[S17 Proposal] INTEGRATED FDD Budget Request

📜 Proposals
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Is this channel only open to contributors?

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Just catching up on things here, but want to share several reactions.

As a steward, I am primarily focused on the question: “is this budget proposal a good use of DAO resources”.

I have not been concerned with the question “where will the funding coming from”. To me, that feels like more of an implementation detail. It was my impression (perhaps incorrectly) that funding could be moved around across different multisigs if it needed to be.

Coming to @chaselb’s two questions:

1. What is the Workstream-GitcoinDAO relationship and expectation?

I have viewed each workstream as a pod within the DAO that’s granted a multisig and the autonomy to figure out how best to get things done. I have not viewed workstreams as service providers to the DAO. Personally, I don’t like the idea of each workstream having its own P&L or the ability to accumulate a surplus that is then controlled by … who? the workstream lead? current contributors?

This could also create an incentive for workstreams to overestimate what they request from the treasury so they can build up their own reserves. That does not feel like something we should be messing with at a time when neither the DAO nor any of its workstreams has a revenue model.

Others may feel differently about this issue and I respect that.

2. What constitutes grounds for a revote?

We should revote if we feel we were not given an accurate picture of what’s at stake in the original proposal. Proposal-generation and Snapshot voting are social coordination mechanisms. I don’t see a reason to be rigid on this issue, but if revotes start happening regularly, it will definitely erode confidence in the DAO.

Judging from the comments here, a number of people appear in favor of a revote.

Personally, I’m in favor of a revote because the $123K treasury request was presented as a requirement to meet the S17 budget of $340K. Had I known that the workstream already had $445K and was therefore projected to dissolve in three months with a net balance $228K [$445 + $123 - $340], then I would have voted differently.

Finally, let’s not conflate the issues. It’s important to articulate the intended financial relationship between workstreams and the DAO. It’s also important to determine if / when a revote is on the table.

To Shawn’s question:

We revote. Regardless of the explanation for why the information was presented a certain way the first time. And we vow to do better so it hopefully doesn’t happen again.

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Let’s Revote

First, I am seeing broader sentiment that requests the revote. I’m quite disappointed that there isn’t more enthusiasm around finding a legitimate way to determine if a revote will happen. We have an opportunity to find a more legitimate solution - a solution EVERY ALLO PROGRAM MANGER NEEDS.

We could direct power for revote to the steward council. For example, a Snapshot vote with the following options:

  1. Revote
  2. Have steward council decide if a revote should happen and set precedent for how revotes are made legitimate
  3. Keep the results of the first vote

I believe that either 1 or 2 would end up with the same results for this budget, however, 2 would be the better decision for the DAO.

Clarifications

Regarding my Intent to deceive

This felt misleading to me. I had a specific one on one session with @kyle in December where we discussed that FDD has these funds AND that we were applying for an Aave grant. I suggested we should think about the Governance issues that would come up when we dissolved FDD. At the time, we both thought it wouldn’t happen this soon, but it was explicitly discussed.

Additionally, I did bring this up at a recent Stewards call and a Steward Council call. Yes, I didn’t put this as material info on the budget request, however, no other workstream puts that info on their budgets nor is there an established norm across most DAOs. In fact, the norm is that everyone knows the info is public and proposers never put up how much they are currently holding.

Is this implying that I have been lying by omission? I don’t know why you don’t know about them.
I have spoken about them at both CSDO and steward meetings in the past. Not only have I brought it up, I’ve called it out as a potential issue and that we should be prepared.

As I understand, the budget request was only presented as a request for the DAO to fully fund our Season 17.

If one believes that the DAO should control how the $228k in gray funds (That wouldn’t have existed) are spent, then it is reasonable for them to think we should have reported them.

If you believe those funds should be autonomously spent by the workstream (In line with the workstream’s mandate), then you might not consider it as relevant to a seasonal budget request.

Whichever of these opinions are right is up to the DAO. Hopefully, this helps clarify that this wasn’t a deceitful thing to do on our part.

