Space Summary
The Twitter Space Community Growth & Success: Reflections from GG Community Rounds hosted by gitcoin. Discover valuable insights on community growth and success derived from GG Community Rounds focusing on the significance of grants, the impact of the Gitcoin Grants Program, and the role of platforms like GrantsStack and GitcoinPassport. Explore the importance of AlloProtocol in enhancing security and reliability within community initiatives, the power of collaboration, inclusivity, and transparency in driving successful community rounds. Learn how networking, innovative programs, and continuous feedback loops contribute to the sustainable development of communities.
For more spaces, visit the Development Agency page.
Questions
Q: Why is community engagement crucial for community rounds?
A: Engaging the community fosters trust, participation, and sustainable development.
Q: How do grants contribute to community growth?
A: Grants provide financial support, resources, and opportunities for community-driven projects.
Q: What advantages does the Gitcoin Grants Program offer?
A: The Gitcoin Grants Program enables decentralized funding, scalability, and visibility for projects.
Q: How does AlloProtocol enhance community initiatives?
A: AlloProtocol adds a layer of security and reliability, safeguarding community efforts.
Q: What role do partnerships play in community success?
A: Partnerships expand networks, resources, and expertise, fostering community growth.
Q: Why is transparency essential in community-driven projects?
A: Transparency builds trust, accountability, and sustainability in community initiatives.
Q: How can communities ensure ongoing success?
A: Through continuous feedback, collaboration, and adaptability to meet evolving community needs.
Q: What impact do innovative programs have on community rounds?
A: Innovative programs drive creativity, engagement, and effectiveness within community initiatives.
Q: What benefits come from using GrantsStack and GitcoinPassport?
A: These platforms enhance visibility, participation, and efficiency in community projects.
Q: Why is inclusivity crucial for community rounds?
A: Inclusivity fosters diversity, collaboration, and broader community impact.
Q: How do community-led projects benefit from community support?
A: Support from the community amplifies resources, feedback, and success potential of initiatives.
Highlights
Time: 00:15:42
The Power of Community Engagement Exploring how community engagement drives success and sustainability.
Time: 00:28:19
Gitcoin Grants: Empowering Projects Insights on how Gitcoin Grants Program revolutionizes decentralized funding.
Time: 00:40:55
AlloProtocol: Security and Reliability Understanding the role of AlloProtocol in securing community initiatives.
Time: 00:55:37
Partnerships for Community Impact How collaborations enhance the impact and reach of community-driven projects.
Time: 01:10:11
Transparency and Trust in Communities The importance of transparency in building trust and accountability within communities.
Time: 01:25:46
Innovative Programs and Community Creativity Exploring how innovation sparks creativity and effectiveness in community initiatives.
Time: 01:38:29
GrantsStack and GitcoinPassport Efficiency Maximizing efficiency and reach through GrantsStack and GitcoinPassport platforms.
Time: 01:50:02
Inclusivity for Community Growth The role of inclusivity in fostering a diverse and impactful community ecosystem.
Time: 02:05:17
Continuous Feedback Loops How ongoing feedback ensures community needs are met for sustained growth.
Key Takeaways
- Community engagement is vital for sustainable growth and success.
- Grants play a significant role in fostering community development.
- Gitcoin Grants Program empowers projects through decentralized funding.
- Utilizing platforms like GrantsStack and GitcoinPassport enhances community participation.
- AlloProtocol adds a layer of security and reliability to community initiatives.
- Collaboration and inclusivity are key elements of successful community rounds.
- Transparency and trust contribute to the effectiveness of community-led projects.
- Support from innovative programs drives collective success within communities.
- Networking and partnerships amplify the impact of community-driven initiatives.
- Continuous feedback loops ensure community needs are met for sustainable growth.
Behind the Mic
Welcome and Introductions
GMGM everyone. Hello Lena. Hello Mani. Hello Monty. Thank you for joining us today. Gmgm what's Poppin. What is happening? Yeah, just waiting for a few more people to join and then we will get started in the next few minutes. Alrighty. I think we can get started while we wait for others to join us. If you are part of the space, please like retweet, share out whatever you need to do to make sure more people can join. It is also being recorded as well. Yeah, super excited to jump into this conversation today with our amazing guests who yeah, thank you so much for dropping the link to the your GG 21 retrospective. We'll definitely be going in to that as well during this call. So yeah, let's start with a round of intros. Also, what we're doing here today and what we're going to be discussing. So Lina will be giving us an overview of this whole campaign in a moment. But today we're going to be highlighting two community rounds that have run a number of rounds with Gitcoin during Gitcoin grants rounds with us.
