Hi @bordumb! First, thank you so much for the proposal and apologies for not being able to drop comments/feedback earlier. I read the Discussion & Formal Review posts and wanted to share some feedback here before voting on the Snapshot poll.
To start, to be clear: the main change made between the Discussion and Formal Review was the decision to allocate more of the budget from the FOSS Grants category to the “Other Radworks” category? So the requested budget is still 1,050,000 USDC + 100,000 USDC worth of RAD? It’s a bit unclear what the actual ask is in this version of the proposal. Perhaps try making it more clear in the Budget section.
I’ll split up my feedback by category of funding:
On “Integrations & Tooling”
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First, just wanted to give a huge shoutout to @yorgos and co. for all the amazing work they’ve contributed throughout the year on the Jetbrain/VScode integrations, migration tooling, and CI work. It’s been awesome to see you team building out the Radicle open source ecosystem and I’m excited to continue that work into 2024!
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Regarding budget, as @lftherios mentioned, the requested $680,000 USDC is around 34% of the requested development budget for Radicle (~1,975,448 USDC excluding marketing & operational costs). I believe this number is a bit too high. Allocating 680,000 USDC to only Radicle integrations would mean total spend on Radicle vs. Drips would be around 1.6x more. While I understand the need for integration & tooling to support the adoption of Radicle (@yorgos I really agree with your replies to the Discussion post), its hard to see the reason for such a larger spend on Radicle before a stable release has been shipped.
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That being said, I do believe additional funding should be allocated towards integrations & tooling via Grants outside of the Radicle budget because the work is important to the growth of Radicle’s open source ecosystem. I believe being able to provide more “stable ground” for the great developers who have been contributing to the project is important for all the reasons @yorgos listed below
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Finally, to warrant this budget I belive there needs to be some vote of support or signal of alignment from the Radicle Org team. I am hoping @cloudhead or someone else from the Radicle team can chime in here with their thoughts because it is hard to judge the value of the proposed integrations to the Radicle ecosystem (and indirectly to the Radworks ecosystem) without a supplementary opinion from building out the tech. For example, I still have open questions like:
- How does the proposed CI work interoperate with the Radicle Org’s “Build out Radicle CI/CD” objective?
- What integrations will best support Radicle’s “path to PMF” as outlined in the MoU: Radworks & Radicle Org
- What are the biggest pain points of early Radicle users?
Its hard to evaluate the budget without being able to understand how the proposed work will support & interoperate with the Radicle Org’s objectives & roadmap.
My suggestion would be reduce the number of scoped projects from 3 to 2, and closely integrate these projects with the roadmap of the Radicle Org so that they can be adapted to support the organic growth that we will see with the release of Radicle 1.0. This would mean removing projects that are dependent on the stable release (as you’ve identified).
I am lacking context for where & how the proliferation of tooling amplifies adoption of open source software, but I feel like focusing on smaller, well-scoped integrations (e.g. the migration tools, specific developer tooling) and making them great makes more sense vs. broadening the scope of integrations (e.g. IMs, messaging).
On “Other Radworks”
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I think its important that our Grants program should support the growth of all our technologies. There is a lack of detail for how Grants can support the Drips Org and their objectives in the proposal. I would like to see more definition in this category specifically highlighting the ways that grants can be used to steward & support adoption of Drips.
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I agree with reducing the “FOSS Grants” budget in an effort to put more capital & focus into this category, but (as mentioned above) believe we should add more definition to ensure that it will be allocated as intentionally & productively as it can. I believe the proposal should provide more specific context on how different types of grants tie into the objectives & roadmap of Radicle & Drips. I believe a conversation with Org leads about their needs & desires is warranted before setting this category in stone.
On “FOSS Grants”
- I understand @lftherios’s concern of “What justifies the current timing for extending beyond Radicle and Drips-related initiatives?”, and am supportive of reducing the budget for this category. My personal belief is that with proper scoping, this category can strengthen the Radworks ecosystem as whole by bringing in more developers, users, and potential governance participants to our ecosystem. While our dependency funding (Radworks Gives $1M to FOSS Dependencies with Drips — Radworks) is definitely a substantial step in this direction, I see a lot of opportunity to continue “funding new censorship-resistant and permissionless technologies to cultivate Internet freedom” without minimizing focus on Radicle and Drips respectively. I consider us building out the Radworks value proposition as mutually beneficial to the technologies we fund. That being said, I am supportive of taking a slower, more progressive approach to building out this strategy in an effort to collectively prioritize the work of Radicle & Drips.
Despite all of my feedback above, I am still in support of this proposal and plan on voting as such. Due to the organizational structure of Grants (meaning, that funds are still only accessible via application and approval by Grants committee), I believe that we can take the rest of the year to collectively restructure these objectives to ensure all capital will be allocated intentionally and productively. I am in support of the Grants Org existing in 2024 and am excited for the potential grants outlined in all three of these categories.
That being said, I believe we have to revisit the top-line number of this budget to 1) align it with the priorities of the Orgs and 2) more accurately reflect the feedback of stakeholders in the Discussion post. I believe this proposal would garner more support if it reduced budgets to something like:
- Integrations & Tooling: ~430,000 USDC (IDE Plugins + Migration Tooling)
- Other Radworks: ~250,000 USDC
- FOSS Grants: ~50,000 USDC
These are just rough numbers that “make sense” to me based on personal opinion + digesting other stakeholder feedback. However, I am really looking to the Radicle Org to provide more context on the Integration & Tooling category so I can provide a more informed opinion on what I think spend should be there.
Let me know your thoughts here. Again, apologies for not being able to send this message earlier. I am still confident we can find a way to move this proposal forward in either this cycle or the next one 