[Discussion][RGP - 19] - Drips Org Proposal 2024

👩‍⚖️ Governance ⚡ Proposal Drafts
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Author(s): @lftherios
Type: org
Created: 2023-11-06
Status: active

:memo: This is the official discussion post for the 2024 Drips Org budget proposal. With this post, the proposal has entered the first phase of the governance process. Please review the drafted proposal and contribute feedback by Sunday, November 19th. This proposal will be discussed in the Proposal Review call on Wednesday, November 15th. Add to calendar here.

Purpose

The team’s mission is to enable FOSS developers to financially thrive.

In short, the Drips Org is taking on the problem of FOSS sustainability. We develop novel protocols, tools and applications that enable new value flows for developers in order to receive funds from their users.

Our current focus is on establishing Dependency Funding as a new norm for Web3 communities to fund their critical software dependencies.

Strategy & Roadmap

Strategy

Our strategy for 2024 remains “funder focused”, meaning that we prioritize funder neeeds within our execution with the goal to (a) attract more funders and capital in Drips that is directed towards their critical software dependencies and (b) to onboard more FOSS projects that claim those funds and choose to further split those funds with their software dependencies.

KPIs

  1. Number of orgs that use Drips to fund their critical software dependencies
  2. Total $ value deposited in Drips
  3. % $ value collected by recipients
  4. % projects that have claimed who also choose to split to their dependencies
  5. Funder retention

Yearly Objectives

  • 20 orgs that use Drips to fund their dependencies
  • $10m deposited

Roadmap

Following our “funder focused” approach we plan on working on the following topics:

Introduce the option to KYC recipients before they claim funds.

This is currently a blocker for a number of orgs that consider this a hard pre-requisite in order to fund their critical software dependencies. We plan on integrating with an existing provider that provides this optional capability.

Multi-party Drip List creation

This is addressing the friction for a group of people to collectively agree on the items of a Drip List and the associated %s. We believe that this feature can provide a much smoother UX for DAOs to fund their critical software dependencies.

Scaling notification of recipients

This is something that we do manually today via Github issues, Twitter and email but this isn’t scalable. We are looking to automate some of that work with the goal to notify more users that funds are waiting for them and have them claim them.

Partner with well-known orgs & co-create topic-specific Drip Lists

This piece of work aims to explore the possibility to use Drip Lists as a curation mechanism for funding FOSS work. The idea here is to partner with well established organizations in order to a. create a Drip List that is specific to a topic b. bring awareness to the recipienets for the work they are doing with regards to this topic and c. fund it.

An example would be if we partner with the EF and the Tor Foundation to create a privacy specific list for the Ethereum community. In this example privacy related FOSS projects & researchers & engineers that contribute impactful work on the domain will be selected and a campaign will be created in order to fund this Drip List.

Migrate to Chainlink’s decentralized oracle network

This piece of work aims to replace our current dependence on a selected group of Chainlink Oracle providers with their decentralized network of oracle providers. This is not yet on main-net but we’ve been working with their team and we will be ready to migrate when they launch it. We consider this work important as it minimizes the risk of oracle misbehavior and as a result the risk of loss of funds.

Lowering the barrier-of-entry for claiming

We plan to leverage account abstraction so that users can claim and manage projects without a pre-existing Ethereum identity, increasing the velocity of funds.

Attract funders beyond established DAOs

One of the things that we plan to do in 2024 is to expand our focus beyond well established DAOs which is our current segment. Specifically in 2024, we want to do the partnership and product work that will allow us to attract funders from the following market segments:

  • existing DAOs (this is our current focus)
  • DAOs to be formed. The work here would be to convince teams that are about to launch their native token to commit to a scheme where they pay it forward to their dependencies for the next few years.
  • well funded web3 companies. The attempt here would be to expand beyond DAOs and try to attract “off-chain” actors from the crypto industry (think crypto exchanges, wallets etc.)
  • traditional tech and finance organizations. An example here is the recent commitment from Van Eck to fund Protocol Guild with 10% of their profits. This is less defined than the rest but we want to explore the opportunity space and further define our strategy for this market segment later in the year.

