[Formal Review 🌿 ] - Radicle Grants Program [v1]

[lftherios]

Thank you for the answers @bordumb. From my side, I feel that my points have been addressed and the current proposal works for me.

To @niloconthecob’s @abbey’s and your point about a Compensation Committee: I think it’s a great idea. I don’t particularly think that Foundation members should be involved, but we should debate that when that proposal moves forward.

[yorgos]

Thanks for engaging!

To be clear, I was talking about the expected value that Radicle Grants would bring to Radicle, as a whole. Not about the individual projects which the committee team members would be evaluating.

My train of thought was:

• Presumably, some team, somewhere made a decision that Radicle Grants is “a good idea” ™.
• That decision was made because it was agreed upon that some value would be generated from this program for Radicle. (it sounds to me that this is - after all - a kind of an investment)
• If there was some expected return on that investment, that could be the expected value.
• Once we knew that value, we could then decide - for example - a % of that value that would be the amount that could be used to compensate the committee.

I guess you get the point by now… I don’t mean to be putting any obstacles here or anything, I just wanted to offer an alternative and better explain this idea, that’s all.

Thanks again!

[bordumb]

That makes sense.

I can see a useful framework for categorizing and prioritizing grants work.

For example, if we say that the value proposition of the grants program is to grow the Radicle user base, we might categorize projects as follows:

• Acquisition: anything that brings in new users (e.g. new features, enterprise features, lowering friction on any features, etc.)
• Retention: anything that keeps users engaged with the platform (i.e. network effects type stuff that makes it sticky)

But I’d still say putting a value - as in a monetary value - to each of these tasks is a bit tricky. Radicle itself is not a subscription service with a fixed cost (i.e. users aren’t paying say $10/month for usage). It’s very easy for web2 platforms like Netflix to do this sort of valuation of tasks because they can say things like: “Our new XYZ product feature will bring in 100,000 new users, which will convert to $10 subscriptions. So the estimated value is $1,000,000 incremental growth per month.”

I like the idea of applying some framework as noted above.

But how might you actually put a number to each of those tasks, without any fixed income coming from the user base?

[yorgos]

hmmm, I have lots more thoughts on the topic, but perhaps it’s time to take a step back and consider whether this discussion should spin off into its own thread or something?

It doesn’t sound like this discussion is directly related to the Radicle Grants program, and - considering that such a framework does not appear to have been used so far (as far as I understand, being still new to all this) - it should probably not be blocking the program from moving forward with the current approach.

I am more than happy to contribute further if you feel such a framework would be helping Radicle however - please just let me know what is the best place to do that in.