[Discussion] Radicle Ecosystem Growth Fund

👩‍⚖️ Governance ⚡ Proposal Drafts
1

The official discussion for the Radicle Ecosystem Growth Fund (EGF) proposal. With this post, the proposal has entered the second phase of the governance process. Please review the drafted proposal and contribute feedback by 7th February 2022.

Functional Description

The proposal is to start MVPing the Radicle EGF. The focus of which will be on funding initiatives that drive engagement and adoption. We have very strong early signals of product market fit with users and platforms looking to join our ecosystem. Once these have been proven out with activated users and integrations we need to build a playbook to focus on scaling and optimising.

Radicle’s current focus is on building and growing adoption of a secure and uncensorable code infrastructure, collective code governance, and new ways to earn for open source. The growth DAO will use all methods to grow adoption of the protocols and interfaces in this network.

Types of Initiatives

Initiatives can be proposed by any member of the Radicle community and must follow the same format as the format established by Radicle. They cannot be free-form. This is to ensure some level of equality when assessing multiple applicants.

We expect that in Season 1 of the EGF, most initiatives will come from the core Radicle team. Over time, the line between core member based initiatives and community ones should blur. This will be a key part of Radicle’s progressive decentralisation.

Scope

The first season will last 6 months. Proposals will be reviewed on a rolling basis. Every 2 weeks proposals will be assessed by Committee Members.

We envision projects in the following categories

  1. Growth contributors
  2. Hackathon/event sponsorships
  3. Content/media channel sponsorships
  4. Educational content sponsorships
  5. Product driven growth development
  6. Gas reimbursements

Note: Details above are subject to change based on our experience providing grants.

Budget & Timeline

  • Amount: $500,000 (USDC)
  • Length: 6 months

Team & Responsibilities

Radical EGF (Multi-Sig)

The below group will act as signers of the EGF multi-sig. The multi-sig votes here will act as both approval of growth initiatives as well as the funding of initiatives.

The EGF will be governed by a group made up for core team, community, and ecosystem members that have expertise in growth. We believe this approach balances fast decision making, guided by a deep understanding of what is best for the project. Having community and ecosystem members in the group ensures that community and ecosystem perspectives are represented as initiatives are proposed.

Members include:

Committee compensation

Non-radicle core members will be compensated with $2000 per month for their position on the committee. This will be paid out in $RAD based on the average price over a 60 days period prior to the launch of the GrowthDAO.

Growth Lead

As mentioned in the forums, the Radicle Governance Working Group has been wanting to see a growth initiative focused DAO setup and this has been spearheaded by Nassar (core team)

The EGF lead will also be complemented by a committee made up of core contributors + community members. Here’s what the role will consist of:

  • Organising and processing initiative ideas: this will include ideas from core Radicle members or open applications from the community (e.g. requests for hackathon sponsorships)
  • Initial screening of proposals: Committee Members and Core Team members should trust that they will only have to assess proposals who have met a high bar.
  • Scheduling review calls: this will include scheduling calls between proposers and any relevant Committee Members and/or Core Team
  • Tracking delivery/progress: The Growth Lead will track and review delivery and ROI on initiatives to share with the committee and wider community.
  • Multi-Sig voting: the Growth Lead will communicate to relevant Committee Members when a vote for finalized work is in order.

The core goal of the Growth Lead is to build the Radicle ecosystem.

Program Structure & Process

Implementation

  1. EGF will be setup as a multisig
  2. EGF members will be added to the multisig
  3. The members will contribute to and review a strategy for this round of the EGF.
  4. Initiatives can be proposed by core team, radicle community, or the wider web3 ecosystem using a templated markdown document

Application Process

Location: there will be an AirTable based application.

Process: it will ask the Applicant for things like their name/pseudonym, org they represent, GitHub, twitter or other previous work material. It will also ask for details on ROI for Radicle from funding their proposal.

Initiative Approval

The Growth Lead is to communicate Multi-Sig voting due dates and any required secondary assessments. This will occur on the last Friday of every month subject to Committee Member availability.

In leu of synchronous interviews, Committee Members may assess applicants asynchronously by providing written questions for the applicant(s) to respond to. This must be done in a timely manner (i.e. several days prior to when the final assessment takes place).

