[S15 Proposal - INTEGRATED] PGF Budget Request

[safder]

I share some similar concerns to what others have raised about the amount of money that’s being spent here. I won’t cover partnerships as that’s outside my domain of expertise/I don’t have a good intuitive sense of how much “should” be spent on these activities, but feel like it’s fair for me to raise these with Grassroots spending.

Let me start by saying I really appreciate the work PGF Grassroots does - I’ve really enjoyed the Library sessions and Twitter Spaces that I’ve been able to attend, and I think they’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 I’m still not convinced that we need this much time and resources. I also don’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 “8” and “12” numbers and why are they different? I’m assuming this is to be read as 4h per month * 8 (what’s this?) * 40USD/hr (contributor salary). Is this consistent throughout the document?

• I feel like there’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? Shouldn’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 isn’t clear what the Lead’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 aren’t the 6+ other contributors being empowered to take on some of these responsibilities?
• There’s $25k dedicated to experimental grantee engagement which hasn’t been tested, adds yet another channel for communication with grantees (adds to level of overwhelm), and doesn’t seem to have been planned with any consultation with DAO Ops or MMM community building efforts - why couldn’t this be completed with the current DAO Citizens strategy being planned at DAO Ops? Which leads me to my next area of concern.

2. 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 doesn’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 I’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 couldn’t think any higher of this team. That being said, other workstreams have really taken the “leaner DAO” approach very seriously, often in ways that hasn’t been very pleasant and has required us all to reprioritize and hold each other to higher levels of accountability. I’m just not seeing the same sentiment in this proposal.

[kyle]

Thanks for the really thoughtful post, @Fishbiscuit

@Fishbiscuit

one can’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.

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).

@Fishbiscuit

at Devcon to achieve this.

This seems slightly askew… though Devcon may have many potential grantees, a single event as the culmination of activity doesn’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.

@Fishbiscuit

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.

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 wei… 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.

–

@Fishbiscuit

have all gone on to become valuable contributors to the DAO.

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.

–

@azeem

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.

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.

@azeem

I don’t think our focus has been too spread, but I do agree that we historically haven’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.

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 off… I am interested in continuing to learn more though.

[Maxwell]

Thanks everyone for your thoughtful feedback, questions, and statements here. I’m very grateful you’ve all taken the time to provide such thoughtful feedback.

@kyle

Given the added accountability I am inclined to vote yes, but the Grassroots work still seems aimed a bit off… I am interested in continuing to learn more though.

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).

I’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

@safder

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

I agree with Saf that in the past we haven’t collaborated closely with other workstream’s in our efforts. But to defend Grassroots a bit, up until S14 DAO Ops and MMM weren’t principally focused on Community Efforts.

Given the other workstreams new interest in supporting community, I’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, we’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 ‘spread the good word’ about grant rounds and help onboard grantees).

As Joe said,

@DisruptionJoe

I’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.

I couldn’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 MMM’s increased desire to focus on community as well.

While we begin shifting our focus as a DAO to the protocol, I’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, “focus on helping the world understand why the Grants protocol is such a game changer.”

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 I’m quite proud of. $100k/season is a healthy amount of funding, but as @Fishbiscuit wrote,

@Fishbiscuit

We’ve gone from 210k to 96k while starting a pivot towards grantee engagement. In fact, every season we’ve had to reorient our community efforts to galvanise our community towards more pressing issues.

In response to @CoachJonathan’s budget concerns, QZ also succinctly said, “Your intuition is right. It does take a lot of hours to run a good community.” Despite the expense of funding Grassroots during S15, I’m confident that we can ‘stretch our tokens’ to the fullest extent possible and produce immensely positive externalities through Grassroots community endeavors during S15. We’ll produce these positive externalities in the service of both the program and the protocol, and we’ll, as I’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.

[Jodi_GitcoinDAO]

Loved the robust conversation that happened here. I’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.

[safder]

@Maxwell

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.

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 isn’t a very good one to anchor to. I wasn’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/I’m not aware of).

[Maxwell]

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 “Grassroots Efforts” was just one of four key objectives.

I agree it isn’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 “increase collaboration between community members and level up new participants and increase matching pool donations.” 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 “Seeking a New Kind of Public Good”.