Discussion on Community Rounds
So super excited to dig into some of their learnings, some of their successes and just overall experience running community rounds, which is going to be super exciting. Okay, so let's start with a round of introductions. While I'm speaking, I will introduce myself. For those of you who do not know who I am, my name is Matilda. I do grant things at Gitcoin. I'm grants program lead at Getcoin. And yeah, I will throw it over to my co host for today. I'll throw it over to Lina. Hey everybody. Excited to be on stage with you, Matilda, and join you in co hosting this space today. Yeah. For those of you who don't know me, I've been consulting Gitcoin since March of this year mainly on content strategy and creation. Matilda thinks that I own content and gitcoin, which is, I appreciate that mostly I write a lot of articles, I do interviews and I'm building out a video content engine and a kind of a content general content engine for gitcoin. And yeah, a bit of my background.
Lina's Background
I come from a creative production background, have done lots of productions in web two, anything from documentary projects all the way to like bigger ad campaigns. And I'm really excited to be in the grand sphere of things now. And I get to work with some of the smartest, most caring people that I know. So that's a bit about me. I'll hand it over to Manu. Hope so. Good to be here. Good to meet you all again, guys. I'm excited for today's x space. Super happy that we had the fourth deci round on Gitcoin in total. Yeah. One, two, three community rounds and one centralized round. So yeah, happy to share any of the learnings. So I was one of the coordinators operators of the past three deci rounds, the community driven, bottom up deci rounds on Gitcoin. It was a pleasure. It was a success from my point of view and I also want to share some of the learnings and the reason why I believe that this was a success.
Highlights and Contributions
And also, yeah, I want to highlight some of our great contributors who are joining us today and here in the audience. For example, Swift Evo, who is also one of the operators, who was one of the operators for the GG 20 and GG 21 round. So big shout out to you. Without you, all of this wouldn't have happened. Yeah, so that's me. I love space. I love decentralized science. I'm an open science maxi and I think about how we can fund public goods in space and science and beyond. So that's it about me. And I'm going to throw the ball to you. Monty. Monty, it's you. Hey, everyone. Good to be here. Feels like Gitcoin's over, but we're back on the spaces. No, no, good to be here. Probably most people already know me, maybe not, but I'm one of the founders of Refi Dao. I also do a lot of work with sello public goods and also set on the board of trusted seed.
Monty's Journey with Refi Dao
I come from a background of environmental and sustainability professionals, but also got deep into crypto, especially when the refi movement was born. And yeah, we've been kind of going on this journey with Refi Dao for a while now. And one of the early beneficiaries of gitcoin in terms of that's been Refi Dal's basically primary funding source back in the early days of quadratic funding when you could actually raise quite significant sums in some of the rounds. And then went on to then obviously set up our own rounds for refi local nodes and did two of those in 2023. And now, most recently, I've been super excited to see the regen coordination emerge. It's kind of been an idea that's been percolating a while as someone who is obviously intimately involved in Refi Dao, but huge respect for Greenpill and listener of the podcast and the Greenpool network and the local chapters and of course getting closer with Celo and celo regional daos.
Collaborative Efforts and Future Steps
So kind of weaving those communities together and working out where those positive sum synergies are. And I think this pooling of resources together in a combined gitcoin round has been an awesome experiment. I've just posted the retrospective of that on the Gitcoin forum. I've pinned that to the top here, but I think it's already, I already feel like it's kind of binded these communities together in a new way and there are some really exciting kind of collaborative projects and next steps that I'm looking forward to working on and maybe we can go into that as well. Some of the impact tracking and the retroactive follow up rounds and all that. Good stuff. But yeah, grateful to be here and yeah, excited to chat further. Not sure who I'm pinging it to next or if that's. Yeah, thanks. Thanks for the intros, Manu and Monty. I wanted to give a little bit of context around the idea of this campaign, why we're in the room today in the first place.