Work Approval

All projects will go through the initial approval. This will be managed entirely by the EGF Committee. An approval in this case is any multi-sig vote on a project that reaches quorum for the initial payment (see Payment section below).

Payment

Payment agreements will be based on milestone, streaming, or upfront basis subject to what is most appropriate for the initiative. We aim to use drips.network in order to transfer funds from the EGF to wallets specified by projects.

Purpose

The purpose of this entire exercise comes down to three main goals.

  1. Growth:

Initially the efforts at the top of the funnel will be about growing an audience, understanding their reality and needs, understanding their blockers, and maintaining their engagement with the Radicle network. Whilst we build out the radicle stack to become invaluable and core infrastructure, we will need to leverage a number of tools at out disposal.

Once we have started seeing adoption we should move towards starting to build our growth systems, models, and initiatives. Acquisition, Activation, Retention, Referral, and Revenue.

  1. Adoption/Activation:

“The objective here is for more and more decentralised communities to use Radicle on a frequent basis for community-critical operations. This could take the form of using Radicle as an active mirror for their Github/Gitlab projects, using Radicle orgs for organisation management and releases or funding their operations through Radicle”

  1. Progressive decentralisation:

Radicle is meant to enable the decentralisation of governance and contributions to free and open-source software. As a result, Radicle itself should be self-governed, self-funded, and self-built for and by the Radicle community. This also aligns with the third high-level objective of the Radicle Foundation.

Background (what is the reasoning behind the proposal?)

The reasoning behind starting a EGF is to add structure, process, and automation to the funding of new contributors and community members that want to propose and see growth initiatives implemented. This will help us put our best foot forward in decentralising Radicle.

Link to Temperature Check

[Temperature Check] Growth Workstream Thanks for the awesome feedback everyone. We plan to discuss the Radicle GrowthDAO in more detail on the Radicle Governance Working Group call. If the feedback is positive, we’ll close the temperature check and move on to the next step of the process, a structured discussion. Before we start the structured discussion.

Reasoning & analysis (what is the case for the proposal? what are the pros and cons?)

Pros

  • The pros largely follow the Purpose section above
    • Progressive decentralisation: almost by definition, a grants program decentralises
    • Team growth: the EGF can become a powerful channel for attracting community contributors as well as new core members
    • Network user growth: the EGF will bring in more developers wanting to use radicle and teams wanting to build on radicle.

Cons

  • There is a risk of projects not working out as expected

Technical implementation (who will be writing the code? what is the scope required?)

Treasury Funding

  • Amount: $500,000
  • Period: 6 months
  • At the end of the period, the money should be sent back to the Treasury
  • Would need someone from Core Dev Team + Treasury to implement this

At the end of the 6 months, a new season must be announced, go through the normal governance process.

Impact (how does this contribute to the long-term resilience, sustainability and/or growth of the Radicle network?)

(Note: largely covered above in the Purpose section, so summarised below)

  • User Growth
  • Adoption/activation
  • Progressive decentralization: self-sustaining (community funded/community built) growth from community contributors
2 Likes
2

I’m definitely in support of moving this proposal forward! I’m very interested in seeing us experimenting with subDAO-esque structures in the Radicle ecosystem that can deploy capital quickly & efficiently towards focused “prime directives”.

My main open questions are regarding process & execution and IMO, don’t need to be answered before moving this proposal through to Formal Review:

  • What’s the difference between the Initiative Approval vs. Work Approval? Seems like the Initiative Approval is a soft off-chain approval process whereas the Work Approval is the multi-sig sign-off? Is this correct?

  • Does this mean initiatives will only be funded on a monthly basis?

  • Should we direct all event sponsorships to this Fund instead of via the Radicle Foundation? If so, we might want to earmark a certain amount to sponsorships as we have a rough estimate of what we spend monthly.

  • Any legal considerations here?

  • Just to clarify, will all distributions be done via drips.network? Would love to see it :slight_smile:

The one question I’d like to propose we answer before this moves into Formal Review, is the following:

  • How do you believe success should be measured for the Radicle Ecosystem Growth Fund? What KPIs or objectives should the community compare against when this Fund comes to an end?