I’m also quite surprised you didn’t have previous knowledge that FDD had these funds. We do speak pretty freely about them in FDD and always have!

Legitimacy of workstream autonomy

In August 2021, I put up the first FDD proposal. It involved personal risk as I left the company and had little clarity on what the future would hold. The message from Gitcoin to the public at the launch of the DAO was that workstreams would be autonomous (DAO of DAOs). I was even told that it was 100% up to me if we incorporated, but they recommended we did. We pushed back, hired legal help, and defined FDD as an unincorporated non-profit association and designed contributor agreements.

We’ve discussed workstream treasury management many times with the CSDO group. It was necessary! I remember @annika asking what she would do if the price of GTC dropped and PGF couldn’t follow through on dollar based commitments to pay contributors. WE WERE EXPECTED TO DO OUR OWN TREASURY MANAGEMENT!

Some of our workstreams had leadership that was hired by Gitcoin Holdings and paid to create proposals and create a workstream. GPC was transferred from the company to the DAO less than a year ago. I understand that many people would view our workstreams as departments in a corporation. I’m not here to say that they are wrong.

I am here to say that it shouldn’t be unreasonable to consider my viewpoint legitimate considering the early risk I took and the experience I had.

If it is a legitimate viewpoint, then our governance should have a process to solve the issue in which those with both viewpoints would consider legitimate - even if the result isn’t in their favor.

Suggestion for next steps

I could post the vote suggested at the top. This might be more legitimate than someone else posting it, but I don’t feel too strongly about that detail.

Mostly, I’d like every Gitcoin Stakeholder to know that we were proud to bring extra value to the DAO. This seems like a great decision to have to make!

If we moved forward without a revote, we were excited to do governance experimentation dogfooding the protocol and/or testing other allocation mechanisms to spend the last of the funds we would have had. Specifically, ideas like a QV round, a JokeRace, or Moloch implementations where the DAO would have ragequit capabilities if it didn’t like the decisions made.

It could help fund things like:

  • Decartography PoC - Using DeSoc collusion dampening
  • BrightID Aura Implementation
  • Open Data Community Sandbox Sponsorship - Another node pinning relevant data from trueblocks
  • Sybil detection legos built using our findings from this last season with Pometry and their Raphorty open source time-series graph database.
  • And many other great ideas!

Rather than push for this vote to go the way I think it should, I’m pushing for it to be handled in the best way possible for the future of the DAO, even if it is against my personal opinion.

I’d love to see people establish the steward council as having the power to call for a revote, followed by voting their fully informed present opinion on the topic.

Perhaps, we could compromise by writing a new GCP for us to do the planned innovation experiments if the DAO were to give us the explicit approval?

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I’m putting my support behind Joe on this one. I both agree with the need to create a governance process for these situations, as well as the argument that FDD has full autonomy and discretion over the funds they acquired outside of GitcoinDAO’s involvement. I do not believe these funds are material information, and I do not believe we should conduct a revote. I DO believe, in the absence of a formal process for deciding whether or not to revote, we should create some temporary mechanism for doing so (such as pushing it to the Steward Council), and then workshop a more thoughtful mechanism for deciding whether or not to revote.

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Thank you Chase and everyone for your insights here.

I’ve been on the sidelines (for once!) in this discussion because I have a clear conflict of interest as I am very active as a founder of the OpenData Community which itself will likely be requesting resources from the DAO in the future and, more importantly, was started with the support and inspiration from FDD and from Joe specifically.

That said - I would just like to state for the record that I think Joe has acted in good faith and that I have been in a number of conversations in which he freely shared that FDD has generated additional funds.

