Steward Council Call #3

Steward council members present:

SCM Missing:

Agenda

• Where are we on budgets and what’s the sentiment going into voting next week:

• dCompass 110 200$ (19k GTC - $5.8/GTC) for Season 14

• MMM 152,912 GTC for Season 14 (9% reduction)

• FDD $486,130 to fund Season 14

• Moonshot Collective Requesting a reduction (from 103.7K to 83.8K GTC)

• DAO Ops For S14, we request $ 989k USD or 179k GTC

  • Q about transparency

• Public Goods Funding 198K GTC as budget for Season 14

• Kernel proposal 96K in GTC for Season 14 (a 36% reduction from our original request of 150K GTC)

• Kudos proposal 6.6k GTC for Season 14 (May-July 2022) from 33.4k GTC

• Open discussion (please add topics)

• Q&A

• Kevin - token at all-time-low, bear market, it’s time to start saying no to things outside the core focus of GTC

  • QF protocol DAO w/o a protocol
  • Recommend voting no
    • Failed goal of shipping to mainnet
    • Outside of focus
  • Doesn’t see dCompass as a priority
  • dCompass & Kernel are outside the core focus

• TJ - voting no to both new proposals due to the unexpected nature of their appearance (showing up shortly before the vote)

• Lefteris - agree with Kevin. Sometimes not sure what that focus is, like the feedback and voters guide. I want to stay in focus, but I understand that I may be too narrow and want to hear other opinions. GTC DAO has been trying to do too much

  • Kevin - over the last year, DAOs that are self assembled but can’t make a decision on what to do in the future. CSDO working group has been assembled to figure out what we want to be when we grow up. Building the machine that builds the machine. Grants 2.0 as a focus. WS leads consensually agreed upon this in their meetings. TLDR; shipping grants 2.0 is the highest order item
    • Kris - Agreed. Don’t care about the bear market, prices fluctuate. Priorities are having a good treasury manager, what do we focus on? What do we fund?
      • Want to prioritize on protocol
      • increase sustainability
      • increase coordination within GTC DAO
    • Kris - Also voting no on the new ones (kernel should have half the budget). Our efforts should be focused on everything that makes us a protocol DAO. We need to prioritize
  • MURAL - https://app.mural.co/t/theready7827/m/theready7827/1651759127362/e725e0a698f03944495507ed206cf5f90bd07428?sender=sam3202
  • Simona - Mural was a means of getting us closer to what our purpose is. Focus isn’t just a problem of GTC, we can do a lot of things but should we? There is purpose in deciding short/medium/long term initiatives. Are we funding initiatives for each workstreams that are relevant to the DAO
    • Is Sybil essential to the core mission?
    • Kudos?
  • Simona - These have informed my choices. Good to see so many WS coming back with an adjusted budget, shows what should be funded right now vs what can wait

• Kyle W - I plan on updating my voters guide more. Supportive of TJ’s perspective of not funding Kudos & Kernel. New proposals are easy no’s, slight concession from MMM is interesting, FDD has been the hardest. FDD has been building in the wrong direction, for multiple seasons. Spent time w/ Joe on Friday, he’s amenable and interested in us shifting gears to focus more on protocols than human review. This is a space that’s new to FDD - Joe has experience with organizing people & events and that shows. Unsure of what’s fair to fund within FDD. Will need to talk to Joe and investigate alternatives to his proposal. Open to any blindspots I might have. How do we retool their budget proposal and what they plan to do in S14. They have reserves, would be okay to take a little bit of time.

  • TJ - Contributor to FDD, will have to abstain. One proposal was to freeze budgets, and skip a generation of budget increases, vote flat budgets this period, and demand these groups present a budget for 3 months from now - gives us 3 months to review vs 3 days.
  • Lefteris - can they survive?
  • Kris - TJ is proposing we approve the current one and review the next one in more detail
  • TJ - the alt is voting for budget increase
  • Simona - you’re saying skip S15 and go straight to S16?
  • TJ - it’s undesirable that we vote on budgets a week before they’re do
  • Lefteris - I like it.

• Kris - How can we give stewards enough time to give feedback? Specifically now, going through the FDD budget I also think it’s a big machine that we’re funding here and a lot of people on the inside don’t quite get what FDD is building. Lots of research things, should FDD just focus on building software and preventing Sybil?

