General Announcements & Updates
- Given the 2025 scope of the Foundation, core contributors for 2025 are Ange, Sally, Natascha (our newly hired Admin Support), and Daniel (Legal). We are all very part time and so the best way to get hold of us is by email. First resort: ops_at_betterinternet.foundation.
- Things on the Foundation’s horizon:
- The Foundation will be working with Org Leads to determine what legal work should be prioritized and completed by Orgs to respond to policy and regulatory developments that impact their products. Since Orgs will now pay this legal work, the Foundation will re-invoice Org entities directly for this work (this is why the 2025 budgets for Orgs have a legal budget). Work may include: privacy policies and terms of use, mechanisms for accepting income, organizational (entity) strategy. We will leave it to Orgs to report on this work as they see fit.
- The Foundation will steward a conversation with Org Leads in Q1 2025 to discuss a RAD disbursement from the Radworks Treasury to Orgs (via governance proposal), in order to allocate additional RAD to contributors - especially those who have not received an allocation or those who have not yet vested their full allocation. Org Leads will be responsible for requesting RAD and allocating it to their own contributors.
Quarterly Objectives Update
Foundation Health
- The Q4 meeting of the Foundation Council took place in Zug in December.
- We began work on the 2024 Audit. For 2024 and years going forward, the Foundation will only be required to do a limited audit, as opposed to a regular audit, as part of its regulation under ESA. This means the audit will require less time and money.
- We updated our website: https://betterinternet.foundation/. Thanks @brandonhaslegs.
Radworks Ecosystem Support
- Ange and Sally drafted and submitted the Foundation Org 2025 Proposal as part of the 2025 Multi-Org Proposal and then facilitated the 2025 Multi-Org proposal - including the review of individual Org proposals and stewarding governance and voting processes. The 2025 Multi-Org Proposal was passed in December (and, again, in January due to a proposal code snafu).
- Some of our contributors enjoyed supporting Drips at DevCon in Bangkok - but also getting a sense of wider practices when it comes to marketing, grant-giving, and operations in the web3 space.
- The Grants Program was intended to have cycle in February focusing on Drips; after conversations with Drips Team members, it became clear that such a cycle should be led by the needs of the Drips product. Since it’s a particularly busy time for the Drips Team, it’s not clear there is the bandwidth within the Team for defining the contributions they want and reviewing the contributions received - especially when it’s not clear the value that this work would actually bring to the Drips product or community. Therefore, we plan to reassess the opportunity for grants to Drips users and community members later, at some point later in Q1, with the Drips Org. We do intend to provide one grant in Q1 2025 to a previously identified (though not yet rewarded) Drips community contributor.
- On the legal side, there was a multi-jurisdiction coordination and analysis effort as the best entity for driving and way for organizing development of the Radworks Product was considered. In the end, it was recommended that Monadic GmbH would be used to drive this new product development for the time being (more on that here).
Timeline & Budget Update
We are still finalising figures as it’s the end of year - and the finalization of the year’s books takes more time. What we can say is that we came in between 500,000 and 700,000 USDC under budget. These numbers are still in flux given that we are still receiving invoices for services provided in 2024. The Foundation will be publishing a report to Radworks in early March with clearer financial reporting on 2024 and how funds were spent.
As you can see from the 2025 Proposal, the scope of work and team is reduced in 2025 and therefore additional budget was not requested from the Radworks Treasury.