Quarterly Objectives

For Q1 2024 we want to:

  • attract 5 new orgs that fund their critical software dependencies
  • additional $1m deposited in Drips

Organizational Structure

We have established a Swiss non-for-profit association that we call the Public Goods Association that is the recipient of funds. The founding members operate as a committe based on simple majority (3 out of 5).

The Association is an independent legal entity with legal capacity. It is governed by Swiss law. The official language of the association is English.

Founding Members

lftherios (current project lead)
json (product & application development)
jtourkos (product, SDK & application development)
everett (product & application development)
brandonhaslegs (design)

Contractors

IgorZuk (smart contract development)
earthwindfirewater (partnerships, research & strategy)
LukeF (partnerships)
Project Jasmine (operations)
Abbey Titcomb (partnerships)

Contributors

  • lftherios (project lead)
  • json (product & application development)
  • jtourkos (product, SDK & application development)
  • everett (product & application development)
  • brandonhaslegs (design)
  • IgorZuk (smart contract development)
  • earthwindfirewater (research & partnerships)
  • LukeF (partnerships)
  • Project Jasmine (operations)
  • Abbey Titcomb (partnerships)

Communication

Reasoning & Analysis

Drips empowers builders to continue contributing to the commons (Free and Open Source Software) by creating new value flows towards them based on their impact.

In short we believe that our work strengthens the incentives to build FOSS by re-distributing wealth towards the most impactful FOSS projects. We consider this an essential part of the Radworks mission to cultivate internet freedoms.

Reporting & Success Criteria

  1. Number of orgs that use Drips to fund their critical software dependencies.
  2. Total $ value deposited in Drips
  3. % $ value collected by recipients
  4. % projects that have claimed who also choose to split to their dependencies
  5. Funder retention

Before the Snapshot poll for this proposal , we will share a link to a Dune dashboard with the above metrics.

Through Q2 2024, the Foundation Org will provide monthly financial reporting to Radworks on behalf of the Foundation, Radicle, Drips and Grants Orgs. Therefore, starting in Q3 2024, the Drips Org will publish monthly financial reports on Radworks-granted funds spent by the Drips Org.

Retrospective

Timeline & Budget

The total budget requested for 2024 is $1,103,645.

Specifically:

Description Budget
Contributors $1,326,515
Marketing $325,809
Offsites $30,000
Accounting $9,307
Operations $12,014
Total $1,703,645

This includes budget to bring on a marketing lead for Drips.

Budget carried over from last year

There will be an estimate of $600,000 left over at the end of 2023.

Requested budget

$1,703,645 - $600,000 = $1,103,645

Fund Management

We plan to use a multi-sig (gnosis safe with 3/5 signatures) with founding members as signers. We won’t use a bank account. Crypto to FIAT conversions will take place through Skyline Digital and that’s why you see the fees on our budget.

The Drips Org - also the “Grant Recipient” of Radworks, if this proposal is passed - hereby agrees to use the amount granted by Radworks in support of fulfilling the purpose outlined in the “Purpose” section above. The Grant Recipient understands and acknowledges that the awarded amount may be used only for this Purpose. Furthermore, any part of the grant that goes unused in the calendar year outlined in this proposal (for 2024) will either be returned to the Radworks Treasury (by March 2025) or rolled over into and applied towards the Org’s 2025 proposal and future grant from Radworks.

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Thanks for the proposal @lftherios & Drips team!:droplet: It has been exciting to watch your massive progress this year (see summarized nicely in your 2023 retrospective)! A few questions & comments regarding your proposal below:

Is this 20 new Orgs or 20 total? How many do Orgs are currently using Drips to fund their dependancies?

