First off, this was a great write-up.
I’ll try to mull it over a bit more to add comments that may also help tease out details for moving it forward. But overall, if there was a vote to move this forward, I would vote “yes.”
Just answering the immediate questions you posed:
What philosophical principles should applicants stay true to?
Basically, someone who would ascribe to a lot of values important to open source work, since those are the types of people Radicle serves.
A few ideas here:
- Someone who is collaborative, as opposed to competitive
- Someone inquisitive: listens, learns, and asks many questions
- Someone with a sense of responsibility (attention to detail, high quality mentality, etc.)
- Someone with skin in the game (either owns RAD or contributes to open source projects today)
- Someone who ascribes to a very long-term view on things (see skin in the game above)
- Someone that believes in radical transparency
What types of projects would you like to see funded by the Radicle Grants Program?
Web3 network effects
Projects that bolster the overall web3 network by integrating better with other platforms. As a concrete example, if there is some web3 standard (say IPFS or The Graph), integrate plug-ins for Org onboarding, such that we make it easy for developers to quickly setup infrastructure in the best way possible.
As an even more concrete example, if someone is on The Graph’s subgraph page making a new subgraph, linking their authentic Radicle repo should be as easy as dropping a URL in (this could be one task for a grantee to work on). Conversely, when someone is setting up or editing their Org on Radicle Upstream, they should be able to easily link their subgraph there, too. Basically, tooling that creates virtuous cycles for onboarding to Web3.
CI/CD
Finding a way to elegantly make great development pipelines, including automated testing
GitHub Migration
This is a two-pronged problem.
In the short-term, find ways to automate the ease for anyone to migrate their GitHub workflows and funding over to Radicle. This would largely focus on web3/blockchain Orgs.
Longer term, get traditional (read: non-blockchain) projects to migrate their work and funding to Radicle’s platform. As a “pie in the sky” example, getting a project as big as Apache to move all their code and funding to Radicle. What would that take? What does the time horizon for that look like?
Those are the first that come to mind. I’m sure there’s a lot more!
What changes/improvements upon existing grants programs (e.g., Uniswap and Compound grants) would you like to see?
In general, I’ve found it hard to understand what exactly grantees are working on. Grant work is essentially “outsourcing” the work to sort of “3rd party” teams and they keep their code elsewhere sometimes, so the low-level transparency can start to crumble.
Your point of building Radicle’s Grant program directly on Radicle Orgs may be the best way to solve this, if there is a way to more directly tie grantee code contributions to the Radicle Grant’s Org page.
So perhaps an initial grant project might even be to support that:
- Build an outgoing fund source called “grantee” that links an child Org (grantee) to a parent Orgs (“the” grant)
What do you think is the optimal quarterly budget for the Radicle Grants Program?
No idea.
I think it depends a lot on what the backlog and estimations for projects look like.
In other words, would we have some idea that there is Project A that will require 4 people to do 3 months of work?
If so, I might say the project needs $100,000
Then if there are 4 such projects in the quarter, I’d say the total needed is $400,000 per quarter
I think there’s too many inputs missing to accurately gauge this question.