Update: GitcoinDAO's Adopted Purpose and Essential Intents

Last edit: 7/2/2022

TLDR

After discussing and incorporating community feedback, this post confirms GitcoinDAO’s adopted Purpose and Essential Intent statements as ratified by CSDO on Tuesday June 14, 2022. Thanks to everyone who took the share their thoughts on these artifacts.

After the community feedback period ended on June 3rd, I summarized the feedback received and met with several CSDO representatives to discuss what should be incorporated. S/o to @GTChase, @Viriya, @krrisis, and @seanmac for working through the feedback with me and supporting the editing process. Below you’ll find a summary of that feedback with justifications for and against editing language.

Our current Purpose & Essential Intents statements are summarized below:

The Purpose of Gitcoin
To empower communities to fund their shared needs.

The Essential Intents of Gitcoin

  1. Protocol Adoption

    • Build a widely adopted, modular Grants protocol that creates a flourishing ecosystem of funding mechanisms.
    • Build a widely adopted, modular Pluralism Passport protocol that creates a flourishing ecosystem of network effects around Decentralized Society.
  2. Financial Sustainability

    • Have a comprehensive, diversified strategy for financial stability of the DAO in order to effectively achieve our mission.
  3. DAO Organization

    • Create and promote clear and engaging rituals, communication channels, and messaging that build emergent shared context among GitcoinDAO’s contributors, stewards, and supporters.
  4. Grants Program Success

    • Enable a successful grants protocol launch by dogfooding it internally and supporting ecosystems in adopting it.
    • Continue to support the Ethereum ecosystem and public goods in web3 and beyond through Gitcoin-led rounds.

Community Feedback and Adopted Statements

Purpose

Community Feedback & Summary of Changes:
Feedback from the community contained the following major themes and questions:

  1. Statement is too vague, broad, or uninspiring;
  2. Should our values imbue the statement?
  3. Should the DAO’s purpose center on supporting shared needs or creating impact?

CSDO adopted a simplified version of the DAO’s purpose statement that left in “shared needs”, but removed the reference to “build”. This statement is meant to guide the DAO’S direction over the course of the next 100 years, and though broad, there are plenty ways the DAO will evolve in that time. This statement gives the organization room to grow while acknowledging that our work enables communities to create impact for themselves. Finally, we think that by focusing on one active verb, the statement as a whole is clearer.

We think that the edit also addresses some contributor feedback that the purpose statement felt uninspiring, but recognize that some feedback is simply subjective. Either way, MMM is putting finishing touches on draft mission and vision statements that are the more appropriate artifacts to memorialize our aspirations as a DAO. Sean previewed some of that work here.

Essential Intent for Protocol Adoption

Community Feedback & Summary of Changes:
The one comment we received focused on making explicit who should use GitcoinDAOs Grants protocol. We decided to leave the language the same because the protocol work is intended to be credibly neutral. The ethics or values that we wish to signal to the broader web3 community are more accurately captured in the work of our Grants Program (see essential intents below).

Another statement emerged in the comment section that sought to acknowledge Gitcoin Passport as a Grants Protocol essential intent. That protocol development is currently underway and a statement confirming that is included below.

Essential Intent for Financial Sustainability

Community Feedback & Summary of Changes:
Feedback on this essential intent called for a more explicit description of our financial strategy and a specific call out for the statement to include a commitment to more ‘effective spending’. Here again, CSDO decided to not change the language. Effective or focused spending is part of a diversified strategy and one of several strategies the workstream leads will engage over the next 12-18 months to support the DAO treasury.

Essential Intent for DAO Organization

Community Feedback & Summary of Changes:
Based on the feedback received, this intent was updated to signal the emergent (or bottoms-up) nature of our internal context sharing and how we would like our internal communications, rituals and messaging to develop.

Other comments to this essential intent focused on whether:

  1. Our community should focus on influencing the ecosystem or improving our internal context sharing, and
  2. This essential intent was an end in itself or in service of the other intentions listed.

We opted out of making additional changes to the language since we believe the intent stands on its own as important internal work we should push forward over the next year.

Essential Intent for Grants Program Success

Community Feedback & Summary of Changes:
After reviewing the comments, these statements were left as-is. The only feedback received for the here was that CSDO should include the definition of public goods in one of the statements. CSDO decided against this since the discourse around what qualifies as a public good is often a distraction from the important work of educating and growing the ecosystem while running successful grants rounds. My hope is that demonstrating why funding public goods is important will have the same (if not greater) influence on the ecosystem.

Finally…

It’s really important to state here that this is a beginning, not an end. As GitcoinDAO grows, the essential work will change with it. With that said, we hope the statements provide all contributors a clear sense of the direction we’re all building toward.

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Thank you to @Jodi_GitcoinDAO and the rest of the team for all of the work that went into these documents. It’s helpful to see how thoughtful you were about hearing the feedback and weighing revisions.

I think these statements provide a great foundation for our work and I’m excited to move forward with them!

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Thanks for this great overview of all feedback Jodi!

Might be useful to add the below summary at the top or bottom of the post so we have this published?

–

Our current Purpose & Essential Intents :

The Purpose of Gitcoin

To empower communities to fund their shared needs.

