Grants Committee Weekly Jun 21, 2022
Attendance
james, lion, kouros, rene, chuck, links
Date
Jun 21, 2022
Last Edited Time
Jun 21, 2022
Last edited by
Note-taker
Recording
Multi-select
Team Perspective
- lion917 away next week (June 28)
- jameswmontgomery is off 7/5 and 7/12
- Retrospectives for Grants Committee
- Rene has brought forward the idea of doing a retrospective of the Grants committee
Accounting
- Bank for the remaining of the season: 6,969,211.713
- Average BANK per week left: 1,161,535.2855
- Grants Committee Funding tracking
Discussion
KPI Acceptance Flow
- reminder: projects must have KPIs accepted AND recorded to get second half of funding
- list of projects that have met requirements and are ready for funding is here
We don’t have a breakdown on the Notion page of seasonal project disbursements
- https://etherscan.io/tx/0xbe860d9952065a4541a8713df12154e6e1b79a388ac7e0963fe261ea41ba73ab
- the above is the transaction for seasonal funding
- https://snapshot.org/#/banklessvault.eth/proposal/0x4361af215c331363d4dfc213454c7123a3871d716b8ac1c7280f908122f9bf26
- shows total amounts approved for projects in S4
- ACTION: Kouros to put the info together to make it easy
Kouros has been handling the accounting, but his term ends, so we will need to do a transition
- should it be the grants lead? should it always be the lead?
- we could also ask the treasury guild to do this for us - Kouros says he can do it
- ACTION: Add this to S5 spec or create a new structure/compensation for Grants Committee
Coordinape Proposal - Is this in the Grants Mandate?
- Ops Administrates Coordinape, Grants Disburses funds
- Should we go to snapshot with this? It implies to change it back we’d need to go to snapshot
- This is a fundamental change in the way we do things, therefore it should go to snapshot
- Ops Guild has SOME authority over the systems they are responsible for, but what is the line?
- Coordinape are specified in the seasonal spec, therefore it should be changed as part of a seasonal spec
- grants committee has no authority on this
- therefore needs to go to snapshot
What are the Grants Committee KPIs?
- If we are holding projects accountable, we need to hold ourselves accountable
- What’s our purpose/mandate? How can we show progress towards our goals?
- links asked coordinape workstream if they would give us some questions on next coordinape round, and Ella_Dane suggested these:
- how familiar are you with the grants committee? (scale 1-7)
- what do you think of the grants committee? (scale 1-7)
- what is one action the grants committee could take to improve? (free response)
- Is there anyone on this call that thinks Grants Committee could be doing better?
- we are doing admirably, but we could be doing better
- KPIs are about continuous improvement - if we want to improve, we need to have some sort of measurable improvement
- but to improve, we need to understand what our goal is?
- So step 1 - understand our purpose/mandate, then step 2 - set KPIs
KPI brainstorm:
- do projects have adequate input from us?
- are we disbursing in a timely way?
- are we having some sort of accountability flow
- NPS?
- are committee ready to engage w/ projects? (i.e. read forum posts)
- timeline for posts to hit quorum → grants reviews the proposal
- # of contributors
- get good contributors to stay, get new contributors to join
- one of the biggest way to encourage this is the price of the BANK token…higher token means more contribution
- we’re the only group that can pull the lever to encourage projects to seek revenue/utility of BANK
purpose brainstorm:
- to encourage contribution through disbursement of BANK?
- could this mean that we are going beyond just funding? i.e. encouraging contribution through other means?
- to ensure that projects are aligned with BanklessDAO values and mission?
- can we help projects succeed?
- is project success part of our mandate?
- perhaps something around easing flows/barriers to funding/contribution
background - why did we create grants committee in the first place?
- to get any funding from the main vault, we need snapshot approval
- so the grants committee was made to disburse funds more quickly
- does that mean that we are incentivizing contribution? i.e. we made it faster and easier for projects/contributors to get funding
ACTION: links to create an item to track this on the Kanban
Price of BANK - does this change the way we operate this committee?
- if our purpose is to encourage contribution, then we may have to change the way we do that
- we can seek different contributors (ones who have the ability to work without pay, ones who can work less hours, ones who are very value aligned)
- if we do things correctly, we can build resilient systems that will allow us to succeed over the long term
- building projects around strongly value-aligned contributors who are able to weather the bear
- we can’t handle all external forces…1 BANK = 1 BANK
- for projects, it means we have to ask - how can you continue with the bare minimum amount of resources?
- for new projects, how can you ensure your project succeeds
- for existing projects, how can you ensure your project survives?
- at the end of the day, it’s a difficult process, but the end could be a set of healthy and striving projects
- is the purpose of the BANK token to maintain a full-time salary?
- i wouldn’t do this myself, but we can’t stop someone from doing this…so we commiserate
- you are unable to pay rent with your role salaries…that’s tough
- but we have a lot of BANK in the treasury, so we can do something - maybe double down on contributors who are able to contribute now
IMN Nodes (lion917)
I would like to discuss IMN KPIs and its progress in the next GC meeting. I had a very indepth discussion with Jengajojo and there seems to be no proper path for Nodes to become independent. there are around 25 nodes being funded with extremely different numbers in terms of audience and contributors. The IMN ask will just increase each season without a proper mandate as my understanding is that they ask for a huge chunk of the budget and allocate the capital themselves instead of finding the best value for capital expenditure which GC at least tries to do. Some nodes also indulge in paid marketing so their numbers are all skewed as well.
Additionally, each season 5-6 nodes are added without the previous one's being successful. This is quite a big challenge.
- Iced’s input - Once we validate the BDAO SubDAO model, I think that this could be another location that we could enable their growth with it.
- Counterpoint - These subdaos may eventually want to tokenize themselves.