Are these initiatives in any particular order of importance or perhaps in chronological order of when you plan to tackle them throughout the year? If not, would you mind adding some context around how you plan to prioritize these throughout the year?

This is a really great initiative and will certainly unblock a lot of potential users. When you plan to have the integration in place and functional?

Is there anywhere one can read more about how you plan to do this? Curious to learn more about the technical setup under the hood for this.

Does the Chainlink team have an estimation for when this will be on main-net? Will this migration temporarily disrupt the protocol/active Drips lists in any way?

Just to clarify, any funding from other organizations would come in the form of a “grant” or “donation” - not as capital investment expecting return, correct? I am referring to the following section of the Drips<>Radworks MoU:

Looking forward to this! Will be a really nice way for the Drips team and Radworks community to track progress real time.

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Hey @shelb_ee, thanks a lot for your reply. Jumping in to answer some of the product-related questions :slightly_smiling_face:

Are these initiatives in any particular order of importance or perhaps in chronological order of when you plan to tackle them throughout the year?

Since a year is a pretty long time, the roadmap is fuzzy. These are the larger initiatives that we’re currently quite certain will play an important role in the future, but what we eventually end up prioritizing in what order depends on the feedback and impulses we get from (potential) users over the next year more acutely.

If not, would you mind adding some context around how you plan to prioritize these throughout the year?

We’re quite frequently having meeting with users, both funders and project maintainers, to get feedback on our platform and UX. As Ele lined out, we’re focussed on acquiring funders at the moment, so we’re mainly prioritizing to drive funder-related metrics. This means that as we identify potential blockers for onboarding orgs in our conversations, those will carry a larger weight in our short-term priorization. Both our current main product priority (One-Time Donations) and next larger initiative (KYC) are direct results of funder feedback. So, to sum it up — we’re continuously assessing the potential upside of our backlog items in regards to funder-related metrics, and picking the most promising ones to build out short-term.

This is a really great initiative and will certainly unblock a lot of potential users. When you plan to have the integration in place and functional?

ATM, it’s still a little tricky to set a tight timeline on this given the myriad of possible approaches and platforms, but it’s our next big priority, right after wrapping up One-Time Donations (which we expect to happen in the next 2-3 weeks). How long it’ll take to launch depends on some larger variables like whether smart contract work will end up being required. Still, we’re aiming for having something in place around EOY / early next year.

Does the Chainlink team have an estimation for when this will be on main-net? Will this migration temporarily disrupt the protocol/active Drips lists in any way?

Probably more of a question for @igor, but as far as I’m aware they’re already on mainnet in beta, and a bunch of work was already done on our end to integrate it. Of course Chainlink currently still cautions against using Functions to secure any real-world value, so we’re going to have to wait for them to give the green light. Once that happens, I wouldn’t expect any downtime or protocol disruptions.

Is there anywhere one can read more about how you plan to do this? Curious to learn more about the technical setup under the hood for this.

Not yet. We’re generally trying to figure out technical solutions as close to feature release as possible, in typical agile™ JIT fashion :slightly_smiling_face: For this particular feature, the plan is to run manual “discovery workshops” with one of the funder orgs in our pipeline shortly, with the goal of settling on a single holistic Drip List for the entire org. The learnings from this process will then inform our design for our multiplayer Drip List solution, and the design in turn informs the technical approach.

Just to clarify, any funding from other organizations would come in the form of a “grant” or “donation” - not as capital investment expecting return, correct?

The point here was to say “funders” as in “orgs that use Drips to fund their dependencies”, not funders that fund Drips as a platform.

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What a strong proposal, Drips Team. I get a clear sense of what the product will look and feel like - and why.

A small typo: EFF, I presume?

A small clarification: I’m assuming “$10M deposited in the Drips protocol”?

I love this. There are some synergies with the Foundation’s objectives - and I would really like to coordinate how we can harness the Foundation’s outreach to like-minded organizations (like Tor, etc.) to support this work at the Drips Org.

