Fantastic reply, thank you @bordumb!
A quick reflection below.
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.
This is an excellent observation and is something I think is worth spending time to get it right. Anyone who has worked for a large company (and even a small one) knows how difficult it is to get people to proactively, consistently, and clearly explain what they are working on, the progress of the work, and what the roadmap for future work looks like. When this information is not communicated among employees, work tends to be done redundantly, without an explicit goal, and generally, poorly. When this happens for long periods of time, morale drops and people burn out. No bueno.
While DAOs are different than traditional companies, in an abstract sense, there is one major similarity: both are organizations of people working together towards common goals. And any time a large amount of people are working on something, it’s important that they tell their colleagues what they are doing in a proactive, consistent, and clear way.
In my experience, companies try to get employees to communicate well by (i) explaining the importance of communication and coordination to employees, (ii) leading by example (e.g., managers mentoring juniors), (iii) rewarding employees who do this well with promotions and more money, and (iv) reprimanding employees who do this poorly through lack of promotions, or worse, firing them. Although the process is simple to understand, most companies fail to do it well and/or consistently. It’s hard!
To get closer to the topic at hand: if grants outsources work to third-party contractors (“contributors”), it’s important that everyone is constantly updated on the progress of others. And to your point @bordumb, right now, most grants programs fail to create a culture of communication and coordination. That’s how we get the problem you refer to; namely, nobody knows what the hell is happening!
Something I’m interested in exploring is how do we implement traditionally used communication and coordination playbooks to DAOs. In particular, what tools are at our disposal? We can certainly create a culture of communication and coordination. We can lead by example. But what about the other tools? Can we pay the “star” contributors more to signal the behavior we want others to emulate? Can we pay “satisfactory” contributors less to signal the behavior we don’t want? Are there other systems we can use to develop a rockstar organizational structure around the Radicle Grants Program?
Food for thought!