The Essential Intents of Gitcoin

  1. Grants Protocol Adoption + Growth
  • Build a widely adopted, modular Grants protocol that creates a flourishing ecosystem of funding mechanisms.
  • Build a widely adopted, modular Pluralism Passport protocol that creates a flourishing ecosystem of network effects around Decentralized Society.
  1. Financial Sustainability
  • Have a comprehensive, diversified strategy for financial stability of the DAO in order to effectively achieve our mission.
  1. DAO Organization
  • Create and promote clear and engaging rituals, communication channels, and messaging that build emergent shared context among GitcoinDAO’s contributors, stewards, and supporters.
  1. Grants Program Success
  • Enable a successful grants protocol launch by dogfooding it internally & supporting ecosystems in adopting it.
  • Continue to support the Ethereum ecosystem & public goods in web3 and beyond through Gitcoin-led rounds.
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Done! Thanks for the feedback.

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Hello all, it’s amazing to see us make progress with our purpose and essential intents!

The Marketing team has incorporated the changes into slightly revised vision & mission statements derived from the ratified purpose.

As a reminder, here is how to think about how these statements relate to each other:

  1. Vision is where you aspire to go.
  2. Purpose guides you.
  3. Mission drives you.
  4. Impact is what matters.

With that in mind, we’d propose adopting the following statements, listed here in context:

  1. Draft vision statement:
    We envision a world where pluralistic communities thrive by funding their shared needs autonomously & with legitimacy.

  2. Purpose (already ratified):
    We empower communities to fund their shared needs.

  3. Draft mission statement:
    We build protocols & programs that enable communities to fund their shared needs.

  4. On the ratified essential intents
    A key next step is to make the essential intents measurable so we can track our progress against them. We are here reiterating a suggestion to create & adopt specific north star metrics, such as:
    By the end of 2023, we will have 69 communities that have adopted our protocols, enabling at least 69420 individual grantees, funded by at least 6,942,000 contributors.

Why is this important for marketing and the broader DAO?

  • With north star metrics in place at the DAO level, individual workstreams such as PGF, MMM & FDD can fund specific efforts to track & move these metrics, thereby increasing focus & improving coordination.
  • Vision, purpose, mission & impact statements are the critical inputs to a successful marketing strategy.
  • We will use this strategy to grow our community & to increase awareness, comprehension & engagement with our programs and protocols.
  • Defining north star metrics will enable us to create long-term bets & short-term experiments and give us the best chance possible to increase our impact

We appreciate any and all feedback to the above proposals.

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Thanks for all the work that went into this. It is very helpful. I especially appreciate moving them to the top so it is clear and accessible. Another spot where these might go is the gitcoindao.com homepage.

I’ve added them here for an easy copy paste.

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Thank you for all of this Jodi! Because my main interest is the grants program I would be curious to sync with you when you have availability and try to understand your POV more.

PS. The definition of a public good is very hard to define :smiley: We are trying to help with that and just last week @David_Dyor created an amazing “test” that has this scope.

Good call @DisruptionJoe. I’ve updated the page to reflect your copy.

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Happy to discuss whenever! I would also add that as PGF Leads @annika and @ceresstation will have perspectives worth investigating :slightly_smiling_face:.

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Thanks for this thinking Sean. Love the direction.

I think the mission statement could be more impactful.

We build protocols and programs that help communities fund their shared needs but what is the intended impact of that?

Could be something like: We enable Web3 ecosystems (communities?) to thrive by developing revolutionary protocols and programs (or funding mechanisms?) that will shape the future of the open internet and beyond.

I think using more specific language like this could be really impactful and inspiring given that our purpose is fairly neutral. I included “web3 ecosystems” because our direction is quite vague and lacks specificity when we use “communities” but am open to using whatever is most accurate here.

I think a powerful vision is one where the impact can literally be imagined.
What happens when pluralistic communities thrive?
What happens when funding mechanisms are autonomous and legitimate?
What will the future look like by having us in existence (vs. if we didn’t exist?)?

I’m hoping answering some of these questions together might have a more moving and clear vision emerge.

Happy to chat more and jam on this if desired :slight_smile:

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I love seeing the engagement on this matter. The ethereal but tangible regen-ethos/solarpunk culture of Gitcoin might just be our most uniting factor. So easy to get distracted by the day-to-day which makes me appreciate these guiding ideas even more.

Big thanks to Jodi, Sean, Kris, Chase, Viriya and the many others who were involved. Y’all rock! :blue_heart:

(warning short tangent ahead)

Watching these coalesce into a foundational document reminds me why I get out of bed each day. This doc will help keep these ideas running through my mind on a loop. Will help me stay focused on the proper targets. They also remind me how different Gitcoin is from legacy corporations in all the right ways.

DeSoc is a radically different but possible reality and Gitcoin is pointing the way for so many people. Financial sustainability is mandatory. Dao rituals are slowly surfacing bottoms-up and the Grants Program is about to go v2.0

Gitcoin Dao has a huge amount of diverse talented contributors. Internal organization is better each week. As all these talented folks get to know each other they begin supporting each other. This is how the world gets changed imo. Somehow Gitcoin is more than a job, a club, an activist network, a fundraising protocol. It is all these things and more. I don’t even have a word for it…but one comes to mind…

WAGMI :deciduous_tree: :palm_tree: :robot:

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Made this design for the Purpose & Intents. Simple, clean, text focused with a bit of Gitcoin branding. Let me know of your feedback. Thanks!

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This is great. Thanks @DisruptionJoe for posting, and we’ve RT’d it on the Gitcoin DAO Twitter account!

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