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I would like to start by manifesting deep appreciation for all the people that worked to build Gitcoin into what it is today. I deeply appreciate the work of @kyle @J9leger @DisruptionJoe @connor @kevin.olsen @griff and others… without them Gitcoin would not be what be what it is today and I have so say I can’t wait to see what it evolves into :robot: :evergreen_tree:

I would like to share my honest thought around the “issue” discussed in the last 20 or so comments and hope that by this I can provide additional clarity for those who seek it. At first sight this appears to be a complicated subject because the more far away a Steward/Key decision maker is from the actual “action zone” the more inclined it would be to believe that Joe has omitted the existence of the “gray funds” , but this is a false premise because:

-as a formed team lead in the FDD I have always been informed of the existence of these funds, also every FDD member was aware of the existence of these funds, more so at certain points we were included and informed in all the decision making around them
-I have been in numerous public meetings(with other WS) in which Joe has proudly talked about them and the way that FDD managed to be very wise via good treasury management decision making
-if he didn’t care about the DAO and Gitcoin’s mission so much he wouldn’t have made the effort to protect funds via wise treasury management

I respect that a lot of the Stewards have a limited amount of time(because they are doing valuable work for all of web3) and it’s hard for them to understand what’s actually going on. The past two years have been filled with experimentation for the common-good, decentralization at almost every decision making level and also empowerment with the goal of growing the Gitcoin DAO. As the bull market ended, the macro has changed and it resulted in a relatively accelerated shift toward a more sustainable future for the DAO, it’s is understandable, because ofc the biggest vulnerability a DAO is…surprize…“human nature” :smiley: , but this should not create dissonance between all the great people working towards our collective PG future.

IMO the concrete fair way forward would be to continue to fund the FDD as indented because the information was not hidden and people voted yes to the budget, but unfortunately seeing how the conversation here took place and what the current state of affairs is I am worried that this would lead to dissonance between stewards and this is not the point, so +1 to @chaselb viewpoint:

As in life these challenges appear and can lead to an even stronger DAO, it will be very interesting to see how Gitcoin DAO handles this particular one as it seems to be quite complex and provoking at first :robot:

I also know for a fact that the last 2 years have not been easy for all the Gitcoin WS leads, more so for the ones that always pushed forward and maintained their position as Joe did. I also know for a fact that Joes intentions are always positive towards GitcoinDAO and its future. He is one of the most value aligned persons I’ve met in web3 and worked with in web3. If someone doubts that he can just search DisruptionJoe in Gitcoins Discord and will be amazed by the level of engagement and value addition most of his messages lead 2.

I really hope the situation is handled in the best way possible for all the parties involved, but I would add that a certain level of kudos should be awarded to the FDD leadership, who managed to be one of the WS who protected funds and generated profits via great treasury decision making.

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I’m sad to see FDD go. I enjoyed my brief time working there and am proud of the contributions I was able to make. I regret that I wasn’t able to stick around to finish getting the simulation results from the Agent-Based Model. In the end, I had too many commitments to do them all well.

FDD saved a quantifiable chunk of GitCoin’s funds from sybils (many of whom had developed really smart strategies to game Quadratic Funding). In addition, FDD proactively prevented both new attacks and repeat attacks by people who would have come back. I thank you @DisruptionJoe for being the person who could lead this difficult effort through crucial times. There’s no doubt in my mind that your work and the work of FDD literally saved GitCoin from becoming a scammer’s paradise.

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I am catching up on this conversation and, while it is certainly a challenging & uncomfortable situation, my overarching sentiment is that there is so much to learn from this and a great opportunity for the DAO to really build more clarity & specificity in budget request templates looking ahead.

I am in favour of a revote. I strongly echo @ccerv1 's sentiment:

Personally, I’m in favor of a revote because the $123K treasury request was presented as a requirement to meet the S17 budget of $340K. Had I known that the workstream already had $445K and was therefore projected to dissolve in three months with a net balance $228K [$445 + $123 - $340], then I would have voted differently.

I think getting caught up in the “what constitutes a re-vote?” discourse is unnecessarily distracting. Yes, that is 100% something that should be outlined and agreed-upon in the aftermath of all this, but I think having a huge debate & discussion around that just stifles progress in getting to an outcome here.

To me it’s directionally pretty clear that this is a re-vote situation, and then the re-vote specifics on guidelines/process can be figured out post-mortem.

