Thanks for the detailed review of S15 and what youâve got planned for S16!
Passport efforts seem to be very lightly referenced in this request aside from denoting a contributor being hired specifically to support Passport. Could you provide some more color to what the goals are for Passport product marketing in S16?
I am supportive of this budget, and have been so excited for the work MMM is doing. It feels like so much of our marketing, our protocol understanding and our community engagement is starting to take shape.
Having Schelling Point this season (which was outside of this budget as @Pop lead this work) always brings such great energy, marketing and excitement. I am really pumped to see that there may be more collaboration between the SP team, and the MMM team as well.
I want to summarize some of my understanding for the work ahead - this is the first season we will be really building and marketing three distinct protocols, at the same time we are transitioning our grants program from cGrants to Protocol (which reduces the marketing burden of ârunning a roundâ but increases the burden in our general website, and brand positioning and understanding). Does that seem accurate?
Overall, I really appreciate the thoughtful approach, growing the budget and team in a way that is still manageable and prudent, and then also scoping projects with clear deliverables.
Thanks for sharing â and great list of S15 wins. A lot to celebrate! I want to specifically echo the cross-workstream partnerships & clearer lines of communications between different workstreams â that was such a huge shift in S15 that will set the DAO up so much better heading into protocol launch, kudos to MMM for leading much of that DAO-wide.
Overall I echo othersâ sentiments that the proposal is solid and the magnitude & increase of budget is reasonable, given the net new areas MMM is absorbing this season.
Just one point of feedback on the proposal â the âtop prioritiesâ listed in the TL;DR donât quite map to the S16 goals⌠I found myself a little disoriented flipping back & forth and trying to reconcile them (e.g., the first bullet in the TL;DR talks about GR16 communications as a focus, whereas under goals the point around âProgramâ minimizes the effort of that area). I appreciate the clear âprotocol/programâ even/over articulation, but when I look at the objectives under programs, there is a LOT still there. No specific question â just sharing those observations for the teamâs consideration.
Hi Laura and Jonathan -
Thank you for your patience with me. I thought unpacking the areas of potential quantifiable progress were particularly valuable; I also learned quite a bit about our approaches to DevRel and about the overall operating context of building MMM while shifting our focus as a DAO. Thank you for taking the time to educate me and other Stewards.
On the whole - at the risk of being a lonely voice in the wilderness - I think we should consider whether the DAO is leaning forward too aggressively given unavoidable risks.
Hey everyone, I appreciate all the feedback that has been provided and have updated our budget accordingly.
We have gone ahead and added several items to reflect our increased commitment to seeing Passport expand in S16, including:
I would say this is mostly accurate. We are still finalizing some details but TL;DR related to what you highlighted:
This is a great point. Iâve gone ahead and re-organized the priorities to put Protocols even/over the Grants program. Our more external facing activities will be quite focused on the Grants Program in S16, though lots of work will be done in the background to prepare for awareness building of the protocols.
Thank you for asking questions and challenging our thought process! I speak for both myself and my co-lead @Viriya - we are 100% dedicated to Gitcoinâs success and are completely uninterested in being right about how we get there. Our #1 focus is to serve the DAO. Questions and challenges help us ensure that we are taking the right approach to getting to where we all want to go.
I am in support of this budget proposal. Upon reviewing all the accomplishments from Season 15 and looking ahead to all the great things planned for Season 16 really excited to see all the new developments.
How has the peer performance review process been going so far from Season to Season and how has it affected the MMM work stream team overall? Especially in terms of planning for future successes.
Great question, Sabrina.
S14 was the first time we ran them. I think they only went OK - there was a major focus on showing each other appreciation vs. creating a culture of high performance. I think this is because our culture at the time wasnât as open to receiving that kind of feedback.
In this past season (S15) we ran a session with less of a focus on appreciation (which we have a ritual of doing each week at our Weekly Sync) and more on creating commitments to high performance. Not only was the feedback given/received by everyone more impactful, our group session gave everyone the opportunity to share learnings and insights from their feedback and to create public commitments about what they are going to strive for next season.
The main gap I see from last season that we will look to rectify this season is creating clear accountability around those commitments (by writing them down somewhere and tracking how they performed against those commitments).
If you (or anyone else) have ideas on running effective peer/performance reviews, please post them below or send me a DM in Discord (CoachJ#0481) - would love to learn how to improve our process!
This is great. Yes def! We are in the midst of reviews as well right now. I will get something over to you in the coming days on discord.
Thank you for this detailed budget! Itâs great to see progress made since S15 and learn more about the direction MMM is headed in. I was curious about organizing it by headcount (a question I know was brought up in one of the most recent MMM meetings), but outside of the overall organizing structure, I think think the allotments suggested make sense. Iâm in support!
I am supportive of this budget, the sheer volume of work MMM has underway is inspiring and the recent âtakeoverâ of the weekly stand up indicated to me there is plenty of substance being developed. In a prior life I worked for what was essentially a marketing company and the rigor I see starting to be developed reverberates with brand building frameworks I am used to, but at a much price point and eons faster.
Via back and forth in Discord, MMM has helped me understand their work and budget. As we move into and past season 16, I will be looking for these things:
Highly supportive of the MMM 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.
