Hi all
First off, apologies for getting back on this late. I’ve left post-mortem notes on some of our processes at bottom. It is apparent that our process broke down a bit here.
Immediate next steps
Scheduling
- The Grants program’s first wave ended so we are not taking applications right now. Please refer to the community post here for rough timelines on when we will have Wave 2 started; estimating around September.
Feedback/Reapplying
The main reason we could not reach quorum was due to a few related factors:
Smart contract work
The grant mentioned smart contract work, but it was not apparent from any of the links posted (LinkedIn or GitHub) that anyone on the team has smart contract experience. Perhaps one of the team members is an expert writing smart contracts, but this is not apparent from links provided.
If someone on the team has experience here, please feel free to reapply while calling this expertise out more explicitly. Please remember that we’ve never worked with you. So err on the side of giving more details (links to other in-progress projects or completed products on GitHub for example). As of right now, it reads like “Here is a great looking group of people, but we don’t see any clear and explicit examples showing they can do the technical work involved.”
If no one on the team has experience with smart contract work, I think getting quorum will be extremely difficult here. If this is the case, I’d recommend either recruiting a new team member (and repricing the grant accordingly) or coming back at a later time once some of this expertise is learned/proven out a bit more.
And beyond the smart-contract work, there is really very little to go off technically speaking based on the links provided.
Overall, this was the major sticking point and raised concerns around whether the work could be done at all, on time, and on budget.
Post Mortem
It’s always worth calling out poor or broken processes. So leaving some notes below for anyone interested in improving.
1. Multi-sig communication
Issues:
We did not manually link to the vote when it started. For future reference, our multi-sig is here.
We did not follow-up on Discourse with a note about the vote being rejected in the Gnosis safe. For reference, the vote was Nonce 24 on the multi-sig above. If I remember correctly, it garnered 2 votes and did not move forward.
Simply put, not having a direct link to the multi-sig on the application is bad.
Solution:
I do not think this will be solved by saying “we’ll do better next time” because this comes down to human error of not manually linking things. There is always room for human error.
I see us solving this point around voting communications with technology/tooling.
Once we (Grants) adopt Workstreams, we should be able to surface everything from the application to the discussion + voting in one UI. This should get rid of a lot of the manual overhead and make things more seamless and transparent.
2. Feedback
We had some positive feedback on Discourse here, which is why I started the vote.
But dissenting opinions came up on discord and group calls once the vote was actually started. Ultimately, we could not reach quorum and ultimately rejected this grant. I will go into the details of why quorum was not met below.
I want to point out 2 process/tech problems here:
- We are not doing a good enough job collecting dissenting opinions; they often come only after a vote is started, rather than before a vote.
- Conversations are documented across several tools
Solution:
For 1:
- Processes: I understand some of the psychology of expressing positive versus negative feedback (it’s generally harder to publically say “no” about things). So I’m not sure how best to improve the processes here. I’m open to suggestions.
- Tech/tooling: Having an off-chain mechanism to gauge interest in a proposal could help lighten the overhead of publically stating dissent. Perhaps even letting non-committee members (Core Dev, Community Members, other DAOs/Users, etc.) weigh in would be nice. I can imagine this being a feature of Workstreams where a grant application could have off-chain community polling + finalized on-chain vote/funding. This would not totally solve this issue, but I think it’d at least make it easier for people to show dissent without too much overhead. From there, we could follow-up with request for feedback.
For 2:
- Tech/tooling: Some of this will be solved by migrating our Grants to Workstreams. It will help us keep more of the discussion + voting all in one place.
- Processes: With that said, we should do a better job creating a culture of taking note of conversations and not being afraid of voicing dissenting opinions out in the open. Talking about “no” should be as easy as talking about the weather imo.