I also selfishly would love to see a TLDR recap of all this after the fact either in Steward Council or on a monthly steward call – what happened, what we learned, what we’ll change in the future as a result. If resolved effectively, I think this moment might end up being a big milestone we look back on in productively moving forward governance processes.

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I want to request clarification on some key points. Is it correct that:

  1. The existence of the “surplus” FDD funds was made publicly known in a public and recorded Stewards council meeting.
  2. Many Stewards voted on FDD funding without doing due diligence and information-gathering, i.e. attending the meeting or reading the transcript.
  3. An unprecedented revote is being enacted on sentiment analysis of the basis of about ten forum posts, absent any provision in any existing GitCoin governance document.

If these are the facts, then my personal view is that a revote is completely illegitimate and sets a terrible precedent regarding the ability of individuals to simply assert decisions through personal will. It borders on the Tyranny of Structurelessness.

Is there a clear model of the desired information flow in GitCoin governance, and of who bears what responsibility for that flow?

Specifically, what are the official records that Stewards are expected to be familiar with before voting? Are Stewards expected to know what has occurred in meetings relevant to their votes?

I understand that some Stewards have expressed that they have little bandwidth. But, I don’t understand how this is possible: all human beings are equal in the fact that we all have 24 hours of bandwidth per day.

I think ultimately that there need to be clear standards and expectations regarding what constitutes effective disclosure of relevant information, so that we can determine whether a standard of clear information availability has been met.

Additionally, I’m not sure if I have standing to raise points in this discussion, since I sold my all of my GitCoin this week. But, as a DAO and mechanism researcher, I am still interested in the answers to the above questions, and clarity regarding the situation.

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As described above, this case illustrates a gap in our governance processes. Finding such gaps are not uncommon and this will not be the last time we find new challenges to deal with.
Using existing tools, and leaning heavily on Robert’s Rules of Order NR, I built a reconsideration process that can help Gitcoin navigate cases like this.

I do not presume my proposed path is perfect for this and all future circumstances, but it could give us a framework from which to start. I welcome any and all input in on that draft post so that we can find an equitable and non-acrimonious solution to this and future cases.

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Really appreciate your writing this. I appreciate that you posted it on Twitter.

This is more than a single issue. It sets a precedent for the GitCoin DAO. that will likely influence other DAOs in the future.

I would encourage that the discussion be publicized widely, at least within GitCoin DAO. My guess is that relatively few people realize a major governance question is emerging in a forum discussion on a vote that was already settled.

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This is really great work. One suggestion: CSDO doesn’t have any legitimacy in this context. The steward council would serve as a better appellate court because their legitimacy comes from the token holders.

I would like for us to take the time to do this right. The nature of the problem also allows us to take time without immediate financial worries for FDD.

I’d echo Octopus sentiment. Our governance says that a snapshot vote is final. If you look at Uniswap, 100% of their snapshot votes are enacted on Tally. Do we want to be the ones to change this precedent for the ecosystem based on a few posts on the forum rather than a legitimate process? How do we remain leaders in legitimacy after that?

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Hey Joe, thanks for the comment. With everyone I am in touch with regarding this situation, I try to draw a line between this example, and the proposed process to deal with this example. I find doing that places a layer of abstraction between contention and good governance design. This being the case, I moved responses to this to the proposal thread.

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Just want to come back to this (after reading comments) and provide a bit more context regarding my position:

  • I have full confidence in Joe’s integrity, that he has been acting in good faith, and that he is deeply committed to serving Gitcoin DAO and its community. I hope no one see this process as a referendum on one person’s intentions.

  • I have deep respect for the work FDD has provided to the DAO over the years and the impact it has had on Sybil defense (both practically, by preventing attacks during rounds, and through its thought leadership / experimentation) and in the data community. I also hope no one sees this as a referendum on the value or legitimacy of FDD’s work.

