[Temperature Check] Radicle // Gitcoin Public Goods Alliance

👩‍⚖️ Governance
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Authors: @schlabach, @helloshreyas from Llama

Summary

We propose a Public Goods Alliance be formed between Radicle and Gitcoin. Radicle and Gitcoin will provide a mutual grant of their respective native tokens (RAD and GTC) to the partner DAO’s treasury. Voting power from these tokens will be delegated to multisigs controlled by the partner DAO. Gitcoin will receive a range of RAD (dependent upon the final grant rate) and Radicle will receive 500,000 GTC, making both DAOs top 10 delegates in one another’s governance [1].

Context

Llama builds economic infrastructure for DAOs. We are an opinionated layer on top of DeFi protocols that helps DAOs take treasury actions including treasury diversification, liquidity provisioning, token swaps, and more.

As part of our goal to grow the DAO economy, Llama has engaged with key stakeholders from the Gitcoin (Scott) and Radicle (Abbey) communities to propose a Public Goods Alliance.

You can view some of our work here . For more on Llama and our initiatives, see below.

Overview of Gitcoin

Gitcoin is a platform for funding public goods. Gitcoin’s mission is to help build an Internet that is open source, collaborative, and economically empowering. Along with Gitcoin Grants, Gitcoin has made other important contributions to the public goods ecosystem through its Kernel accelerator and research into anti-sybil technology. Gitcoin also hosts events, hackathons, and educates users about how to get involved in web3.

Purpose

As web3-native DAOs, Gitcoin and Radicle share similar missions of growing the public goods ecosystem. The Gitcoin and Radicle communities have rallied around this public goods mission and informally worked together over the last few years, co-hosting events and integrating Radicle in Kernel. In the future, Gitcoin and Radicle can benefit from more product integrations and a closer relationship.

As the two operate in similar spaces and have complementary focuses, Llama believes a formal Public Goods Alliance between the two DAOs would be mutually beneficial.

We view this alliance as a unique opportunity to formalize the partnership that has developed over the last few years by gaining a governance stake in each other’s communities. The alliance will allow the communities to:

  • Collaborate on a shared vision through governance in each other’s communities: The mutual grant makes Gitcoin and Radicle major governance stakeholders in one another’s communities. Each community will have influence in the other’s governance process, enabling them to best represent their interests and to more closely collaborate on a shared open-source vision.

  • Develop synergistic features and products: A formal partnership and vested token interest creates opportunity for closer collaboration on features and products that will benefit both communities. This could provide the necessary support for joint development on things such as using Radicle’s decentralized identity for Gitcoin Grants and Gitcoin becoming a de facto funding mechanism for open source projects on Radicle.

  • Set precedent for future community alliances: Both Gitcoin and Radicle’s treasury strategies outline the basis for mutual grants and community collaborations being influential to the success of the protocols. This alliance can serve as a basis and provide the template for future collaborations for Gitcoin, Radicle, and the larger web3 ecosystem. In the future, and with alliance-member approval, more DAOs could be brought into the alliance.

  • Diversify each DAO’s governance base: Today, the distribution of voting power at both DAOs is concentrated in the hands of internal contributors. Both DAOs would benefit from a more diverse voter base, especially one that includes a like-minded partner DAO as one of its top stakeholders. To achieve this, Llama proposes that Gitcoin receive RAD (depending on final grant rate) and Radicle receive 500,000 GTC, formalizing the alliance between the two DAOs and making each DAO a top 10 delegate in each other’s governance.

After the proposal is executed, both DAOs agree to hold the others’ tokens for a minimum of 2 years.

Proposed Voting Process

Two committees (one committee from each community) of 3 representatives will be chosen to focus on metagovernance in each community. 2 representatives will come from the respective community, while 1 representative will be from the Llama team. Community representatives should have the context needed to make decisions on most proposals that Gitcoin is putting up for votes.

The committees should vote independently, though the two should collaborate on joint governance proposals and initiatives relating to the strategic alliance.