Since I joined a year and smth ago I have closely watched the evolution of the MMM workstream. It has evolved from a kinda centralized action based team to a more decentralized one(imo).
Just the talent pool, dedication and impact of this workstream should be enough to justify the budget. The workflow, efficiency, inclusiveness and the crucial role that it plays in the future of DAO, the protocol and the impact it has on the future of PG makes this a clear YES(small GTC hodler though, others may disagree).
I donât want this to sound weird and idk if anyone remembers because I talk a lot 
⌠but last year I actually mentioned the issue around merch and web3 during a Gathering Hour. Ironically that in web3 everybody has a regen mission, but the clothing they sell is kinda the exact opposite. As a fashion lover, newbish fashion illustration designer and friend of a fashion founder I am delighted that Gitcoinâs merch will be regen, sustainable and adapted to the mission of the brand.
Extremely happy to see that this is at long last a priority 
PS. Would love to help out in this area as @CoachJonathan probly already knows
To note - This proposal is now live on Snapshot and will be open for your vote through Nov 23, 2022, 6:00 PM EST
While I do appreciate all the work this workstream has been putting I canât agree with the budget request.
I echo what @epowell101 says and can promise him he is not alone in his thinking.
We are going through one of the most aggressive bear markets with the whole crypto sentiment being as negative as it can be. At the same time the macro outlook of the global economy is also terrible which points us to really hard times ahead.
This DAO spends like nothing is happening. I firmly believe there should be aggressive reduction in expenses and the MMM workstream seems to me like a good to have, but not essential to the operation of Gitcoin. As such I am voting No.
I agree with lefteris, MMM does great work, that said, IMO, we need to make cuts and the only way the stewards can signal it is by voting no.
I am going to vote no on all work streams until we get our spending under control. This is the only thing I can do, and I hope other Stewards will follow suit. We have given strong warnings over the last few seasons and they donât seem to be working.
We cannot spend this much money in this market.
I am happy to work with the Gitcoin Hiring team to explain how Giveth finds intrinsically motivated high caliber contributors in lower income countries to keep our budget at 1/10th of the cost.
I appreciate these perspectives and I really look forward to having the Steward Council active so that folks can help advise on where/how they would like to see cuts.
So much of what MMM does has far reaching impact, and we are still working to evolve as the Protocols come online. As I look what the team is doing, there is maybe 20% of it I could see us punting on (for 3-6mos) but it would put us behind (IMO).
Startups hit a trough of spending right before they break out of the atmosphere. In our case, our ambition is to launch the protocols and really work to make sure those are impactful for communities who want to build on them. I am not sure that meaningful cuts would allow for us to have that impact. but, I am certainly in the forest and may be having a hard time seeing through the trees.
I think it is worth connecting directly with Griffith to learn more about how Giveth is run.
How is it that Giveth has launched a half dozen protocols on 10x less budget than Gitcoin has? See Griffithâs comment below.
Brand new Steward, lacking context. Apologies if questions and comments are naive while I get my footing
MMM has been the work stream I have followed most closely since engaging with Gitcoinâand also where I have the most friends in the organizationâso I know they have been doing great work. However, it is a bit shocking to see an increased budget request for marketing during current market conditions. In fact, Gitcoin is the ONLY non-institutional organization I have spoken to in the last 6 months that plans to increase their marketing budget, which is usually the first to be cut in circumstances like these.
Granted, with the rollout of the protocols there is a necessity for making people aware and driving user acquisitionâI just wonder if there is a better cadence or sequence of events that would allow for product development to proceed while MMM âHODLsâ until conditions improve. I noticed a lot of S15 goals were not hit due to âgrants protocols werenât mature enoughâ which signals to me that there is misalignment on roadmap & timeline between work streams. Similarly, MMMâs task of protocol adoption will be significantly more challenging in the current market. It is a bit relieving to hear that you are pulling back on metric-driven goals related to adoption until the protocols have matured, but I would still encourage the team to set any relevant KPIs around the research & strategy objectives under the âProtocolâ and âCommunityâ pillars. Further, despite very similar budget requests for Protocol & Community (~159k each), it would appear that Community has a much lighter lift of tasks. A further breakdown or KPIs would help explain this.
Despite these concerns, I know the work that MMM does is essential and that their contributors are hardworking & well-intentioned. This proposal is well thought out and thorough, but arrived at a time when there seems to be a wider ongoing debate on the DAOâs spending. From reviewing all 5 of the recent budget proposals, my gut tells me that there is a lot of money, time, and energy to be saved with better effort on Cross-DAO-Coordination efforts. Duplicated efforts and misaligned roadmaps/timing often results in a lot of waste! Looking forward to following the discussions on this moving forward.
This snapshot vote has passed with ~90% approval rate.
Metrics:
943 unique votes
~10.5M GTC tokens cast.
And thank you to all the commenters & voters who took the time to participate in Gitcoin Governance. - you folks are all awesome
https://snapshot.org/#/gitcoindao.eth/proposal/0x35010aec1b8a754dc250ac714c6b3c7337663d1d82a601537eb72f3afee99249
the whitepaper is also very clear, I hope your project can be successful and successful in the future, I also hope the community can grow even bigger than.
