Context

This brief serves as an artifact for the early stages of the Grant Explorer and Round Manager product domains. It documents initial goals, assumptions, and considerations so that the team can get started and further flesh out the vision/strategy for the product.

The Grants 2.0 Vision

Round Manager and Grant Explorer are the primary unlocks to scaling our Grants protocol horizontally and allowing any project or team to use Grants as a mechanism to fund public goods.

Grants 2.0: Where We Are So Far

Round Manager and Grant Explorer are the last two core domains of Grants 2.0 to kickoff (after dPopp and Grant Hub), which gives the team some additional information to inform early development.

Domains

The Gitcoin Event Storming group initially outlined a number of domains that have been redistributed as part of the Grants 2.0 roadmap. At this point in time (May 2022), those domains are loosely allocated as:

• dPopp: individual identity (as a key input to Sybil defense) and grant owner verification
• Grant Hub: grant creation, grant management, some amount of user profile management, and (long-term) potentially the ability to browse and apply to grant rounds directly from the Hub
• Round Manager: round governance (deciding scope / settings for the round), grant eligibility, grant verification, grant applications, matching distribution, claims/payouts, appeals & resolutions, and round management (including Sybil defense)
• Grant explorer: grant discovery, participation mechanisms (e.g. payments, donations, voting, etc), and community engagement

There are some key domains that we expect to have somewhat fuzzy boundaries and (potentially) have shared interfaces:

• Grant application — our hypothesis is that grant owners will want the ability to apply to grants both from a specific round’s Grant Explorer as well as from Grant Hub. In the latter case, we could see Grant Hub hosting some sort of “round explorer” where grant owners can browse open grants rounds