Thriving GG20 - Thank ARB and Gitcoin

🌱 Gitcoin Grants
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Hey everyone! I’m so excited to tell you all about this plan. As you may know I have now been involved in running the last 9 grants program rounds at Gitcoin. In that time we have tried a lot of nifty experiments but this one feels to me like the culmination of all that and more.

To put it shortly, we have an idea for how to “supercharge” GG20 and maximize the impact and effectiveness of the round with a mix of strategic incentives and assessment/ validation feedback loops using Thrive Protocol (spoiler alert I am now working for Thrive Protocol while still playing an advisory/support roll on the Grants Lab team).

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TL;DR

  • We plan to provide incentives for grantees, round operators, and community members to supercharge this grant round. These incentives will include both ARB tokens and Thrive Points (which will be redeemable at the launch of Thrive DAO this summer). We have tried to strategically target this to drive meaningful participation.

  • These additional bonuses will be available via Thrive Protocol working on behalf of Arbitrum DAO who is a sponsor of the OSS Rounds, the community rounds and other rounds that have applied for funding and fit within certain criteria. See below for more on matching funds below.

During GG20

  • During the round grantees and community members will be able to claim rewards for posting about the projects they have supported and why they supported them.

  • There will be bonuses for the most popular posts (based on reviewers’ assessments and social media metrics).

There will be token rewards for hosting twitter spaces with other grantees.

  • There will be rewards for producing content that helps support or onboard new community members.

After GG20

  • Round operators will have incentives for how well they run rounds including paying funds out on time and the assessment of participants. Grantees and community members will get to weigh in on which rounds were run the best and why.

  • After the rounds are over, grantees will be rewarded for providing updates on goals and milestones using Karma (see the link on your grants page on Grant Stack).

  • As grantees continue rolling out their work these milestone updates will be assessed and rewarded based on the validation and evaluation of reviewers.

  • Over time streaks and consistency will also be rewarded. For example participating in GG21, GG22 and GG23.

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More Details:

Thrive Protocol to put it simply helps decentralized communities effectively grow and thrive. They do that with a strategically customized mix of incentives and feedback loops tailor made for each community they serve. What that looks like in practice is the assessment of the work of both grantees and grants program operators which is done by sets of reviewers using the same rubric.

Key considerations of the Rubric we will use: timely execution of milestones, expert review of code, community adoption/ use (if applicable), and a overall assessment of quality from expert and general community reviewers. We will share more on the rubric and opportunities to weigh soon.

A big thank you to Sejal, Sov, Mathilda, Meg, Laura, and everyone else at Gitcoin. I am so grateful for the thoughtful partnership and graceful brilliance of everyone on both of these teams, as well as all the community members, grantees, and partners who have helped shape this plan. It genuinely feels to me like a win-win-win-win scenario that can generate exponential growth for everyone involved.

Goals:

Drive up community participation, project quality and verified impact. Reduce friction for grantees, donors and round operators.

Facilitate a lasting and meaningful partnership between Gitcoin and the Arbitrum community via Thrive Protocol.

Funding Specifics:

Thrive Protocol will provide the following in terms of financial support as part of the Thank ARB campaign on behalf of Arbitrum DAO:

  • 100k (USD equivalent) in ARB for OSS round matching funds
  • 150k (USD equivalent) in ARB for matching available for rounds run on Arbitrum that meet criteria.
  • 100k (USD) matching fund bonus for grantees in the OSS round building on Orbit and/or other Arbitrum Nova tools (applications will be via Thrive Protocol on the Thank ARB page).

TOTAL: approximately 240,000 ARB (350,000 USD)

And also this!

100k ARB for incentives including human validation and assessment of impact (likely using Karma)

Thrive Protocol will also allocate 4 dedicated staff people to this work during April and May until the completion of GG20 payouts as well as funding ongoing impact assessments between GG rounds.

Implementation Plan:

Our plan is to incentivize and reward more meaningful participation for all three sides of the Quadratic Funding market; Grantees, Round Operators and Individual Supporters (aka donors or voters).

Incorporating assessment and validation feedback loops and creating attestation data not only makes these processes objectively better in terms of delivering real growth and impact but these activities also increases trust in our program(s) overall and drive more participation in the process now in and future rounds.

Using incentives at every stage of this journey and on all three sides of the grants program will supercharge a flywheel.

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AI depictions of a flywheel

These incentive programs will be optimized to increase quality and retention. For example there will be increased rewards for multiple rounds of positive feedback from assessments made by validators.

