Thanks for this application.
@savva007 : lots of details below, but please focus on the Q(uestions) in bold.
I’m generally in agreement with @yorgos here, but with some nuance outlined below.
Concerns
On the call and on this application, the 2 examples that stand out for me are:
- Ketamine
- Psilocybin Mushrooms
Neither of these are federally legal and to my knowledge, have stringent controls for research. If we play the thought experiment of putting all of our eggs in this basket, there seems to be a good amount of risk. We could have this protocol built, but end up with 2 (Ketamine + Psilocybin Mushrooms) use-cases that flop.
On top of that, we’re talking about drug trials/experiments. So it’s like experiments^2: running experiments on drugs that are themselves nebulously legal (experimental).
FWIW: I’ve loved seeing this explosion in interest in this category of medicine. I’m just well aware that this adds a lot of risk - i.e. having this POC/MVP not actually going anywhere. I think myself and many others would be curious to know what sort of other follow-up studies you might look at, given these specific examples are very much an up-hill battle, both on the science as well as legal/legislative front.
Milestone Feedback
Overall:
We’re generally evaluating by first determining what category a grant falls under:
- Adds to the core code base to improve Radicle infrastructure or 3rd party integrations with popular development tools. These sorts of grants address a very important problem: improving the underlying infrastructure to improve new user acquisition.
- Simply “adopt” Radicle as infrastructure to build other tools. These sorts of grants do not necessarily add to the underlying infrastructure; they’re analogous to marketing campaigns where a company gives out free money (e.g. Spotify giving new users - “adopters” - their first 3 months for free).
This grant falls under the category #2. Keep this in mind below.
Milestone 1
I am against funding initial setup for a project that falls under category #2.
I’d see this as your own investment in the work.
Note: this is a grant, not an investment. So we’re generally hyper-focused on funding specific parts of the work (e.g. the “adoption” of Radicle), and not the entire project.
Milestone 2
Looks good to me.
But the Radicle component makes up 1/10 of the tasks.
Q: Given the points above, can you please estimate what % of the cost of this milestone should be covered by Radicle? (I don’t think it should be 100% of 22,250)
Milestone 3
Looks good to me.
But the Radicle component makes up 1/10 of the tasks.
Q: Given the points above, can you please estimate what % of the cost of this milestone should be covered by Radicle? (I don’t think it should be 100% of 14,750)
Milestone 4
“Researchers claiming funds” is not work that makes sense for us to fund. Assuming we’ve used Radicle for this work, this functionality of squeezing drips should come “for free”, insofar as adopting the infrastructure + exposing the squeezing in your UI, researchers should simply be able to collect their Drip balance.
Similar to above, I’m not keen on using Grant funds to fund simply “adoption” of the infrastructure.
Conclusion
This grant sounds awesome.
But this grant - and others - are bringing up an important policy we need to hash out a bit more:
Q: Should we be paying 100% of an external team’s development work to simply adopt the infrastructure that we’re building?
Intuitively, the answer is “no.” We fund a core team of developer, technical writers, and have a very open community across Discord, Discourse, GitHub (issues, etc.), which should make it easy for anyone to “adopt” the infrastructure.
But some ideas that come to mind:
- Short-term: we allocate some % of our overall budget for “Adoption Grants”. Something like, we’ll allocate 100,000 USDC (10% of budget) for “Adoption Grants” and set the bar pretty high.
- Longer-term: create 4 month long quadratic funding rounds, whereby we can allocate x% of our 1,000,000 USDC budget to a pool and allow community members and outside . This would take some of the voting/governance load off of us, maintain funding for important teams adopting Radicle infrastructure, and grow the pie through quadratic funding.