[S17 Proposal] INTEGRATED FDD Budget Request

📜 Proposals
21

Hey @DisruptionJoe - I wanted to confirm this is the amount in total FDD needs to operate for this season?

I see that based on currently market values, FDD has two gnosis safes:
1 - Gitcoin Fraud Detection & Defense (Main) starting with (0xD45) and has a balance of 361.72K USD
2 - Fraud Detection & Defense (ops) starting with (0xbc4) and has 83.16K USD

The total seems to be in excess of the $340k requested for the season (and offer a healthy reserve). Does this mean you don’t need to request any funds this season?

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22

This snapshot vote has passed with ~93% approval rate.
Metrics:
1171 unique votes
~13M GTC tokens cast.
@kevin.olsen @drnicka @farque65 @llllvvuu @ccerv1 @lthrift and @kyle thanks to all of you for agreeing to do a deep dive review and provide feedback.
https://snapshot.org/#/gitcoindao.eth/proposal/0xf185198f0b0b7dacfcfd0e25d6129ed2b8a2fa40e5f527c38e966ebad0417284

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23

That is not correct. The vote was to fund the season 17 budget less the 100% of reserves which are being rolled over.

If there is a governance agreement about a workstream acquiring extra funds, please point me to it.

24

What do you mean by this?

I am just trying to figure out if you all actually need funding given the amount you hold across the two multisigs?

Is some of that Grant money from Aave that should be excluded here?

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25

Yes, and over the course of the last year and a half, FDD has made good treasury decisions. We accurately report our seasonal reserves to roll over and request the difference. This request is to fund our S17 budget of $340k.

In the past we have used these “gray funds” sparingly. For example, last season we had great breakthroughs with time-series graph database analysis with a payment to Pometry for setup and example uses of their open source Raphorty DB. This was not on our original budget.

The gray funds have been a way for us to maintain some autonomy in getting things done when needed. At the end of this season, we will wind down the workstream entirely. We believe we should have autonomy in using those funds. They will first pay for severence for those who are put out of work by the dissolution and secondly be put to use further advancing our sybil defense capabilities.

We want to push innovation forward, not just for our mandate, but for the DAO which desperately needs some innovative governance experiments which aren’t choked off by top delegated stewards not having the bandwidth to decide how to manage them. Because we believe these funds are separate from the quarterly budget request, we believe we have the autonomy to choose how they are spent.

Our current plan is to setup a Quadratic Vote for stewards to decide how much is allocated to 1) sending back to treasury 2) conduct a jokedao contest for sybil innovations 3) grant to Open Data Community as Founding Member to a subDAO structure 4) Fund FDD as a MolochDAO for ongoing independent services. Maybe there are other options. We would then follow through the execution of the results. This would happen after EthDenver and before 4/28, the end of Season 17.

Here are a few other reasons why we think ensuring FDD gets this budget is both a legitimate and smart decision.

  1. The treasury decisions weren’t primarily gains in the last quarter.

  2. Saying no after the vote is shady. We did not hide our current holdings this season as we dissolve. We reported accurately and consistently as we always have.

  3. The secondary effect of taking workstreams autonomy to do as they will with funds they acquire will demotivate them from being creative in becoming sustainable. Why would a workstream do any treasury management? Why would they attempt to get outside grants?

  4. CSDO discussed sending funds back to the treasury. However, that is CSDO which is an opt in council representing how workstreams will work together. All of the workstreams have opted out of CSDO recommendations in the past, so why is FDD opting out of this one different. The entire point of CSDO is that it IS NOT governance sanctioned by token holders. It should only make OPT-IN decisions that require the decisions about workstream collaboration to not be enforceable. This means the decisions have to be good enough to opt in. Saying that a CSDO decision has the same value as a token vote would upend the entire structure of CSDO, its purpose, and its intended outcomes. It would also directly violate the foundation agreement for token governance as the decision making power. Of course workstreams can make decisions within their workstream or between workstreams if it doesn’t break any steward voted policies or require their releasing funds. CSDO is bottom’s up, soft power.

Conclusion

It seems like there are 2 choices:

  1. Follow through with the vote. Maintain integrity and consistency. FDD finishes the season working hard and gets the rest of the DAO inspired with some governance innovation and the gray funds going to continuing our mission.