Purpose of the Campaign
So this campaign is really to highlight both the rounds that have run successfully on Gitcoin, but also the grantees that have partaken in rounds, and to share these stories of impact creation and also collaboration. Because theme in every GG round has been collaboration. And so part of that is sharing how we're working together, how different even communities within our ecosystem are working together. Like you just mentioned, Monty, and. Yeah, and how that all comes back to Gitcoin grants and actually the origins of this campaign I need to credit to Matilda. So maybe you want to give us just a quick spiel of where the initial idea came from. Yeah, I mean, I think it's so important, you know, when we run these rounds quarterly, you know, they come up pretty fast after one another sometimes.
Matilda on Showcasing Impact
And I feel like it's really important to showcase the builders that participate, you know, whether you're a first time grantee or a really successful builder that has come through getcoin grants a few times and been able to, you know, rally your community and fundraise quite a lot through the program. So I feel like it's really important to also show the impact of that as well. It kind of first started a little bit with the impact report. So if you go to impact Dot, Getcoin dot Co, it is a really amazing overview of some of the really biggest builders that have actually come through Gitcoin grants. So yeah, it's really important to showcase that. And now that we have kick started this new governance community round process that has been the same sort of idea that let's also showcase the impact that these community rounds that are, you know, that are running during Gitcoin grants rounds, let's also showcase that.
Learning from Community Round Operators
And through all of this, we also learn, you know, especially with community round operators. I find that I learned so much from everyone that comes in and runs rounds and, you know, the way that they approach rounds and the way that they approach everything is quite unique sometimes. So it's been really great. So that's the kind of the background, but yeah, excited to. Excited to dig in. I'll throw it back over to you, Lina. Thank you. Yeah, so we've built a little bit of a structure for the conversation today, but obviously we'll let it flow wherever it goes. But I wanted to start with the background and more of the evolution of these rounds, both for you, Monty and Manu, that you've been operators on. So let's start with you, Monty.
Monty's Experience with Gitcoin Rounds
Give us a quick introduction of the rounds that you've run on Gitcoin and even what led you to run these rounds. Yeah, sure. Happy to. So I think for a bit of context, Refidel was kind of born in essentially the birth of regenerative finance, or the REFi acronym as it became known when 10% of the global carbon markets came on chain in sort of bull market days. And this Refi term was born and all these founders energy and people started coming into the space and it started as a podcast that was led by John Ellison and a blog and various other media related stuff and an events network with Refi Spring, an online community, so founder circles.
The Evolution of Beta Cohorts
And, yeah, then that's obviously can take in a new form this year with the kind of beta cohorts and the incubator. I see we've got Scott in the cool shout out who helps kind of redesign the curriculum and onboard a whole next cohort of local nodes. And then that's culminated in the most recent regen coordination round where we've brought together, as well as the refi nodes that the Greenpool chapters and the seller regional daos and are feeding into this next stage as well, with the retroactive round coming up. So, yeah, that's been the journey. Yeah.
Impact and Inspiration
Thanks for sharing. I remember my first call with you, my first interview with you, when I was still very new to all of this, and you were highlighting some of the real world impact that these original nodes are creating. And I was just astounded and it really inspired me to write the article that, by the way, is on Mir. You can read more of the Regentao story there. Yeah, why don't we go into highlighting some key turning points within that journey, within Refi dao, running these rounds on Gitcoin.
Key Milestones and Reflections
Key turning points, what exactly do you mean by that question? Like some key milestones that you hit, some turning points within that journey that were monumentary. I think. For me, one of the big highlights, I think, was after doing those two rounds and getting towards the end of 2023 and then writing that big mirror article where went and then looked back at all of the local nodes we'd funded and kind of collected all of their inputs in terms of what they'd done with that funding and their impact and achievements. I think that was, for me, really awesome, to collect all of that work and have it in one place and just be able to see all of the awesome work that these communities have done and all the pictures of the events they've run and the logo and all the kind of movement, really, that had grown across the globe of people actually trying to use web three to regenerate and do good for the world and create real world impact.