I see that Drips success for 2024 looks like: 20 new orgs and $10M deposited. I can understand the quarterly goal setting that you did here. Do you aim to set a quarterly goal going forward as you approach the beginning of a new quarter?

And for Q1, is it clear what kind of potential new orgs are worth prioritizing recruiting to Drips, given the state of features by end of 2023?

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Got it, thanks! Is there a public place you are tracking this feedback? Is there a mechanism or process for users to provide feedback/share what features/functionality would be most important to them? One idea for you folks is to potentially use Jokerace as a way to collect feature/functionality signals and users could then vote on which ones would be most useful for them. This would also be a cool community collective way to collect ideas for features. Here is an example of how Aragon did this.

This is great! Excited to follow progress here!

Makes sense.

Cool! Excited to follow this initiative.

Got it! Thanks

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Thanks for the awesome proposal @lftherios! Exciting things on the horizon for Drips :slight_smile:

I have some follow-up questions:

Can you share a baseline of where we stand currently in relation to these KPIs? Is this what we can expect from the Dune Dashboard?

How do we define “orgs” here? Are they funding their dependencies one-time, or multiple times? Can you estimate how many “recipients” you’ll have if you successfully onboard 20 orgs & $10m in revenue? Seems like this is going to be a huge amount of operational work — especially with KYC involved. Who will manage this work?

How does the creation of Drip Lists correlate to the onboarding of Orgs? If you “partner” with EF and Tor Foundation, does that also include onboarding them? If not, I would expect these types of partnerships to also be captured in your objectives.

Perhaps a noob question, but what is required to migrate to Chainlink’s decentralized oracle network once it’s ready? Does it require anything from governance?

Can you expand on what you mean by “leveraging account abstraction”?

Regarding the “attract funders beyond established DAOs” point — when you say “partnership and product work” what do you mean exactly?

Can you elaborate more on your marketing costs? Do you have a set of marketing objectives that you’re building the budget off of? How much is being allocated to sponsorships vs. contributor spend?

Do you have any planned hires beyond the marketing lead?

Please link to your MoU and I’d suggest you share the Dune dashboard with above metrics before the Proposal Review so we have time to discuss them IRL. Also there are a couple of typos, would suggest re-reading and fixing them before this goes to Formal Review :slight_smile:

Great work! :two_hearts:

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Thanks, looks great. My only question is this:

Are there thoughts/efforts around organic growth? Basically, do you have an idea of how your users (both funders and fundees) will grow without you having to go to each org one by one and onboard them?

I’m asking this because I’d like to see Drips as more than a funding tool, since it has some great potential network effects.

I’m guessing that manual org onboarding is just step one, and you hope that this will result in organic growth too.

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Love to see this proposal!
image

Re the budget:
Is the new marketing lead compensation currently included in the Contributor budget or Marketing budget? Are there specific initiatives planned for the $325k marketing budget?

In September 2023 there was a $145K USD payment for a security audit, is there a plan for another one next year?

Thank you!

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Thanks @abbey for your support and for such a thoughtful response! I will try to answer some of your specific questions below.

How does the creation of Drip Lists correlate to the onboarding of Orgs? If you “partner” with EF and Tor Foundation, does that also include onboarding them? If not, I would expect these types of partnerships to also be captured in your objectives.

I want to start here by saying that there is still a lot of uncertainty about where the most usage for Drips will come from given that Drips V2 has still only been live on mainnet for a few months. With that said, so far we are seeing the most interest from large web3 DAOs and other public goods funding orgs like Octant and we believe that - at least initially - that is where the biggest opportunity is.

With those orgs, the org itself typically creates at least one Drip List as a funder (in Radworks case, they created 4 because of the sub-DAOs) but then another Drip List is typically created by each of the recipients (so that they can split some to their dependencies as well). So the best way to think about the relationship between onboarding orgs and the creation of Drip Lists is that it will essentially always be one-to-many.