The committee will be responsible for keeping track of all proposals in the other community and bringing them to their respective community for discussion. For each proposal, the committee will vote on behalf of their respective community, informed by their community’s values, the goals of the Public Goods Alliance, and feedback from the broader community.

Votes will be executed out of a multisig controlled by the Metagovernance Committee. Upon receiving the mutual grant, the Treasury will automatically delegate votes to the multisig.

Reporting & Criteria for Success

In order to allow the communities to evaluate the success of the alliance, it’s important to provide comprehensive, objective reporting on how the partnership is working. Reporting should be done on a monthly and quarterly basis to share results with both communities. Below are several ideas about how to gauge success of the alliance.

  • Governance
    • Participation rate in each other’s governance votes
    • Number of proposals posted in each other’s forum by the committee
    • Number of comments posted in each other’s forum by the committee
    • The impact of cross-governance participation, with a particular focus on the major or contentious proposals
  • Social
    • Number of co-sponsored events and their attendance
    • Community sentiment regarding the partnership and overall governance involvement (e.g. community members’ willingness to hold the other protocol’s tokens, voting on the other community’s proposals)
  • Product
    • Number of development hours contributed to joint projects
    • Joint features / products / integrations shipped or in-flight

The quarterly review might include the above information and additionally report on:

  • Furthering Gitcoin and Radicle’s primary mission
    • Whether and how the partnership has helped Gitcoin build and fund public goods on web3
    • Whether and how the partnership has helped Radicle develop resilient, peer-to-peer collaboration software
  • Collab / interoperability
    • Cross-community interoperability and its growth trajectory
    • Other synergies, or the lack thereof

Ragequit Options

In the event that one party wants to reverse the deal after the mutual grant has been executed, Gitcoin and Radicle will need to strike a new agreement and run it through the governance process. Considering the operational complexities, compromise of the future roadmap, and damage of capital and goodwill the other community may endure, the party that initiates the reversal should reasonably expect less lenient terms, such as a partial return of the originally granted assets. Each DAO may choose to leave the alliance and return tokens within one month of the proposal being executed.

Ideas for Extensions of the Alliance

We view this mutual grant as just the beginning of a long alliance between Gitcoin and Radicle. In the future, we would like to explore more options to further the alliance. Several ideas include:

  • Gitcoin and Radicle commit funding to a jointly-governed pool and use it to advance public goods (grant programs, product development, etc.)
  • Having new public-goods-centric DAOs join the alliance

Asks from the Community

We are looking for 2 community members to serve on the Metagovernance Committee. If you are interested, please reach out to Abbey or Dan.

[1] Source: Radicle delegates, Gitcoin delegates.

About Llama

Llama is building economic infrastructure for DAOs. We have worked with some of the leading DAOs, including Aave, Uniswap, dYdX, Gitcoin, Radicle, PoolTogether, FWB, Harvest Finance, and Fei Protocol, among others. Llama has implemented on-chain proposals, constructed treasury strategies, designed liquidity incentive programs and on-chain indices, and built analytics dashboards and financial reports. Llama’s 45 contributors are among the most active in the DeFi and DAO ecosystem and include engineers, DeFi strategists, data analysts, quants, and accountants.

Disclaimer: This post has been provided for informational and discussion purposes only. It is not intended to, and does not, constitute legal, financial, business, or tax advice. This post should not be relied upon to provide any form of protections or business advice. No decision to buy, sell, exchange, or otherwise utilize any digital asset is recommended based on the content of this framework.

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Disclaimer: I have to say I don’t feel very informed to be commenting here because I know very little about Gitcoin so far. I have only been hearing good things about Gitcoin, but I know very little about it.

Disclaimer #2: a critical / make-or-break point for different teams of people, is how the … people in those teams get along and how well they can work together. It would be nice to have some input from Radicle / Gitcoin founders about how they feel about this proposal.

