[Discussion] Grants Org Proposal 2023

bordumb · April 4, 2023, 9:15pm

Grants Org Proposal 2023

Author(s):	bordumb
Type:	Org
Created:	2023-03-23
Status:	active

Purpose

The Radicle Grants Org’s goal is:

To find, fund, and guide research and development of any projects that fall outside the purview of the Drips Org and Radicle Org.

Past projects include things like:

More broadly, the Radicle Grants Org is open to funding the following grant categories:

Annual Strategy & Quarterly Objectives

Recruiting

Goal: Onboard grantees to more permanent work within the Radicle ecosystem.

Philosophy: The aim with this is to provide a model for other DAOs on how to uplevel casual contributors into more permanent or regular work.

KPIs:

Easy: bring 1 grantee team to the level that they can either spin off their own Org or join an existing one in a more permanent working engagement.
Hard: bring 2+ grantee teams to that level.

Reasoning & Analysis:

How?: we will make a point about not keeping grantees tethered or beholden to Grant funding, but instead - where it makes sense - encourage them to work directly with the main RadicleDAO, other sub-DAOs, or spin off their own sub-DAO through a new proposal.
Contribution to growth: in cases where a grantee is working on an important enough problem, bringing them into the fold of more permanent work will mean putting resources behind solving important problems for the RadicleDAO at large, as well as their entire Radicle ecosystem.

Dogfooding

Goal: Utilize Radicle products for both (a) the payment of grants via Drips and (b) the organization of work via CodeCollab.

Philosophy: The aim with this is to create a positive feedback loop on product development, as well as to provide a model for other DAOs who may look to us for successful use cases of our products.

KPIs:

Easy: run 100% of Grants payouts via Drips V2
Hard: incentivize 100% of Grantees to use Radicle CodeCollab for their work.

Reasoning & Analysis:

How?: the Grant Committee will allocate extra time to using tools like Drips and create an incentive structure around adoption for Grantees (e.g. give 5% bonus per grant that adopts CodeCollab).
Contribution to growth: the benefits will be two-fold: create a feedback loop for product improvements and increase adoption via grantees.

Drip to Dependencies

Goal: Drip to the Radicle Grants Org’s dependencies.

Philosophy: We should exemplify what Radicle is all about: funding FOSS and Web3 projects, starting with those we depend on for Grants.

KPIs:

Easy: allocate 4% (40,000 USDC) of budget to Drips balance + drip to 4 dependencies as outlined here.
Hard: onboard all teams behind the 4 dependencies to at least 5 of their own dependencies, such that they split the incoming Drips from us further down the line. The aim being to kick off some network effects via Drips.

Reasoning & Analysis:

How?: we will do this by reaching out to our dependencies, collecting a list of their dependencies, reaching out to those dependencies, and so on, then onboard all of these groups to Drips. Once this is completed, we will start Dripping the allocated funds.
Contribution to growth: the benefits will be two-fold: (a) create successful case studies, which will help with marketing and (b) increase adoption and network effects for Drips.

Community Input for Grants

Goal: Integrate with GitCoin Round Manager or some other quadratic vote/funding mechanism to open some % of our budget to community input for grant funding.

Philosophy: We should open up Grants votes/funding to the community.

KPIs:

Easy: finish research and decide on
Hard: integrate with and hold 2 community based funding rounds by end of year.

Reasoning & Analysis:

How?: we will do this by continuing conversations with GitCoin, as well as bring our own marketing into the fold to recruit grantees and community voters/funders.
Contribution to growth: this should help us offload some of the overhead involved in reviewing each and every grant, especially in cases where our Committee does not have the domain expertise to call the shots on more niche grants.

Reporting & Success Criteria

The Radicle Grants Org will publicly share the following on community.radworks.org:

Quarterly reports that breakdown the operations, research, and development progress made by the Radicle Grants Org itself and grantees.
An annual report that summarizes the previous 4 quarters, with any major updates to the organization and management of the Radicle Grants Org.

Note: we will aim to progressively move more and more goals on-chain, such that there is a regular, transparent note of any progress made by the Radicle Grants Org.

Organizational Structure

Contributors

Within the Radicle Grants Org, a contributor includes:

Committee Members (i.e. multi-sig members)
Grantees

Note: see more about how voting works across these 2 groups using OtterSpace badges in the Governance/Voting section below.

Current Committee Members include:

Bordumb (Radicle Grants Org Lead)
Abbey (Radicle)
Nas (safe.global; DevDAO)
Nader (Lens Protocol)
Derek and Larry (Reverie)

Responsibilities:

Reviewing Applications: reviewing applications in detail. If a committee member does not understand something, they are expected to be resourceful in learning or finding outside council on a topic.
Reviewing Milestones/Completions: reviewing milestones/completed work in detail. If a committee member does not know something, they are expected to be resourceful in learning or finding outside council on a topic.
Multi-Sig voting: participate in voting on and funding grants.
Meetings: most work will be done asynchronously, but committee members are expected to actively participate on Discourse, community, and governance calls.

Governance/Voting

There are 2 types of votes:

Governance (OtterSpace): Committee Members + Grantees
Grant Work (Gnosis Safe): Committee Members only

For more information - including how to onboard your own DAO to OtterSpace - please see our docs here.

More on how these voting types maps to our contributors below.

Communication

The most up-to-date information on the management of the Radicle Grants Org can be found in our repo here.

For miscellaneous questions and comments, anyone can reach out on our Discord here in Grants - # general.

Grant applications and the review of grants is entirely public and carried out on the Grants Discourse page here.

Timeline & Budget

As noted in the latest approved proposal for the Radicle Grants Program here, the Radicle Grants Org shall run with optimistic funding.

We originally allocated the following amounts:

Component:	Budget
Grant Funding	1,000,000 USDC
Committee Fees	44,108 RAD

Regarding Grant Funding:

There is no set timeline on using the funds up as this is entirely contingent on receiving grant applications and how large those grants are.
In the roughly 1-year since the Grants Program started, ~752,000 USDC remain, meaning we have used roughly 250,000 or 25% of the budget in 1 year.

Regarding Committee Fees:

Committee Fees are 150 USDC per hour, meaning these are contingent on the workload of committee members. So there is no set timeline to use up the funds.
In the roughly 1-year since the Grants Program started, ~28,000 RAD remain, meaning we have used roughly 16,000 or 36% of the budget in 1 year.

Fund Management

As noted in the latest approved proposal for the Radicle Grants Program here, the Radicle Grants Org shall run with optimistic funding.

Topping Up Funds

Funds - whether USDC or RAD - will be topped up through additional Org proposals.

In the event that quorum cannot be met, the current Org shall be considered disbanded. In this case, a new Grants Lead may step forward, recruit committee members, and go through the Org proposal process.

Fund Retrieval

Funds can be retrieved via the following methods:

A vote of no confidence by RAD token holders, meaning the larger ecosystem of RAD token holders.
A vote of no confidence by OtterSpace badge holders, meaning the tighter knit community of Grants Org contributors.

Upon a vote of no confidence, the Grants Committee must rubber stamp a return of all funds back to the RadicleDAO’s wallet.