I believe having a mutual agreement of how success should be evaluated will provide the community with a better foundation for making a decision to continue/remove support of any Treasury-funded initiative when the time comes.

2 Likes
3

Hey, this looks awesome!

I don’t see anything that is a hard blocker for me on this.

Just dropping some ideas to improve it moving into a formal review.

Mainly around 3 topics: compensation, technical implementation, and scope

Committee compensation

2 questions / points here.

  1. How will Radicle Core members be compensated for their work on this committee? What incentive does a Core Member have to take on this added responsibility?

  2. Interesting non-core incentive model

Non-radicle core members will be compensated with $2000 per month for their position on the committee. This will be paid out in $RAD based on the average price over a 60 days period prior to the launch of the GrowthDAO.

This will be an interesting experiment as it contrasts with the Grants Program.

I think it’s worth playing out the mental math here…

The current 60-day moving average is $8.45 (source: https://www.coingecko.com/en/coins/radicle/historical_data/usd?start_date=2021-12-08&end_date=2022-02-08#panel)

This means non-core members will be paid roughly 240 RAD per month for 6 months.

With 4 non-core members (Dimitar, Nadia, Richard, Shah), this will amount to 5,760 RAD over 6 months (4 contributors * 240 RAD/month * 6 months). This 5,760 RAD is an upper bound limit on what will be paid out.

Pros

  • Low overhead in terms of managing this contributor budget; very much “Set it and forget it”
  • Nice upside if the price goes up

Cons

  • There is no way to control if the price goes downward (hopefully it doesn’t). But it might be worth keeping an eye on this if that does happen.

Overall, I like that this contrasts with the Grant Program and it’d be nice to share notes at some point on how well we think one works over the other.

Technical Implementation

You might find the code from the Grants proposal useful.

I’d add similar code as in the “Actions” section to the Formal Review as it helps solidify what is actually going to be implemented. We took a long time to write this out for the original Grants proposal and I think that slowed us down.

Scope

Here is the current scope:

  1. Growth contributors
  2. Hackathon/event sponsorships
  3. Content/media channel sponsorships
  4. Educational content sponsorships
  5. Product driven growth development
  6. Gas reimbursements

I can already see places where I might want to offload/transfer some of the incoming Grants work to your committee. As an example, this education-based application as well as this education-based application.

Again, not a blocker, but definitely worth chatting about this in detail. I think it will help us with the following:

  1. Clear / intelligible channels for anyone in the ecosystem that wants to work with us; lowers confusion
  2. If we draw clear lines, we can get laser focused on building specific expertise across different subDAOs. This will help us become domain experts, rather than jack-of-all-trades-and-master-of-none :slight_smile:
1 Like
4

good point. think these can be merged into one step for the EGF based on experience with grants programme.

  1. no. can also be done async and at any point. the monthly point is just around the aim of having a monthly meeting.
  2. sure.
  3. no idea re legal considerations. most initiatives I know are happy to accept crypto payments.
  4. yeh. where possible

for this round:

  • a clear strategy for growth of the radicle ecosystem to be taken into the next round
  • number of inititives funded
  • number of active partnerships

I don’t believe we’re at a stage yet where we can get very narrow about this, but hope to be a lot more number driven in the next round.

5
  1. core is already incentivised and has compensation structures in place for their time. Not sure about the doubling up.
  2. yeah. that’s a good point. would perhaps adjust to either the 60 day moving average or the price at time of payment and using whichever value is lower each month.

yup. we can discuss and work that out as we go through our first rounds together.

Thank you for the feedback. Abbey suggested a subDAO fight… but I think having these pools of capital work together will work very well :smiley:

6

Cool.
I’d recommend spelling this out in detail in your formal discussion. It caused a lot of back-and-forth with the Grants proposal, which slowed things down.

If you do, the part around How will we handle volatility in RAD:USD? from the Grants Proposal may be useful.

I also have it as a Python notebook here in case you want to play around with the numbers.

1 Like
7

This Discussion has been officially moved to Formal Review :point_down:

Voting is open until 11:00 CET on Tuesday, February 22nd. Submit your vote here :seedling: