Funding pools on Gardens are how you can allocate resources efficiently, transparently, and through the power of bottom-up governance! Follow this guide to set up your funding pool and tailor it to your community's needs.

Funding pools on Gardens use Conviction Voting - a time-weighted mechanism where voter support for proposals grows in conviction the longer it’s staked. This allows for continuous community funding (evergreen funding) and bottom-up governance.

First things to know about Funding Pools on Gardens:

• Threshold = amount of conviction needed for the proposal to pass
• Conviction = grows or shrinks on proposals over time based on their support
• More tokens requested = higher threshold. Proposals choose the amount of tokens they’re requesting.
• Community members can dispute proposals they feel are abusive or violate the Covenant.
• Proposals are continuous. They’ll remain active until they either pass, are disputed and blocked, or are cancelled by the creator.

1️⃣ Decide the Purpose of the Pool’s Funds

Before you begin, define the purpose of your funding pool and the eligibility criteria for proposals to get funded. Answer these key questions:

• What will your pool fund?

  This can be a pain point in your community, or an area where members can create a lot of value for the community if they had the resources to execute.

  Funding pools with a clear, narrowly defined purpose are more effective and easier for proposal creators and voters to understand.

  Examples: Contributor expense reimbursement, community events, DAO tooling - see the Governance Pool Library for examples and Case Studies from other communities.

• Who will vote?

  Decide how inclusive your pool’s governance should be. You can open voting to all community members or restrict it to a smaller, high-context group using an allow list.

2️⃣ Set Pool Parameters

Customize your pool's governance and voting settings to reflect your goals. Key parameters include:

Voting Weight System

• Choose how the number of governance tokens staked affects voting weight.
• You can choose from Fixed (members have equal voting weight), Quadratic (voting weight = square root of tokens staked), Unlimited (voting weight = tokens staked), or Capped (voting weight = tokens staked, up to a max limit)

Conviction Growth Rate:

• This determinews how quickly voters’ conviction increases when they support proposals.

Spending Limit:

• Set a maximum percentage of the pool that can be requested in a single proposal.

Minimum Conviction:

• Defines how much conviction (voting weight) is needed to pass small proposals, since more funds requested = more conviction needed to pass.

Minimum Threshold:

• A safety override for Pools that don’t have enough governance weight activated by members - set the minimum amount of voting weight (in points) needed to pass proposals.

Arbitration Parameters:

• Select a Safe account address that will serve as the Tribunal Safe that can resolve disputes. Set collateral amounts for proposal creation and disputes to deter spam and encourage quality proposals, and the number of days the Tribunal Safe has to rule on disputes.
• Gardens also offers a Gardens Global Tribunal to rule on disputes in your pool if preferred.

3️⃣ Activate Your Pool

• Once your funding pool is created in your Gardens community, it’ll show up in the “Pending” category of your community’s pools. To activate:
  • Connect your community’s Council Safe to the Garden
  • Click “Activate” to set up the transaction in the Safe
  • Sign and execute