With that said, I feel I should still contribute to this discussion because I find this proposal very interesting and it has already been 2 weeks with no input here.

  • I do agree that both DAOs operate in a similar space and the partnership makes sense from that point of view. :+1:
  • I like that this will bring some more diversity into Radicle’s governance. :+1:
  • I do think that synergies in the Grants programs makes sense. (I would expect that teams looking to fund development of public goods would be applying to both/either grants program, but that’s probably something the respective grants leads can confirm). :+1:
  • I like the “2 years” suggestion, to signal that this is no short-term alliance. :+1:
  • on the product synergies front, I would like to suggest that such a close alliance could eventually bring gitcoin-funded development onto radicle as the default collaboration platform/protocol, once Radicle is ready for that. This would be a major boost for Radicle, so :+1: here too.
  • similarly to above, the idea to use Gitcoin as the default funding mechanism on Radicle also makes sense to me. :+1:

With all that said, I don’t see any obvious conflicts of interest between the two organizations and so I can only thank @schlabach and @HelloShreyas for bringing this forward! :clap:

The only point that is not so clear to me yet is around the committees: it is not entirely clear to me what role Llama is going to play in the Radicle-Gitcoin partnership. I do not intend this comment to appear as any sign of doubt of Llama’s intentions, etc. but what I am seeing here a 3rd party being introduced in the committees that are being put together to govern a 2-party alliance and it is not entirely clear to me how this 3rd party will participate. https://llama.xyz/ doesn’t offer much info about Llama as well. Could you please help make that a bit clearer ? :pray:

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Thanks for the thoughtful response @yorgos!

it is not entirely clear to me what role Llama is going to play in the Radicle-Gitcoin partnership.

When we authored this temp check, we felt that it might be useful to have someone on the metagovernance committee who had context on both DAOs and could help facilitate the governance process. That said, I’ll echo what @HelloShreyas said in response to a similar question on Gitcoin’s forum:

We’re definitely happy staying out of the metagovernance committee if needed! Not super keen or insistent being on the committee. We just think this alliance is a good thing for Gitcoin, Radicle, and the DAO space generally. Having said that, we definitely view ourselves as part of the DAOs we work with.

https://llama.xyz/ doesn’t offer much info about Llama as well. Could you please help make that a bit clearer?

Llama is a DAO of governance contributors and works actively with many of the top DAOs today. The best way to get a sense of who we are is by taking a look at the proposals that our community members have made and the research we’ve done: https://llama.xyz/community

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A partnership between Radicle and Gitcoin makes a lot of sense. Both are on a mission to bolster the growth of the open source web, build technologies where users share ownership and influence and promote the creation of public goods. I believe it would be highly beneficial to have Gitcoin as an active force in our governance process given the similarities in their mission and values. I also see this as a great way to attract more development of public goods onto Radicle which we love to see!

I think the 2 year minimum is a good timeline. It shows a strong commitment to mutual support and will allow both DAOs to learn from each other and grow together. Given it is a longer time period, it will be good to consider “ragequit options” as you mentioned.

Great list here already! Another one to add under “Governance” could be participation in monthly governance or community calls.

Really like both of these options as possibilities to extend the alliance. The second option is particularly exciting, but it would be good to be careful to avoid having their voting power overshadow that of the active contributors/community members of each DAO.

Thank you for the clarification here. I do not necessarily have any strong feelings towards having Llama being on the committee or not, but maybe in place of Llama we could have each DAO propose an active community member (someone outside of the core teams) to take the spot on the committee. This would be a cool opportunity for community involvement in a cool project. This could maybe even be a rotating spot every quarter/2 quarters/year.

One question I have is have you considered any compensation for for the committee members given the time commitment needed to fulfill the committee role? If yes, could you elaborate? If no, why not? I do not have strong feelings for or against having compensation, just curious.

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Generally in favor.