Outline of Potential Rewards for GG20

(note the specific amounts of rewards available for each contribution type will be available on Thrive Protocol when GG20 begins) Please share your thoughts below as these potential rewards are still be discussed. #BuildinPublic

  • Participation in GG20:

  • Hosting Twitter Spaces:

  • Coordinating and hosting a twitter space that includes 5 or more other grantees with an audience of over 50 people (must provide link to space recording)

  • Coordinating and hosting a twitter space that includes 5 or more other grantees with an audience of over 100 people (must provide link to space recording)

Curation:

  • Create a collection of grantees based on similar characteristics or the assessment of grant project qualities (to be assessed by paid validators)

Rewards for Grantees

Reporting and Milestones:

  • Completion of Karma report
  • Successful completion of milestones outlined in Karma
  • Additional bonuses for projects assessed as highest quality

Round Operators

Community Rounds that received matching from Gitcoin:

  • Completion of Community Round round operations within Gitcoin’s prescribed timelines and eligibility including payout of matching funds.

  • Bonus funds for programs deemed to be especially well run and valuable by community assessment.

Community Rounds running independently in GG20:

  • Completion of Community Round round operations within GG20 timelines, including payout of matching funds.

  • Bonus funds for programs deemed to be especially well run and valuable by community assessment

How Will We Allocate Matching Funds?

  • Community Rounds that were selected to run during GG20 will be eligible for allocated additional matching funds and some additional funds will allocated to other program that applied to Gitcoin for funding support. Stay tuned for additional information in a future post specific to community matching fund support.

*100k will be available for projects participating in OSS rounds that are building on Orbit and/or using Arbitrum Nova - applications to be added to this bonus matching fund will take place using a simple Airtable form linked to the Thrive Protocol page.

Conclusion

We would love to hear your thoughts about this program. It’s ambitious, and exciting. We will update the community here on the governance forum as well as elsewhere online and onchain in the weeks ahead. Good times will be had by all. Public goods are good. Live long and prosper.

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AI still hasn’t really figured out hands

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Coming back to digest this in detail after the Twitter space with Gitcoin.

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Just to bring things full circle here is the link to the twitter space if anyone missed it and wants to hear it https://x.com/BenWest/status/1778091003439653170

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This is such a fantastic initiative, and I can’t wait to see the domino effects start pushing the entire ecosystem forward! I love the comprehensive focus across all the stakeholders involved in the plumbing for public goods funding.

Sharing a few additional non-fleshed-out possibilities to tie incentives with behaviors:

  • Grantee Reward: Taking inspiration from Tunable-QF by TEC and peer-selected investment model by Village Capital, one opportunity to boost grantee funding is the endorsement from fellow-grantees who are experts in the domain. The assumption here is that fellow builders/grantees working in the trenches have the best possible lens to evaluate the work of other problem solvers, so a donation to a project from fellow builders can be boosted via additional funding outside QF to amplify the signals.

  • Boosting Matching Fund: Tying incentives to performance metrics that help in onboarding, adoption, and sustainability of public goods funding, such as:
    – Top rounds with the highest % share of first-time voters (with qualifying Passport criteria)
    – Top rounds with the highest % share of returning voters (e.g., cGrants voters returning to Grants Stack)
    – Top rounds with the highest diversity of participation (e.g., measured as the average number of projects supported by a voter)
    – Top rounds with most tenured voters (e.g., measured as the average “Gitcoin-age” of the voter since their debut donation)
    – Top rounds with highest contribution share for first-time grantees

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Big thanks to the legend @M0nkeyFl0wer and the rest of the team at Thrive for making this happen.

I am excited to press forward into GG20 with these incentives in place and continue to work with the team to find ways to incentivize the community to continue funding what matters :heart:

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As a former Gitcoin contributor and current Climate Coordination Network team lead, I’ve been working behind the scenes on grant program rounds almost as long as the amazing Ben West, and I’m super excited about the potential of this cool experiment. I really appreciate how the rewards incentivize all 3 sides of the QF market: Grantees, Round Operators and Community Members. Here are 3 suggestions for potential rewards, one for each side:

  1. For grantees & contributors: We often have people develop useful content and tools that help support or onboard new community members into the round e.g., @Deeparocks’ AI grant tool that was just updated to support Markdown formatting. Not all tools are created equal. I’d suggest rewarding people who develop tools that are vetted and then shared via Twitter (X) by either Gitcoin or a Round Operator (or both).
  2. For Round Operators: Gitcoin developed a Round Wrap-Up Template for community rounds that received matching funds. Perhaps reward operators who submit a completed Round Wrap-Up report by a certain date. You can also reward operators that hold cross round twitter spaces.
  3. For Contributors: To encourage cross-pollination and help contributors become more familiar with a variety of interesting projects: Perhaps there can be a reward/incentive for donating to all 5 Community Rounds + one of the OSS rounds.
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