  2. Cancel or overturn the vote. Lose integrity. FDD members not moving forward likely have to stop working on 4/1 (or earlier) so we can pay severance. FDD is able to return a minimal amount of what’s left < $20k. No extra governance innovation. No funds being jointly allocated by stewards and FDD for continued sybil innovation after dissolution.

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26

Love ya Joe, but i don’t get it.

The plan is to end the workstream.

You outlined a budget to do that.

Turns out there was an accounting oversight and you have more then enough money to do the proposed budget.

Why should the DAO send an extra 123k to a workstream that is ending, when you are holding an excess of 100k already to complete your stated objectives?

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It says the season reserves are $216k… but…

This shows you have $444.88k.

Maybe you weren’t hiding it but it seems like inaccurate reporting. It’s fine to have an accounting error, but it is very pertinent to this request and IMO it invalidates the vote, as the vote was for money needed to complete tasks outline here, which you have more than enough money to do… So now you are now requesting funds you don’t need.

This doesn’t make any sense man, you have the funds to complete the proposed plan without the $123k injection. Please do right by Gitcoin DAO and use the funds in the workstream for their intended purpose and don’t follow thru with a push to request this funding. You have 100k more then you outlined you need to complete your stated work… why do you need another $123k on top of that?

IMO the workstream is funded and Gitcoin DAO needs to conserve its resources.

We should probably revote given the new information.

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27

Going through this conversation and overall I’m confused about a couple things:

The gray funds have been a way for us to maintain some autonomy in getting things done when needed. At the end of this season, we will wind down the workstream entirely. We believe we should have autonomy in using those funds. They will first pay for severence for those who are put out of work by the dissolution and secondly be put to use further advancing our sybil defense capabilities.

No other workstream has gray funds and this is something we’ve never heard about before. Could we have full transparency about these gray funds?

The workstream has funds already to do all the things that are mapped in the budget. Revoting makes sense to me and not fund anything beyond that makes sense to me.

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28

Here’s what I think is going on (hopefully Joe can clarify further):

Through smart treasury management and other means independent of the work of Gitcoin, the FDD workstream was able to amass some funds extra to that given to them by the GitcoinDAO. I believe Joe is arguing that these “gray funds” should be used at the discretion of the FDD Workstream, and should not be included as pertinent information in FDD’s budget request from GitcoinDAO.

Whether or not one agrees with Joe on this is a function of how they view the workstream-DAO relationship (which is currently ill-defined, and is something we should try to define better in the future to prevent problems like these).

For example, if the “Workstream” is an autonomous unit that GitcoinDAO grants money in exchange for some future work, then Joe’s point is valid. We should not expect the “Workstream” to do work on behalf of GitcoinDAO with funds that were not given by GitcoinDAO. In the context of this budget, under this assumption of a “Workstream,” then FDD should receive DAO funds because they are doing DAO work. If they do not receive DAO Funds, then we should only expect from them work that can be compensated by the DAO Funds they have in reserve (NOT their “gray funds”).

However, if the “Workstream” is bound to GitcoinDAO in the way a corporate division is bound to the larger corporation, then Joe’s point is invalid. All funds made by a corporate division belongs to the corporation itself, and is relevant to all funding decisions of that corporation. To be honest, I don’t think anyone in GitcoinDAO thinks of a workstream like this.

Another possibility (and perhaps the most likely) is that the “Workstream” is somewhere in-between, without a clear precedent. However, even if we do not explicitly state it, we are defining this precedent by choosing to revote or not.

Another important precedent we are setting is that of revotes. What constitutes a revote and what doesn’t? There do not seem to be clear guidelines for this, which is unfortunate considering that our voting process is largely social (no automatic execution on snapshot, and automatic execution on-chain has to be pushed through by large delegates willing to pay the gas cost).

TL;DR:
We are setting two important precedents through the decision to revote and not fund FDD’s treasury request:

  1. What is the Workstream-GitcoinDAO relationship and expectation?
  2. What constitutes grounds for a revote?

All stewards should carefully think about their answer to these questions before making a decision.

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29

Sorry for the short phone reply, but I want to clarify the WHY here. It is important.

