S15 as an opportunity for the three workstreams with community-based objectives to align efforts, eliminate redundancies, and ideally reduce costs substantially, during S16 and onwards.

Regarding the second concern, the first PGF budget passed on Snapshot on August 6th, 2021. The first proposal was for 45k $GTC. On August 6th, the price of $GTC was roughly $9 USD (so the rough $USD value of 45k GTC was $405,000). You can find a detailed breakdown of the first proposal here. TLDR ā€œGrassroots Effortsā€ was just one of four key objectives.

I agree it isnā€™t too helpful, generally, to compare anything we are doing now to what we are doing over a year ago. But it is a helpful practice, I find, to look at the beginning when we are considering the end.

The first objective for Grassroots efforts from July 2021 was to ā€œincrease collaboration between community members and level up new participants and increase matching pool donations.ā€ I believe Grassroots (and PGF) has done an exceptional job staying true to this original objective.

The Library, also, to my knowledge emerged from this initiative where there was a request for proposals on ā€œSeeking a New Kind of Public Goodā€.

PGF, like all workstreams at Gitcoin, has continued to adapt since July 2021. Iā€™m excited for Grassroots to especially adapt to the protocol development, and continue building community in very close collaboration with DAO Ops and MMM during S15.

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