Personal Challenges and Future Directions
It's obviously, that's my mission, and it was exciting to see that kind of take hold. And then. Yeah, obviously this year it has been a bit of a. Certainly the beginning of the year was quite a challenging journey for me personally in refer now, obviously, I was doing it quite closely with John. There's a kind of co founder role that kind of emerged together with him. And then at the end of 2023, some circumstantial things, he's gone a slightly different direction, had a personal kind of journey that he's gone on. He's got this regenerator thing as well, which is really cool that she's doing at the moment. But I was kind of sort of left thinking, okay, where do we go next for Refi Dao? But luckily, we did a kind of refi week event at traditional gene factory. Scott was there and a few others, and we kind of regrouped and came up with a vision for what we could do in 2024.
Excitement and Future Goals
And really. Yeah, this year, I think seeing that culminate in the regen coordination round, the funding we've raised for that and the collaboration with Greenpearl and Celo, I think, has been really exciting. And I'm really, yeah, thrilled to have seen that emerged. And so I guess that was the next big milestone for me. But, yeah. In our ecosystem, like you mentioned, things tend to change really quickly, and I wanted to dive into those changes, into that evolution a little bit more in terms of the types of projects or participants that you partake in these rounds.
Shifts in Project Participation
How has that changed over the course of the rounds? Yeah, well, I think we've certainly had a few nodes who have. Who have gone through all three rounds, the ones that really have established quite solid roots and grown a lasting community and a lasting organization. And, of course, then there are nodes that are a bit more, you know, have a place in time and space they ran an event, they did something, but then have grown or composted, I think is the term we use. We've actually kind of like, categorized the nodes into kind of different stages from the kind of seed nodes just getting started, the sapling and then the canopy nodes, which are kind of those kind of pioneer nodes that have lost standard stress of time and support other projects and ecosystems, etcetera.
Constantly Evolving Ecosystem
but, yeah, really, to be honest, we all the time have new people coming in saying, hey, how do we start a node? We want to get involved. And so there's a kind of a constant churn with new nodes coming in and other nodes kind of composting, which is, I think, again, that's, that is part of the regenerative nature here of the work is you've got to allow this emergence to happen. And so, yeah, it's always exciting to see when new projects and nodes and people come into the network. We've certainly seen that recently with regen coordination as well.
Looking Forward: Emerging Voices
Cool. Thanks for sharing. I would want to dive into the future and what's ahead, but I want to give Manu a chance to speak as well. So, Manu, can we start kind of a similar way? Like, let's talk about some of the highlights of running deci rounds on Gitcoin. Point out, maybe you have some memorable moments to share that have happened, stories that you want to bring into this space today. Sure. Thank you. So, yeah, I'm going to tell you a little bit about the history of the decel rounds on Gitcoin, just to make a check mark behind this. And then, yeah, for sure, I can share some of my personal highlights. I'm excited about that.
The Decentralized Science Movement
So, I mean, decentralized science, it's a movement fundamentally emerging out of the open science movement, mainly led by NASA and CERN, how we can make science more accessible and inclusive for people all across the globe to create scientific outcomes. And so I was curious for the last couple of years how we can fund underdeveloped or underfunded areas in science, so what scientists call the value of death. And then I came pretty quickly to the conclusion that we can use alternative financing mechanisms to solve this value of death. And then I found out about design, everything that is happening in this ecosystem roughly three years ago with my own project, deep venture dao.
Finding Pathways for Funding
Yeah. And then I saw, okay, we had this main. So grants funding is one building block, I would say, how we can bootstrap or at least fund. Yeah. Underfunded areas and science, obviously. And then I found out about gitcoin grants in September 2022. So there we had a centralized round. So this was mainly organized by centralized organizations and individuals, including molecule and orange, Dow and Vitalik Buterin and pro collapse. So a lot of these, I would say ogs also funded the Genesis round in September 2022.
Genesis Round Challenges
And then these people allocated I think roughly five hundred k to a lot DSI affiliated projects. But then after that there was no real, yeah, tracking of progress, no real impact measurement, and not really the will at the bottom of the bear market. Then in 2023 to continue deci grants on Gitcoin. And I thought why? Why it's such a good thing to bootstrap a whole ecosystem with grants funding and then commit an onboard more protocols to support the underdogs and very early stage pre seed projects with initial liquidity. So I really wanted to see this again.
