The S15 Budget can be found here. The tl;dr is that S15 total request (no reserve) was $983,429 and S16 is now $1,100,689. A difference of $117k. S16 now also includes Saas costs that the foundation was absorbing ($90k for the season), the MC team and the loss of a couple of folks.
The short answer is yes that we will be slowing down the Moonshotty type experiments while we focus on our Essential Intents for a couple of seasons. We might still hire out some of this work via the foundation (ie, the governor contract upgrade, the Grants Protocol launch experience, etc.) but we have not made any final plans yet.
I wuold love to defer to @GTChase on this one Overall, we wanted to ensure we defined the outcomes we cared about without being overly prescriptive in how we accomplished them.
This is a fair call out, the TLDR is we want our software development focused on driving specific outcomes for our users, rather then focusing on solutions. Our roadmaps actually take this a bit further and lays out the opportunities we want to experiment against in order to meet the desired outcome.
So in different words for this budget, the outcome is what we would like to accomplish and the oppurtunties are the âHowâ we will potentially accomplish the outcome.
Attached is a visualization to show how we have broken down our outcomes into opportunities, hopefully this gives you more answers then questions
Lastly, to directly answer your point on the protocol + passport⌠There is actually no integration of Passport and the Grants Protocol, only with the cGrants platform. So, we need to prioritize building that integration and the functionality for Passport to achieve this outcome.
Appreciate your thoughtful feedback, and happy to jam around any other questions or feedback you may have!
Thanks for the thorough answers to questions here and separately. Iâm supportive of this budget based on the outcomes described above and the responses to questions.
As a steward, I had the chance to study the proposal in detail and get individual feedback from @kevin.olsen on my questions in discord. Most of my questions were clarifying for me to understand more about the GPC workstream and I thank the team for their feedback and patience.
Observations when comparing season 15 and 16:
Integration of the MoonShots team - while saying virtually flat on budget on budget. The team could have argued a ~40% budget increase (combination of the MS+GCP budgets) however they go into S16 asking for a 3% increase. Thank you for your stewardship.
How did GPC remain flat? When I asked how this was possible, I learned GPC used higher-cost external resources in S15, but was able to use the external team to build internal processes and resources and thus transition the work to (lower cost) GPC resources. This exemplifies excellent use of external partnerships - get the work done, learn from their expertise, and bring the work in house (where it is a core capability). This approach is worthy of reapplication.
On strategic thinking:
The goals above are excellent starting points. I like how they are lofty yet achievable and how they give us clear time-bound targets of success. Recognizing GPC may need help, it would be great to see other workstreams consider/refine these goals so we might have concise building blocks enabling the DAO to deliver.
In summary - this is a solid plan for Season 16 and plan to vote for it.
And thanks to the GPC team for your leadership and helping me understand your work.
How can we measure this? Also, is it wise to seek majority adoption of Passport considering the importance of plurality in our key technologies? Passport is a plurality enabling solution, but in the spirit of that, should we not allow room for other plurality enabling solutions? Iâm a bit new and missing context so I may just be confused here.
I like this focus. For the people we provide value for, letâs provide TREMENDOUS value for them. Again, how might we measure this? Customer survey?
I think the work thatâs being done here is super dope! Canât wait to see it come into fruition.
I agree with annika in terms of the vagueness of the S16 goals. Is there a way to attach more specific numbers to them? For example, I think it might be unreasonable to think passport can verify the uniqueness of a human with 100% confidence, so what level of confidence should projects using passport have of sybil resistance?
Hey folks meet @chaselb! Chase is one of our newest stewards and and a student at the University of Southern California. Chase has an interesting blog where he mentions conversations with @GlenWeyl, his introduction into the blockchain several years ago and some really interesting thinking.
Welcome chase - glad to have you with us, and thanks for your questions.
Highly supportive of the GPC budget. Iâve read up on the above comments and replies, in the context of the âlightâ budget approach as decided in CSDO and combined with the earlier live session we had to review the draft commitments and budget Iâve gathered enough feedback to vote confidently yes here.
