Post Updated May 2022.
Other onboarding resources:
Hi frens,
I’m writing an overview post about Gitcoin, so that prospective DAO participants know the why/what/how of GitcoinDAO. I plan to update this post every month as the DAO evolves.
TLDR
GitcoinDAO is a community of internet citizens who builds & funds digital public goods, like Open Source Software.
So far we’ve funded $58mm of open source software, & are currently moving about $6mm/quarter to OSS devs.
We are just getting started.
Mission First
GitcoinDAO is mission first (always has been). Our mission is to build and fund digital public goods.
The world we want.
We believe that
- Open Source Software is a digital public good that creates $400bn/year in value,
- but that creators of OSS don’t have great ways to monetize their work on digital infrastructure.
- Our goal is to correct this asymmetry.
We are missionaries.
We believe that it’s all coordination. Public goods failures are coordination failures, and we see an opportunity to solve coordination failures with blockchains - a new supertool for solving coordination failures.
We know our edge.
Blockchains are our super power. They give us a novel, immutable, global, programmable, transparent substrate for coordination to build upon.
Our weapon of choice is novel mechanism design deployed to decentralized blockchain networks.
We push the envelope.
We develop novel tools that solve coordination failures.
We have momentum
We are creating $6mm/quarter in funding for OSS devs.
Vitalik Buterin once said “Gitcoin Grants is establishing itself as a significant pillar of the Ethereum ecosystem that more and more projects are relying on for some or all of their support.”
We are still emerging.
We are still discovering new & innovative ways to solve coordination problems in a DAO-era world. We systematically discover or invent these mechanisms, and if we’re lucky + good, we then scale them.
We are the EVM whispers, the DAO cartographers, the internet citiziens, and the chaos magicians of the internet of money. We are the homesteaders of the metaverse. We are the schelling point for the hopeful.
We build for human thriving.
Our vision is to establish an empowering, open and collaborative space where individuals and communities can access resources in proportion to their value creation independent of their geographic location, education, background or offline identity.
By creating collaborative, decentralized funding mechanisms, Gitcoin has become the natural choice for seeding and supporting digital public goods. The DAO enables building for the public, by the public by helping individuals and communities start, fund, and scale open source projects.
We convene the people
We have been hosting virtual & physical events at the heart of Regenerative web3. Checkout our quarterly Schelling Point events, or our weekly DAO Vibes (hosted on Discord), or “Public Goods are Good” twitter spaces.
By convening the people, we hope to build an Impact Network of people focusing on using Web3 for positive impact. We call those projects ImpactDAOS, and by studying ImpactDAOs we can build a webscale infrastructure for regeneration.
How we achieve our mission.
Gitcoin is a mission, a community, and a product suite.
If our mission is our focal point, our community is our lifeblood. Our a product - a double sided marketplace that connects digital creatives to the people who want to fund their work. And visa versa.
So far we’ve created $58mm worth of funding for OSS devs. Specifically, the way we do that is:
- Giving members opportunities to earn.
- Giving members opportunities to learn.
- Giving members opportunities to connect with one another & prospective career opportunities.
How do we do that?
Product-wise, we are building coordination tools for a DAO based world. We do that with
- Bounties - gig-based work for web3 projects.
- Hackathons - Build w the coolest web3 projects.
- Grants - Crowdfunding for Open Source.
- KERNEL - A web3-native, community centric accelerator.
- coordination.party - a toolkit for awarding contributors to a DAO.
Community-wise, we do that by being mission-first, producing results, by creating vibes + cultivating a positively-self-referential internal culture.
More on how we achieve our mission here.
The DAO that governs Gitcoin
We believe that the consent of the governed is the only legitimate basis for government.
This is why Gitcoin is governed by the community. (In order to make sure that Gitcoin is serving its community + founding mission first & foremost)
In May 2021, GTC was released. GTC is a governance token with no economic value that governs Gitcoin Grants + GitcoinDAO.
What is GitcoinDAO?
- GitcoinDAO is an ImpactDAO/ProtocolDAO hybrid.
- On a human layer, GitcoinDAO is an egregore - a group of humans who coordinate to achieve our mission.
- From a product perspective, we are building a suite of tools for DAO-era coordination of capital & culture.
- From a governance perspective, we are governed by GTC.
- We are progressively decentralizing Gitcoin from a company to a DAO.
There are 3 important concepts to know to understand how to interact with GitcoinDAO.
- Most of the action happens on discord, gov.gitcoin.co, or on twitter.
- Stewards are ultimately responsible for governing GitcoinDAO.
- Workstreams are the primary mechanism through which work is organized in the DAO.
DAO Workstreams
Workstreams are the way work is organized in the DAO. Workstreams have their own budget, leadership structure, tools, and processes on a per-workstream basis. Anyone can propose a workstream by following the proposal process. The current active workstreams are:
- Moonshot Collective is the DAO rapid prototyping workstream
- Public Goods is focused on our mission of funding public goods.
