Grants Org Retrospective 2023
Objectives
Achievements
The most significant achievement has been fostering a deep relationship with the 3rd party integration grantees (lead by Yorgos), and our success in dogfooding core Radworks products, including Radicle and Drips.
The work with 3rd party integrations has been a key initiative to spur user acquisition. This work will ensure that Radicle is in a place to more easily integrate with developers’ existing tooling and workflows.
Our dogfooding of Radicle and Drips has provided some of the earliest use cases of users succeeding with the protocols. We have funded 100% of our grants with Drips since the launch of Drips V2. This allowed us to provide user feedback to the Drips team. And Yorgos’s team has posted most of their work to Radicle, allowing them to provide direct user feedback to that team.
All of these achievements helped strengthen the core product’s features, as well as created strong use cases of success on our Radicle and Drips protocols.
KPIs
Recruiting
- Bring 1 team closer to Core team or make their own org: Successful
- Yorgos’s team is tightly connected with the Radicle Core team, in discussions on Zulip, contributing to 3rd party integrations with the Radicle core protocol, and joining our offsite.
- Bring 2+ teams closer to Core team or make their own org: Not successful
Dogfooding
- 100% of Grants payouts via Drips V2: Successful
- Since the launch of Drips V2, 100% of grants have been funded through Drips. See our profile here.
- 100% of Grantees use Radicle for their work: Somewhat Successful
- Yorgos’s team’s CI work is exclusively on Radicle, JetBrain’s plugin is migrating to Radicle (as outlined here), and VSCode plugin remains exclusively on GitHub.
Drip to Dependencies
- Drip 4 % of budget as outlined here: Successful
- We created a Drip List and are currently funding our dependencies there. See our profile here.
Community Input
- Integrate with : Not Successful
- We did not complete any work on this, aside from a few meetings with GitCoin remotely and in Paris to discuss their [Grant] Round Manager product, which includes community input via quadratic voting. Their product was not ready until after ETHCC, at which point, most of our budget was spoken for and we did not have bandwidth to develop anything here. So the problems here were mostly around timing and budget.
- We may pick up conversations here next year.
Roadmap
For 2023, the Grants Org did not have a roadmap in the same sense as one of the development teams.
As such, there’s not much to mention here.
Challenges
Gnosis Safe - Efficient Transaction Management
Issue
Gnosis Safe has continued to be a bottleneck for us.
There were 2 occasions where we had to reject existing transactions, which blocked our ability to approve other transactions in the queue. This sometimes added a week to our ability to execute transactions. So it can make the funding process slow.
Solution
The solution here remains fairly manual and ad-hoc.
The Grants lead (Bordumb) has taken much more caution before starting this, by collecting verbal commitments to vote yes/no before starting transactions.
Voting - Efficient Voting
Issue
With the adoption of Drips for funding grants, our funding process has become more complex. The original process was using
Solution
In 2024, we will be instituting bi-weeky stand-ups. These should help committee members
Cross-Team Communication
Issue
While we have monthly community calls, there is still a lack of cohesion between teams.
This issue exists at a more granular level (i.e. input on specific grants) as well as cultivating a broader vision for our protocols (i.e. how can a broader vision better communicate to external contributors about what work is available).
As a concrete example, the Grants Org has funded significant work with Radicle integrations, however, we have not done a good job collecting input from the Radicle core team. I think we are lucky to have such an awesome grantee working on these projects, however, it does make me wonder: would things be even better if our teams had better communication?
I would consider this a smaller issue, but one worth raising.
Solution
I think it would be good if all core teams could share much longer term roadmaps. The yearly proposals tend to be very short-term and granular on details. This does not give a vision to outside contributors as to what might lay in the future or periphery of that core work.
The Grants Org can also do a better job sitting in on Core team meetings and learning about what that broader vision might be.
Stakeholder Feedback
Below is feedback, quoted directly from Yorgos and Vanton:
Went well:
- The Grants approval process was straight forward. Proposal->Discussion->Voting and then the funds were promptly available. This was something that permitted us to continue working on the next project although we hadn’t yet gotten the approval.
- Drips made our lives easier in terms of the cash flow
- All our proposals were approved which means imo that we are aligned with the Grants Org goals
- The whole process has much lower bureaucracy when compared to traditional grants programs from governmental entities like the state or the European Union (EU) and this is really efficient so we can focus on the actual job rather than getting bogged down in extensive paperwork and documentation requirements.
- Minimal or zero negotiation about budget and scope or time created a relationship of trust and motivated us to do our best for the projects.
Improvement proposal:
- Sometimes I feel that the main goals of the Org are not clear to me. Its job is to help radicle on the one hand but at the same time it tries to reach out to the FOSS community and fund diverse projects. It seems that the strategy described in the proposal for 2024 solves this issue.
- Promote more aggressively Grants Org’s work within the FOSS community, this way you can enhance the Grants Org’s reputation, create a positive brand image for Radicle and Drips, and, most importantly, continue to support and strengthen the FOSS ecosystem through funding and collaboration.
- It would be extremely helpful for us to be able to deal with a legal entity like a company or foundation rather than a DAO so we can better justify to the tax authorities where the money come from
Next Steps
As noted above, I think it would be good if all core teams could share much longer term roadmaps. The yearly proposals are - relative to say a 5-year vision - very short-term and granular on details. This does not give a vision to outside contributors as to what might lay in the future or periphery of that core work.
As an aside, it was also interesting that we forecasted our budget unusually well, using up 98% of the budget right as 2023 winds down. With a year under our belt, we have a better understanding of what projects work well and which don’t, so we will be keeping the budget much more targeted.
Given concerns from grantees about getting paid from a legal entity, we should look into funding grants with help from Skyline Digital.