@Jodi_GitcoinDAO

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.

PGF, like all workstreams at Gitcoin, has continued to adapt since July 2021. I’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.

[Fishbiscuit]

Thank you for your support @Jodi_GitcoinDAO some initial conversations on a community strategy are starting to take root now that MMM has a lead for it - and coincidentally its Gary Sheng who was one of our first partners that came through the library (introduced by @ceresstation) and has eventually become a great source of value-aligned talent through DreamDAO.

[lthrift]

@kyle

I really do appreciate the dialog. I am really torn on how to vote for this season.

I’m a bit late to this conversation but very much echo Kyle’s sentiment here and the other concerns that were shared around the overall size of the PGF budget.

There’s been great dialogue regarding making collaboration across Grassroots, MMM, and DAOops happen around community engagement. This seems like a very positive direction to be moving in.

The partnerships budget is the one that I struggle the most with and where the dialogue is still lacking in building my confidence at this point.

I don’t think our focus has been too spread, but I do agree that we historically haven’t done the best job of tracking goals and accountabilities.

I shared this exact feedback during the CSDO review session and it was largely shrugged off. My experience on high performing sales teams is that they are run with extreme transparency and very clear accountability around pipelines and targets. I’m supportive of paying commiserate with performance and thus far we continue to see a lack of ability to really measure performance. Paying on a promise to deliver in future seasons and as market conditions improve does not seem like a prudent use of DAO treasury.

I believe, at a minimum, I would need to see a plan for how the partnerships team will be tracking performance and progress in a more transparent and accountable manner to be able to support this budget request as currently proposed.

[azeem]

Hey Lindsey, very much so actually appreciate and agree with the sentiment around transparency with sales teams. It’s been extremely recent that we’ve incorporated Hubspot into the sales process, which was brought on with the particular focuses of better documentation, transparency, and repeatability around what we’re doing.

With that said, I’d love to offer anyone who’s interested a read only access to our Hubspot CRM. From tracking partners, notes, meeting logs, and emails sent, I do believe it’s a sound approach to the accountability you mentioned.

[nategosselin]

As a first-time steward, I appreciate the level of sophistication in this dialogue. I intend to vote yes on this proposal given the importance of PGF to our overall mission, but I agree with the sentiments about the overall size of the budget and would also like to see more transparency into the goals in future budgets. I’m very willing to help collaborate on that in S15 as well.

[lthrift]

Hubspot will certainly provide the tooling to support a growth plan for the partnerships team. Do you have more details on the targets you’ll be tracking or how you will operationalize this accountability?

[krrisis]

Really happy to see the thorough conversation here.

I share the concern mentioned by a few about the overall size of the budget, +/- double the budget of all workstreams (except for GPC, our product workstream). I think it makes sense that this is a higher budget, as you focus on partnership, but agree with what lindsey posted: clear tracking of partnerships team performance might be a good metric to have in there - and it seems this might still need to be tweaked a bit in this current proposaL

I personally don’t think the community/grassroots efforts need to be reduced, but I still am missing more documentation and learnings being shared from the library calls and twitter spaces, especially because the audience of the latter is so limited, and the team facilitating these efforts is pretty sizeable. It’s great to hear that this will now also be opened up to DAO Citizens and looking forward to a deep collab between Saf (DAO Ops), Maxwell and Gary (MMM) on all things Community.

I appreciate the reduction in budget since the previous season, but I haven’t dug deep enough in the proposal myself to confidently vote Yes on this given the total budget size and some concerns, so will go for the Abstain option for the time being.

[abitrolly]

Decided to read what it is all about. Would appreciate some links in the request for onboarding ppls like me.

@annika

In S15, PGF has components

PGF?

@annika

Sustain and grow the Public Library community

Public Library?

@Fishbiscuit

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

This Google doc is not public.

[krrisis]

@abitrolly

Would appreciate some links in the request for onboarding ppls like me.

Heyhey, welcome. You can find all about our workstreams on gitcoindao.com - there you’ll find also links to onboard into our community.

For the questions you asked:

PGF = Public Goods Funding, one of our main workstreams.

