Materials

• Miro board from retro

Topics + Action Items

Ranked Retro Topics

Notes

• macro need:
  • aligned future of the Gitcoin Grants Program (aka what is the future of the main round?)
  • next step:
    • Annika/Nate to align on process for clarifying grants program future and share back with this group
• Eligibility / review process
  • decouple rounds —> eligibility across main round & ecosystem rounds doesn’t work
  • Product lagging — Ethelo was complex
  • We could decouple for next round, technically speaking — we should probably pursue this for GR15
  • Up until 1 week before round, Joe thought we were decoupling — so FDD realized last minute they had to make a plan to accommodate. Turned other pieces of the process into an emergency.
  • This topic needs more nuance between the closer stakeholders to work it out — not everybody needs to be in solutioning room
  • Seems like a Product/Grants Ops/FDD/Partnerships/Support next step — touches all aspect of the program!
  • Marketing would love a “Grant Hub” — one place where grant owners can see everything
  • We announce rounds too late — we get round briefs on Twitter 1-2 weeks before a round — so we end up with a lot of quality grants that don’t get tags, and we get late-comers applying for a ton of rounds; having all this for grantees earlier would help a lot & what to expect from application process
  • A lot of this is tied into ‘what is the future of the main round?’
  • core need:
    • once future is published, we need to create a roadmap for how we evolve the eligibility process to get there
      • next step:
        • Janine/Connor to drive once program future is clarified (will depend on product roadmap)
• Round Objectives & Operations
  • “What does an optimal allocation of a round look like?” — e.g., Lenster grant — how can we say “were funds allocated successfully in this round?”.
  • Vitalik has all these writeups from previous rounds, useful to think about — in the context of each of those rounds — going through a historical walkthrough of “why were some of those rounds successful, what made them important, what came out & was meaningful?”
  • “Which rounds went really well and why they went well — vs. which were suboptimal”
  • I think what we're missing is
    • data on saturation / round results
    • a complete list of grantee success stories
    • broader program objectives
  • All of this changes substantially in a Grants 2.0 world — program success is very different from protocol success, horizontal scaling is no longer an objective of the program; it’s one of the protocol. The scaling objective of the program is to create a positive externality that then contributes to protocol growth & more horizontal scaling.
  • Being able to see that something will be successful — VC-like prediction of success
  • “The program becomes the beacon of light that helps us show the impact that funding public goods via grants can have for Gitcoin, for other ecosystems and for the industry as a whole”
  • Need to create ‘what the program will look like’ and a process of how we’ll get there
  • core needs:
    • Publish KPIs for our grants rounds so we can be sure we’re being accountable to what we think success looks like
      • Annika/Scott to set north star for program (pending future of the grant program)
      • Process of how we define optimal funding — community-by-community — how do we ensure that communities who are coming to us to run rounds are successful
        • next steps: understanding our success / data so far?