  • Lefteris - Haven’t read it yet, the proposal is huge. It’s a problem, and is difficult to understand. People also don’t seem to be able to communicate w/ Joe properly. I would have abstained. In the context of understanding what we are funding and becoming more lean, I feel like we should go back to the drawing board for every WS and figure out how to survive for a set amount of time. Go back to the drawing board and decide:
    • What WS do we want?
    • What is the theme?
  • Lefteris - need to understand what we are paying? Salaries seem extreme. Had to ask the workstreams how much they’re paying for a full-time salary
  • QZ - I read the entire FDD thing (took 3 hours) and I was still a bit confused
    • Simona - Ok, that's really not great
  • TJ - Discernible risk was ignored. Centralization debt. They’re not creating decentralized software. What exactly are they build and why are they building it? Human review doesn’t scale. It’s a deeply technical space, and now you need someone to pay deeply technical attention to it. Everyone is doing excellent work but I think they’re building crazy things.
  • Kevin - FDD more or less as effective as the trust initiative. Agree with Kyle’s sentiment - FDD is working in the wrong direction
    • TJ - thus my need for 3 additional months of flat budget or something
    • Lefteris - but how? Deny funding? We all agree there should be something (software, etc)
  • Simona - Given that these convos were happening on Friday around focusing more, I’d be curious to know what that does to the contributors they’re paying at the moment as we shift to a software dynamic? Unsure how many of them are engineers - have you had that discussion?
    • Kyle - Not many, nervous about funding FDD - burning cash. A no-funding option doesn’t mean they stop what they’re doing. Convo w/ Joe - big retooling regarding where that workstream is focused. Some team to be retained for protocol work, but most aren’t suited for future work. Hard to say, want to do right by them, but it’s the reality
    • Simona - this is their current reserve $596,295. After they have that convo based on all these convos, it could be that they resubmit an amended request (like many other workstreams)
    • Kris - They have reserves. Lets say they want to take 2 weeks to really work out everything and fine tune - there’s no rules against this right?
      • Simona - No, because it’s never been done before. They’re one of the best-positioned workstreams in terms of reserves. They will be able to pay their contributors if they need to take more time.
      • Simona - QZ spent 3 hours reviewing the budget and still have questions, you’re bulldozed into action because it’s so impossible to make sense of it or even where to begin asking questions. What are we actually funding?
      • Simona - maybe that’s the feedback? They can take longer to revise or receive a no in it’s current state
      • QZ - FDD has a justification for everything. “3 layers of why” You can’t really say no to them. Everything flows back to their OKRs, but the machine to build the machine is being fine tuned, not FDD

• Griff - might be nice to say “here’s the budget for the quarter, what do we fit into it?” All these things are great but we need to prioritize.

  • Kris - agreed, but leads to more centralization than we have or want in the DAO. Someone would need to agree on the total budget for the season. Support this, because it requires alignment and coordination, but for some people this will be considered centralizing
    • TJ - The budget themselves should be required to have a discussion on their impact on the overall budget. These budgets come without a concept on how they effect the whole pie. WS needs to understand how they fit into the larger picture of the DAO as a whole
      • Simona - I think this is why we need the treasury role filled. As we move forward, agreed - require the workstreams to put that in place where we can see right off the bat how they fit into the larger budget. If there is a time deficit, which we don’t want, we can use this to decide to push the proposal forward or deny it. No way to compare what it does to the rest of the pie

• Simona - Do we want to make a council recommendation to Joe to take some time and account for all our feedback, revise their proposal and delay the Wednesday snapshot?

  • Kyle - Yes. An offer has been extended to Joe to work with me & Lindsey to look into this retooling of the workstream. Unsure if he wants to do it yet or not
  • Kris - I think we can give this rec. as a council, but at the same time I use this council as a temp. check w/ other stewards on how to give feedback so he’s probably getting that feedback anyways. How can we improve the process for future rounds?
  • Simona - I look at the council as a means of tackling these things, having different perspectives and ensuring we have the right tools. It’s important to get these tools & perspectives (like QZ’s feedback on the FDD proposal taking 3 hours) on what these budget proposals should look like moving forward. Don’t want Joe to publish this on snapshot on Wednesday and there being a no vote
  • Kris - I think he can put it on snapshot, and receive a no vote which is okay
  • Lefteris - We would like FDD to exist as a software solution in the long-run. Let’s make sure Joe understands this
  • Kevin - Joe says “FDD claims a mandate of ‘anything that affects gitcoins legitimacy’”. He will tackle anything in this realm, such as onboarding. He always goes back to the S1 post. Could restrain their focus to Sybil and collusion, that would go a long way.
  • Lefteris - how do we explain the mandate is different? Or understand it better? It’s not a workstream, it’s a monster
  • Kris - we will keep telling this to him. We’ve had long convos w/ Joe but his logic is “I see this missing and not being done, I think they need to exist, my budget gets voted yes so I’m doing them”. We do have gaps, in onboarding for example, but he’s doing them because his budgets are approved but not for this purpose.
  • Simona - This is an issue that needs to be resolved. From my perspective regarding governance - Joe gave a whole post on gaging sentiment. Unsure why he did this? It’s that feeling of “it’s needed, so I’m going to do it”. It’s hard to keep tabs on things before they manifest, or to even know they’re happening at all because lines of communication are lacking.
  • Kyle - Consensus to re-evaluate FDD

• Kris - TLDR the four focuses (from workstream leads)

  1. Improve Coordination Intra Gitcoin DAO
  2. Gitcoin Grants 2.0 (Protocol)
  3. Grow Grants GMV
  4. Financial Sustainability

• Kyle - MC & MMM are both large. Some marketing overlap between PGF & MMM.

• Simona - FDD needs to be re-aligned & re-focused. Do we feel this is the time for a reset, for this council, in terms of votes & passing any of the budgets as they are now?

• Kevin - TBH fixing the most problematic proposals this season is good enough for me

• Simona - All workstreams should submit amendments by today, so it’s in time for the snapshot on wednesday.

• Meeting Resources

Actionable

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