Public Library = More here

Easiest way to discover more is via gitcoindao.com and/or joining our discord and applying to become a gitcoin citizen.

@abitrolly

This Google doc is not public.

Maybe this was changed in the meantime but it actually is public.

Hope this helps!

[renegaderegen]

Looks great - thanks for all your work on this Annika + Janine

[kyle]

Thanks @Maxwell for the reply and thoughts. I love to hear that so many in the workstream understand and see value in the slight pivot in a few areas.

I will be voting Yes to budget in good faith that we can make the changes discussed:

• Specifically confirming Grassroots is oriented around the highest leverage community engagement work
• The Sales team is developing more accountability on performance, and thinking about recurring sponsorships
• Grants Ops is continuing to scale and think longer term protocol approach (more permissionless, more runbooks, more approachable)

Here is what I added to my Voter’s Guide for a bit more details:

I am voting Yes on this budget, but it comes after a lot of dialog with PGF and the commitment to revise some of where teams are focused (over the next few months). More specifically, Grassroots has done a really strong job of bringing Public Goods into the web3 spotlight over the last year, and I would love to see them focused more on the Grants Protocol messaging now - advocating for why permissionless giving protocols are so important and how Gitcoin fits into the space as a result. Grantees are one of five constituents we likely care about. Donors, Matching Funders, GTC Token holders, our DAO/Community are the other four. Finding a narrative that speaks to the collection of constituents, and that also dovetails nicely with work MMM and DAO Ops are doing is a large opportunity (and I know other workstreams are working to advance as well).

I want to make sure the workstream can still take some risks in exploring better BD habits, and that they can fully adopt HubSpot. I would love to see more recurring Grants rounds from folks, and Aqueducts was one way of doing this. Once the protocol is live, it may offer a more tangible way for folks to grok who the Aqueduct can be used to fund their ecosystem.

[abitrolly]

@krrisis

PGF = Public Goods Funding, one of our main workstreams.

Thanks. Figured that out eventually. I’ve meant the report template could be updated to include the tooltip, if the same reporting format will be used in the future.

@krrisis

Public Library = More here

This was tough to grasp without the explanation. In my area libraries are usually silent spaces with books, where speaking is discouraged. So I didn’t expect it to be a discord channel. My best bet was that it is an list of public goods like Registry - Digital Public Goods Alliance

But yea, if there is an initiative to record opinions, then I have a point to say about protecting digital things in public domain. Which status lawyers say is not clarified. And there is also no activity from them to clarify it. Also initiatives like SPDX are effectively erasing public domain and forcing to replace it with licenses. My guess why is this happening is that opting out from copyright is not being paid as well as protecting the copyright. And I guess people spend big lumps of money to get education in copyright protection. I think decentralized approach can fix that.

[epowell101]

Agreed. I asked about funnel, cycle time, etc. fwiw and didn’t see a response other than that it does not make sense to measure activity alone - which is fair unless you can see activities tied to future outcomes.

We might actually be underinvesting in partnerships & grassroots & PGF altogether; i.e. we may have high return efforts that are not well measured yet that are going to be comparatively starved because of this lack of measurement. Anyway - more data & as you said a plan for operationalizing the accountability.

[Fishbiscuit]

Thank you @Kyle for your support! This means a lot to the team and we’ve been working hard to understand these concerns and the future of Gitcoin as a protocol. Therefore, I will commit to ensuring that the Grassroots team will have a more holistic view on community engagement and to orient around the highest leverage we can as @jodi and @Lindsey have advocated for too. This might also mean that we might have to rearrange the team and transition members around or out of the DAO. We’d definitely rather have these conversations earlier than later.

[azeem]

Yeah, Hubspot has been an amazing tool thus far. Getting everyone accustomed to using it, adding in past data, figuring out how to set up dashboard, and so on is an ongoing thing we’re doing at the moment.

In terms of targets, we’ve outlined what it is we are looking to do in the budget above, and in terms of operationalizing it, the fundraising team as a whole are all tasked with making sure everything we do is going into the Hubspot.

That way we’ll be able to assess things after the round looking back, and is also why I’d reiterate that anyone who wants read only access is more than welcome to have it.