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Wooooo! :tada::champagne: This has been brewing for a long time — so great to see it finally hit the forum! Here’s some initial thoughts on the proposal and some more context on my personal opinion regarding alliances, token swaps, and general DAO-to-DAO collaboration:

On D2D Collaboration:

In the Distribution of Ownership Workstream post that I just published last week, I dive into the concept of “ownership” and the forms it can take. I reference Pat Rawson’s Ownership in Cryptonetworks piece, which compares DAOs to corporate control networks. The (very paraphrased) argument made is that to secure a “a self-sovereign, fiscally and politically decentralized control network” DAOs must “optimize for crypto-institutional resilience” by “distributing ownership as skin-in-the-game to squadlike entities with more specialized objectives is the key long-term problem to solve.”

This temperature check can be considered Radicle’s first foray into understanding what “crypt-institutional resilience” is for our DAO and I believe there is no better partner to be exploring this with than Gitcoin! I envision these committees evolving to become cross-DAO squads that are delegated responsibility, influence, and funding to pursue specialized objectives that support Radicle and Gitcoin’s long-term visions / missions.

Additionally, the distribution of governing power is very important for the The Next Phase of the RadicleDAO. Distributing influence within the project among aligned ecosystem stakeholders will support a more active and decentralized governing community.

Initial Proposal Feedback

Where would we envision reporting on this progress in the Radicle community? What do you think @shelb_ee ?

Perhaps number of proposals isn’t the best metric, but perhaps some metric to measure the quality of the committee’s collaboration. I believe the opportunity here is to use this alliance to co-fund and collaborate on objectives the support the funding of public goods & open-source software. The committees should be judged on the thought, time, and effort put into strategizing around these shared objectives.

In terms of the committee formation, I’d be interested to know who from the community is interested in participating. The role isn’t a passive one — it will require active & strategic participation. I’m interested in participating personally, but would love to know if this intrigues anybody else!

For org design purposes (@ange @louiegrey) I see this “Public Goods Alliance Committee” as another type of entity that needs to be taken into consideration in our DAO organizational design. I could see it technically being in the same category as the EGF and Grants committees (potentially following similar compensation structures…?). Let’s just be sure to include it in our design process.

All in all, extremely in favor of this experiment. I’ll be looking forward to diving into more details in the next phase of governance!

Also thanks to @shelb_ee @yorgos and @cloudhead for the review and feedback here and for the work that went into this proposal @schlabach @HelloShreyas :seedling:

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And just for visibility, here is the complimentary discuss on Gitcoin’s forum!

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One question I have is have you considered any compensation for for the committee members given the time commitment needed to fulfill the committee role? If yes, could you elaborate? If no, why not? I do not have strong feelings for or against having compensation, just curious.

Yes - committee members will need to be compensated, though we’d expect those expenses to be relatively small. Like Abbey notes below, the role is not a passive one and will require keeping an active dialog with the Gitcoin team and committee, so it’s important to incentivize the metagovernance committee so they can produce high quality work

We wanted to get a general sentiment check on the proposal before diving into the specifics, but we can be sure to include details around that in our follow up post. Other than governance committee expenses, there should not be any other financial impact.

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Some initial ideas:

  • Creating a Discourse folder (under governance section) where we post updates each month/quarter. Updates can be co-authored by both teams and shared respectively on each forum.
  • Start a shared Notion page where Radicle & Gitcoin can co-author and share updates in the same place.

I think the forum folder option might be the best though for ease of access/find-ability for both communities.

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I am also supportive and very keen to see this alliance move forward.

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Some good points discussed here and there seems to be general support for this to move forward! @schlabach & @HelloShreyas how do you folks feel about escalating this Temperature Check to the second phase of governance - the Discussion phase? This includes drafting a more concrete proposal based on the discussion above for the community to review.

Besides pulling from the exciting discussion above, you can follow the guidelines for what to include in the proposal from the Radicle Governance Process README. Please let @abbey or I know if you have any questions!

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@shelb_ee sounds great, we’ll get to work on that and will let you know if we have any questions!

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