I think grantees who want to transition to a team should simply apply as a team, like radicle and drips. They can then be evaluated via the same mechanisms as everyone else.
By not seeing proven value. I’ll elaborate on the specific case in reply to bordum, but without seeing something like: “grant 123 brought N users to ” (or some other clear value), I’m going to posit that it’s too early to be spending this amount of money on grants.
I think we’re doing things the wrong way around. Grants team budget shouldn’t be the sum of all grant requests for the previous year. Grants budget should be set upfront based on what we can afford for grants, and then using that budget, we can fund teams that apply for grants.
Total grants budget for 2024. I see the grants program as unproven with respect to the amount spent on it. I couldn’t find the exact numbers, but I would not say that we got $1M-$2M of value out of it so far, which is probably what we spent.
$250K is just a number that seems right based on the funding radicle and drips received.