Our goal with Product and Protocol Development has long been to collaborate over compete. We recognize the need for plurality in dApps - we are unsure of the value in fragmenting the ecosystem with multiple protocols. This means, Ideally the plurality of dApps can share a single protocol that many teams develop (not Just Gitcoin).
I appreciate the question and hopefully the nuance in the approach we are seeking helps.
That goal for Passport is intended to deliver the integration of the Grant Explorer with Passport, implied in that is that with a Passport attached to the vote, the Grants protocol has the downstream ability to generate Passport scores and apply them to determine a userâs effect on the quadratic match. The exact approach here is still being designed in collaboration with FDD, and will be an iterative process to deliver higher confidence in our ability to detect sybils.
Youâre right that passport wonât deliver 100%, it cannot be a guarantee of humanness. But this goal is about Passporting being a replacement for the dataset to support the analysis that was previously accomplished via the centralized platform. I would put forward that we should have the ability to deliver at least parity with our levels of sybil detection from GR15, and be in a position to continuously improve this metric.
I love this question. I think the obis.club integration is an example of the type of plurality that weâre seeing already: https://twitter.com/OrbisClub/status/1592185710219448320. And I hope that many builders will find new and interesting ways to pull in the passport data. Simultaneously, we have new options to explore with how we can surface this new unified VC dataset in the Passport and in our scoring mechanisms.
I am supportive of this budget request. I honestly love reading through all the questions and responses to clarify questions. It is very helpful to me as a Steward. Hopefully we will continue to grow engagement here as well. I do believe that Gitcoin Passport adoption most certainly will grow trust and interested of Web3 in general. The North Star! Safely and securely. The cherry on top! Value to projects, growing support for teams, with that anything is possible.
Brand new Steward, lacking context. Apologies if questions and comments are naive while I get my footing
The outline for merging with the Moonshot Collective makes senseâhow many Contributors are being retained and how does the S16 Staffing costs compare to the S15 Staffing costs prior to the addition of new talent? How much money was saved from cutting down on external resources and what types of operations did we move âin-house?â Appears like we are saving $232,500 from S15 contracting but even with losing a few Moonshot Contributors the Staffing budget still feels low?
Does this screenshot below for âTotal Contractingâ represent outsourced labor? Have we already identified with DevRel shop we are contracting with for S16 and if so who are they?
For the 80% goals related to acquisition and usage: is this explicitly a GPC Workstream task or does it overlap with MMM? Unclear if the budget contains acquisition costs to or marketing expenses related to meeting these KPIS.
Otherwise I support the proposal, found it very detailed & informative, and appreciative of the thought that went into it! Still wrapping my head around Passport, but excited to learn more.
Thanks to everyone for all the detailed questions and answers in this thread. Also thanks to @kevin.olsen for a very detailed budget proposal.
I will be voting yes on this one as itâs imo probably the most important workstream of the DAO.
Some feedback which probably already got echoed in some form or another.
Try to set a bit more concrete goals for the next quarter
Try to cut down expenses a bit. The bear has gotten worse since the last season where we discussed this and with no clear light at the end of the tunnel. We need to think of the DAOâs sustainability.
This is was a total savings of about $275k for the season, and then also we added about $225k for the Moonshot folks
We actually donât have budget for DevRel allocated. This is to show a $0 line item, but we may help with this cost in future seasons.
Yeah, great question. As a product team we decided to âthrow our sword in the groundâ on this metric, knowing it was a 1-2 year goal. We are working to collaborate and roll this out with others in the DAO throughout this season. Timing was awkward with budgets.
Thanks for the review and I appreciate the questions!
This snapshot passed with ~76% approval rate. To note, 23% of voters abstained from voting. Some percentage of these âabstainâ votes are caused by larger holders who are directly compensated by the GPC workstream and thus abstain from voting to avoid a conflict of interest. Metrics:
795 unique votes
~9.1M GTC tokens cast.
And thank you to all the commenters & voters who took the time to participate in Gitcoin Governance. https://snapshot.org/#/gitcoindao.eth/proposal/0x974724227df2dcd1659379651886364eee441c24ff96ed0e0b2ee6395712408d
Overall, we wanted to ensure we defined the outcomes we cared about without being overly prescriptive in how we accomplished them.