I do believe that Chase 2 questions are spot on. I am doing this because I believe there is an insecure gap in our governance. We need to be in challenging governance situations to learn if there is a delta between how secure we think we are, and what the onchain portion of the governance plays out.

There is soft power that can say “I believe we should revote”.

I’m saying “show me how governance actually enforces whatever it decides here”

AND “whichever way this goes, let’s see if the DAO governance we have today leads us to a smart decision for tomorrow.”

I do believe my claim is legitimate. Others don’t. Ok Governance, what happens next. Do people with soft power get to say we must revote. How does our governance today decide this in a fair way?

I led the grants reviews for 5 or 6 seasons. These are the type of questions that come up in grant disputes and appeals. Our next 100 ALLO program managers will need to help their communities solve this problem. Not the specific law, but how does governance handle the process.

  1. Let’s look up the current state of our agreements. 2. Let’s have a thoughtful, careful debate on how and why this decision should go each way
  2. Let’s make sure we get a great outcome (like we did with the Akita Balancer pool - A governance mega-win that was super inspirational)
  3. Share the learnings of our practical governance problems in how WE allocate funds across our DAO and the ecosystem to help them fund what matters.

All I’m asking is how do we find a legitimate outcome?

I do believe that my understanding is both legitimate, and the better decision for the DAO long term.

Either way it turns out the funds will be spent in a way that pushes forward the DAO goals. My word and reputation is behind that. This isn’t that large of a sum. This low stakes way of testing governance seems like a good idea for us to learn our weaknesses.

Worst case scenario, I wasted some time pushing the subject. Best case scenario, we truly learn if we have weaknesses in our current system and if we can learn from our experience about how to solve a problem that EVERY grant round has!

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30

Echoing this sentiment. I think it’s important to have full transparency around the workstream finances so all stewards are able to make an informed vote. A major difference in understanding the financial situation seems reasonable to me to have a revote (applies to any workstream, not just this situation).

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31

I appreciate your engaging. I do agree with your assessment. Then, I think who has a right to call a revote in the future? Do we have a legitimate process for determining if a revote request is valid? Could someone DDoS our governance by requesting a devote on everything?

A clear and legitimate appeal process is a need of every grants round. I’d love for the conversation to be in good faith that we have two different positions presented that both might be legitimate. Who act as an appellate court in our system? Hopefully it’s not the person presenting the other side of the argument. Maybe it’s the steward council, with the people who are presenting each side committed to abstain.

I was approached by multiple people saying there was some “heat” on the forum.

It would be nice to have this conversation in the light-hearted fun way our leadership described governance could be at our retreat. It would be nice to hear “Great job, Joe. We have this money that wouldn’t have existed without your pushing boundaries and innovating in a responsible way. AND we are glad it is you and not someone actually testing our governance structure for malicious reasons.”

Really happy you chimed in here Linda.

How might you suggest we make the decision whether a recite is acceptable or not?

Did you know that this is a pain point for program managers every single round since I have been a part of Gitcoin?

These program managers are coming to us and literally requesting to use the protocol the way Gitcoin does because we get trusted results. I have been the person that handled these appeal situations since round 8.

Can our process here be something that doesn’t open the door to more problems AND is a step towards solving one of the primary problems our round managers have?

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32

This is an interesting case which I think our current structure does not address. What happens when a proposal has legitimately passed, but new information surfaces and voters no longer feel the information was symmetric?

We have to be careful here. Good governance is about protecting against bad actions, but any incremental governance process is always at risk of increasing bloat, bureaucracy, and unintended consequences. Unintended consequence I see popping up here is creating an appeal process that can be manipulated by actors who are simply unhappy with legitimate votes. We must avoid this.

This case is important, but I think it is more important to get the response right. My sense is FDD does not need the funding right away, and I would propose we take a couple days to draft a process (based on a bit of research), bring it to the Steward Council for a quick review, and we trial the process with this case. If the process proves to be just, we adopt it as part of our governance structure.

I am happy to coordinate and welcome any and all contributors to the process in an active, passive, or observational sense. I have created a thread in discord under “Cross Stream Pods” > “DAO success” where we can hash it out.

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33

Is this channel only open to contributors?

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34

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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35

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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36

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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37

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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38

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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40

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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