If we “partner” with orgs like EFF and Tor to create a new Drip List around FOSS projects working on privacy, then you’re absolutely right that we would be “onboarding” in the sense that we would be working with them to help educate them and support in creation of the list. But in this type of case, creating the list is separate from finding significant funding for the list - which may be difficult to do - which is one reason we are hesitant to state specific quantitative objectives for this type of partnership. It’s really still in the exploratory stages and we are putting much less of a focus on it versus DAOs. But if we can get an successful example - like the privacy list - that we see actually receiving significant funding, then it’s something that we will put more energy into and in that case I think it could possibly be warranted - back to your specific question - to count that list and the associated funds as part of our 20 “orgs” that we hope to onboard in 2024.

Perhaps a noob question, but what is required to migrate to Chainlink’s decentralized oracle network once it’s ready? Does it require anything from governance?

Your question is not a noob question at all! Unfortunately, right now the interface with Chainlink’s new decentralized oracle network only allows for an EOA to control the oracle. We would like for the Radworks DAO to have control of the oracle, so this is currently another blocker for this feature. @igor is in discussions with the Chainlink team and they are aware of this requirement from our side. Once they have enabled a smart contract to be able to control the oracle, we will most likely execute an upgrade to RepoDriver which will switch it to use the new Chainlink oracle with the Radworks DAO set as the owner. (@igor please correct me if I’m wrong here!)

Regarding the “attract funders beyond established DAOs” point — when you say “partnership and product work” what do you mean exactly?

The “partnership” part of this work is clearer right now: the first step is to have initial conversations with prospective funder orgs beyond established DAOs and assess their appetite for doing this sort of FOSS dependency funding and also learn what specific features they would require to do so. This is really still exploratory, but could move to something more concrete if an org expresses interest. An example of where we explored this in the past year was a conversation we had with the Ethereum Foundation around dependency funding. And looking ahead, we currently have a meeting scheduled with a VC firm from the traditional finance space to assess their interest in doing something similar to what Van Eck has pledged. It’s important to stress though that while the potential of opening up these sorts of new funding streams for FOSS devs is really exciting, we also see it as, at the same time, more challenging than getting established web3 DAOs to commit to funding dependencies, so for now we are being measured in how much time we allocate to this work. If we start getting positive responses from orgs that we talk with, then we will most likely look to scale up our work in this area.

In terms of the “product” part of this work, this refers to the specific features that such funders would like or need to see added to the protocol and app in order to make Drips more attractive as a dependency funding solution to them. Since we are in the early stages of these conversations, the specifics of these features are still mostly unknown. However, to give just one example of what this might look like, we have already had several conversations with the Privy team around the possibility of integrating their “embedded wallet” solution, which would make it much easier for non crypto-native users to use the Drips app to receive funding - something that may be very helpful if a larger percentage of the funders (and hence FOSS dependencies as well) are coming from trad-fi or web2.

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That is actually a great idea. Plurality Labs with Arbitrum has used Jokerace, and it has worked well for them.

In terms of tracking feedback, we maintain a comprehensive document to capture user insights. To address pressing queries, our product team is actively involved. While privacy constraints prevent us from disclosing specific details, we can provide an overview of prevalent themes we’ve identified so far:

  1. Enthusiastic Reception of Fund Recipients:
  • “I would like to see dependency funding become the norm in the space.”
  • “This is groundbreaking.”
  • “I appreciate the initiative; we need more recurring funding.”
  1. UI/UX Enhancement Feedback:
  • Suggestions to add breadcrumbs to the initial “claim page.”
  • Recommendations to incorporate one-time-drips, coined as ‘Drops’ (scheduled for release in 2-3 weeks).
  • Calls for improved clarity on balance information and various other UI/UX aspects.
  • Minor feedback on the readability of the pixelated font.
  1. Organic Reactions on Social Media:
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You surface good points @abbey. I’ll try to address some of your questions :slight_smile:

We naturally consider ‘Orgs’ as projects with the potential to fund their dependencies, typically organizations with substantial treasuries. This definition should gain more clarity as we engage in discussions and onboard more organizations. We’ve observed that dependencies (recipients) could also transition into becoming funders (“orgs”). Think of OpenZeppelin.