- Fraud Detection & Defense is in charge of preventing fraud on Gitcoin Grants.
- Decentralize-gitcoin is the mechanism through which Gitcoin is progressively decentralizing.
- Memes, Merch, & Marketing is the DAO marketing division.
- dCompass - building DAO native orientation tool.
If you want to learn more about the GitcoinDAO, read this post here.
DAO’s Quarterly Cadence
Gitcoin operates in a quarterly cadence. Quarterly Gitcoin Grants Rounds are our Metronome
Every quarter, the Gitcoin ecosystem revolves around a quarterly stacked event - a combination (1) Gitcoin Grants round, (2) Hackathon, (3) KERNEL block, and (4) Governance activity
During each quarter, we achieve our mission by deploying millions of $$$ of funding to the community. Typically a quarter looks like this:
- Plan for quarterly stacked event.
- Execute quarterly stacked event.
- Learn from the quarterly stacked event.
- Repeat
Our last quarterly event was GR13 (short for Grants Round 13) + it started March 9th 2022 and ended March 24th 2022. The next one is GR14 and it starts June 8th 2022 and goes until June 23rd 2022.
DAO KPIs
Right now the DAO is focused on:
- More Scale
- More Decentralization
Here’s how we’re tracking so far.
- $58mm in total public goods funding issued, $6mm/quarter right now.
- We’ve launched a DAO + several coordination protocols from the DAO.
Ongoing discussions on these KPIs here.. You can see the network stats here
GitcoinDAO is a vessel for humanity to get to the Quadratic Lands!
The GitcoinDAO is a vessel that we would like to take us to the Quadratic Lands - a place where open source software (and other public goods) are well maintained + healthy.
In the quadratic lands, public goods are funded by quadratic funding + other web3 native funding mechanisms.
The quadratic lands is a north star, we are still discovering where exactly it is and how to get there
Help us find the quadratic lands by telling it’s story. Members of our community have created this song about the Quadratic Lands or and this visionary video.
How to GIT involved.
As of May 2022, here is the way you can get involved in the DAO.
- Attend Schelling Point, our conference series about Regenerative Finance.
- Read the weekly Week in DAO posts.
- Get engaged on discord, gov.gitcoin.co, or on twitter
- Apply as a Contributor
- Explore any workstreams (use links above).
- Use Gitcoin to earn, learn, or fund. (use links above).
- Follow this list of GitcoinDAO contributors on twitter.
- Explore any of the links below:
DAO Cartographers wanted!
We are still working on the navigation & orientation of GitcoinDAO. If you are the kind of person who likes to make maps 
of emergent spaces like GitcoinDAO – then say hi in the DAO Cartographers thread in our discord.
Links
- Gitcoin.co
- Gitcoin Schwag Store
- Gitcoin Jobs
- Gitcoin Support
- Gitcoin twitter
- Gitcoin discord
- GitcoinDAO.com
- GitcoinDAO Snapshot
- GitcoinDAO Tally
- GitcoinDAO Twitter
- GitcoinDAO/GTC Governance token
Testimonials
Gitcoin Grants is establishing itself as a significant pillar of the Ethereum ecosystem that more and more projects are relying on for some or all of their support. ~ Vitalik Buterin
I LOVE IT…The community has been outstanding. I have made contact outside of slack w a couple of people. William Schwab was kind enough to ZOOM w me for an hour and tell me his story, letme pick his brain, and as he shared some valuable resources with me. - John Wilkinson
KERNEL is the greatest thing to ever happen to my crypto/business/personal life. I have made plenty of new friends, connected with people who believe in me and want to work together on other projects, and of course learned a lot from other seedlings, mentors and speakers. - Ethan Chiasson
Gitcoin gave me the first break into Ethereum and the crypto space. It helped me find bounties that I could work on and get paid in crypto. After my first ever bounty I got paid a lot and I felt euphoric. - Sebastian TF
I am amazed on a daily basis at the incredible projects and communities in this space. The Gitcoin team and quadratic funding is an invaluable catalyst to bring it all to fruition. Thank you! - Hishamaru Konkon
Gitcoin grants quadratic funding is not just for funds allocation, it’s also a great signaling tool! For the last few rounds, going to Grants | Gitcoin has led me to discover a lot of really cool Ethereum projects I previously did not know about. - Vitalik Buterin
What Gitcoin is doing with public goods funding is absolutely incredible. Nothing but respect to the team and the larger community for the contributions made. - Frobo
Thanks to @gitcoin it has helped us to discover our earliest talent and supercharged @KodaDot development. - Matej
People ask me all the time how I got into Solidity and NFT dev. The answer is @gitcoin! Beginning of the year I just started doing bounties for a bunch of different projects (@synthetix_io @akashnet_ @SovrynBTC etc) and found the NFT ones were my fave. Such a good way to learn! - sarasioux.eth