  • It is normal for organizations to refactor / reorg. Given the market conditions PLUS the fact that the DAO is transitioning from cGrants to a protocol stack, it makes sense to examine the role of “service” workstreams like FDD and question whether the current structure is optimal. As a Steward looking in, my impression is that this could have been communicated / executed better. However, since learning of the plan to dissolve FDD after S17, my position has been to advocate for an orderly and full season-long transition.

  • I don’t have a strong opinion (yet) on whether workstreams should have “gray funds” or what happens to those funds in the event of a workstream dissolving. It appears the DAO is divided on this issue. As Joe and others have said, this should be clarified and made more explicit. That work feels urgent. But I wouldn’t make a decision and then try to apply it retroactively to FDD’s case. From my perspective, FDD can do what it wants to with those funds – but they should be exhausted or at least fully earmarked by the end of S17.

  • I do believe the presence of those funds was material information to Stewards. Sure, the funds were not hidden, but the salient issue is that they were not mentioned as a source FDD could draw upon for completing its S17 budget. In effect, FDD had the choice of funding a full S17 by tapping its gray fund OR requesting an allocation from the treasury and preserving the gray fund so it could be used for something else at the end of the season (eg, a Joke Race).

  • Finally, on the question of the revote, I am happy to see that this is moving towards a resolution here. Hopefully there are important communication and governance lessons we all gain from this. I would hate to see revotes become a common thing or a new layer of bureaucracy added to decision-making.

I hope people find my comments constructive. I appreciate all of the commentary in this thread and hope this ends up being a net positive in the long run for GTC governance.

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I will keep it short. I also was not aware of the extra funds when voting in favour of this, and since the workgroup is dissolving and has enough funds to dissolve I don’t understand why more was needed.

Questions about Intent to deceive and pages and pages of drama is not something I am going to go in.

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On 3.20 this proposal was referred to the Steward Council for a reconsideration by @kevin.olsen, a member of CSDO. Following the newly defined process, it will be reviewed in the next Steward Council meeting for consideration. I will post the outcome of that discussion in this thread.

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Quick update:
The steward council met on 3.27 and voted to reconsider the vote on the S17 FDD budget. This effectively means the snapshot vote for the S17 FDD budget is null and void. FDD budget owner @DisruptionJoe does comment on his intentions moving forward and you can see the discussion in the recording below (starting at about 3:13.

you can see a recording of the meeting `here
And you can see the notes of the meeting here

Thank you to the Gitcoin Steward council members who were present, and cast their vote.

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image727×217 14 KB

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Thank you for all your hard work to make this happen. While I still disagree with the outcome, I do feel that the process for making the decision was fair and legitimate.

I will not be posting the budget again as FDD does have the funds to finish the season and we are already well down that path.

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Hey Joe - Do whats does this actually mean? I think we discovered FDD does have “grey funds” and those cold be used to finish out the season (not saying they have to be, but want to get a bit of context)?

Where do those “grey funds” go once FDD dissolves?

IIRC, dCompass kept their excess funds after spinning down as a workstream as they were working to finish up the product they were building and felt they may still have a go to market path without additional WS funds. What are you thinking for FDD’s case?

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I delayed posting a FAQ about this as I was trying to gather all the details. You beat me to it! My intention is to get it up this Monday.

TL;DR

  • We are planning to execute on almost everything in the Season 17 budget as posted. It seemed that we had alignment on the work to be done, just not if FDD should be given more funds to do it.
  • We have $30-60k left which FDD will vote on how to use to further its mission. These will likely be used dogfooding Allo protocol.
  • 5/10 have transfer plans which will be outlined on the FAQ - Most of these are paid by FDD through 4/28 although they transfer accountability on 4/3 - Its a hand held process
  • Those who aren’t moving on had final dates set according to work they are responsible for and severence based on time/postition with Gitcoin.
  • ODC will still conduct the hackathon 4/25-5/30! Checkout Evan post here: Gitcoin founded OpenData Community Regen Rangers hackathon is approaching!
  • We do hope for other opportunities for individuals to participate in the ecosystem through GCPs and building some of the first service orgs on the protocol! More details TBD.
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