Our research indicates that projects and maintainers can generally identify their 5 to 10 most critical dependencies. Successfully onboarding 20 ‘Orgs’ could result in funding anywhere from 100 to 200 dependencies.

Regarding the operational workload, we acknowledge potential challenges, especially with KYC. However, it’s important to note that KYC may not be a requirement for all funders.

At present, the number of funders and recipients is manageable, allowing us to develop an ‘ideal’ and ‘repeatable’ process. This involves testing various approaches to determine what works best. We see the recipient side (which I assume you are referring to) as a funnel:

  1. Awareness: Recipients become aware that an organization is donating funds to them through Drips.
  2. Learn: They gain a comprehensive understanding before proceeding to the next step.
  3. Claim: Drips UX flow and documentation facilitate and support recipients in the claiming process.
  4. Split and Spread the Love: Transform recipients into funders. Also, incentivize them to mention Drips via different channels to increase awareness.

We feel we are well equipped to scale processes and systems, as our team includes people who went through scaling processes at different organizations.

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Thank you @shelb_ee @ange @abbey @cloudhead @Yuvalis for your feedback and to @efstajas @andrewd and @Lfada for the answers they provided already.

I will try to answer most of the open questions below and I will incorporate most of them on the proposal that will be included with the Snapshot poll.

20 orgs in total.

These are donations via the Drips protocol.

No I actually meant the Ethereum Foundation here.

That is correct. I will update it.

I think that’s a good idea. Thank you for the suggestion.

Yes we are currently focused on DAOs with large treasuries.

We currently have two orgs using Drips, one more committed that hasn’t started funding yet and we are in advanced talks with one more.

The total value deposited on Drips is approximately $1.5m. Until we share our Dune dashboard, you can monitor this in real time here under token holdings: https://etherscan.io/address/0xd0dd053392db676d57317cd4fe96fc2ccf42d0b4

For now we count both orgs that do one-off funding as well as orgs that stream over time.

It’s quite hard to estimate how many recipients we will have but based on our estimated we expect between 3-50 recipients per org. Right now this work is managed by @Lfada and myself but we remain open to update our strategy the moment we face any bottlenecks there.

The idea of context specific campaigns around Drip Lists is not yet tested. We will update our objectives as the year progresses, after we test them with some partners.

My current thinking here is the following: our marketing work needs to acoomplish three objectives: 1. increase awareness 2. build legitimacy 3. facilitate deep engagements with potential funders.

Practically we are looking to scale our social media presence, create long-form content that legitimizes dependency funding and Drips and attend & present at industry events where we facilitate get-togethers with potential funders.

With regards to costs, we are looking at spending roughly $120k on our new marketing lead and around 200k on the initiatives I outline before. With regards to sponsorships we will be only assessing them depending on the opportunity at hand and what we think we can accomplish, as we there is a lot of variance on how much they contribute to our objectives.

We are currently considering candidates for social media but nothing committed yet. We will only proceed if we find the right candidate. If not we will cover with existing contributors.

Yeah our hope and strategy is that this leads to organic growth.

I agree with you that Drips has potential for organic network effects. However, our past experiences have taught us the crucial role capital plays in retaining builders, especially when your focus is on funding Free and Open Source Software (FOSS). Therefore, our strategy is to expand our capital and anticipate that organic growth will ensue.

Yeap. The budget for the new marketing lead is under Marketing on our budget for now. See my answer to @abbey above for specific initiatives.

At the moment, we don’t have a plan for another audit . Having said that, if our TVL grows well above $10m we will definitely consider it.

Thank you.

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