Restarting Efforts in Decentralized Science
And then back then there was the desalid at Gitcoin. The former decided lead at Gitcoin. His name is Boris Diakov, who approached me and asked me, hey manu, you seem like a good guy, do you want to continue this? And I was like, yeah. So then we did the first spin out activity and how we thought about, okay, how can we really give the power to our desi community to make this a continuous effort? How can we create capital formation and capital allocation mechanisms, including quadratic funding to sustainably grow the desa ecosystem?
Community Involvement and Success
And then we had a steward election where I was elected as one of the stewards to review grantees, also together with Sarah Roos from space Biodao and Jelani Clark and Carolina Menkata from Desell World to again review the grantees. It was May last year and they get coin beta around GG 19, I think. And there we onboarded some previous sponsors, we had some funds left from the main round. I also convinced, together with Lunco, with Rod, we convinced Moondao to also pull in additional twenty five k to the matching pool.
Funding Projects and Growing the Ecosystem
And then other sponsors followed, also including uncommons, Greenpeace, China back then. And then we funded, yeah, in total 65 projects with seventy five K and Dai. So this was a success from my point of view, because we again initially kick started this bottom up, community driven effort to sustainably grow our ecosystem. And then, yeah, same question again after that. Who wants to continue this? Do we have funds available? And actually I was caught up with other things.
Continuing the Effort
But then there was a lucky coincidence that, for example, Ivo, who is also down here in the audience together with Maria, approached me and asked me, hey Manu, it seems like, you have some funds left from the last round, do you want to continue this? I was like, yeah, let's do it. So then we formed a project team. We coordinated marketing efforts with previous committed co marketing partners. We engaged our community to again also be bold, make some bold moves and also apply to become a steward as I did this before.
New Support and Community Growth
And then we raised some other funds from sponsors, individual sponsors Daos including Jeffrey Curry from research hub foundation and Skymine from the public nouns community. So the public nouns community also supported us, luckily enough. And then we ended up with a very solid project team again including Maria from Desaia and Swift Evo from Desai Asia and me and two other people also from the blocksplit community. And these were Tomisnav and Lana. And after that it was very good for me to see that it's not only me who have an interest in growing the ecosystem, but actually community leaders who independently step up and say, hey, I also want to see this reality.
Gitcoin Rounds and Growing Participation
We did the Gitcoin GG 20 round and then for GG 21 were blessed to also receive some support from official Gitcoin as one of the community rounds, 30k on top of the nine K that we had left from the other community run rounds. And here we are, my personal highlights. To also answer your question where definitely went first I saw a space friend, the Gitcoin Betta on the stewards collective. So this was my personal win. And then also to see again people independently stepping up.
Unexpected Engagement
I actually did not expect in the GT 20 and GT 21 round that we had so much awareness in the desal ecosystem, so many people who approached us, independent stewards from the community who just sent the applications and then we voted who we want to loop in and in the end we just gave all the people who send in applications to become a steward a chance to get involved in these grants in one way or another, again either with co marketing or moderating or things like that. So I was really proud in seeing these young people who also had more or less really credible track record in desal already with a lot of other daos, seeing these people supporting also general ecosystem growth with our community here on Gitcoin.
Reflections on Growth and Impact Tracking
And yeah, I think these were again my personal highlights. I was super flashed, I did not expect that and now we are here. So I think it's what was missing before previous rounds was again definitely like the impact measurements, impact reporting, tracking and verifying that these people actually do the work that they promised us to do. Also maybe the reason why after the initial genesis round other sponsors were not open enough to continue spending money without knowing what's actually in for them or for the ecosystem.
Proud of Changes and Future Directions
But this changed now over the time. So I'm proud for that. I'm super excited to use all the cutting edge tools that we have available to mitigate the risk that people try to play the system, people try to exploit the system. So the cluster matching, for example, gitcoin passport was very good from my point of view, and also doing our homework. So onboarding more operators, spreading the word about the stewardship of the ecosystem. So also in the next round, we have enough flow of committed people to continue this and then sure, coordinate more fundraising efforts and just making this a continuous thing.
The Future of Decentralized Science
Because I think Desi is here to stay. It's not only defi mechanisms for science, I think Desi is way more than just that. And this is also what's directly reflected on the mix of projects and project sizes we saw over the past three rounds. So, for example, in the beginning we had very biofocused initiatives. You know, these were also not, they were also not directly linked to using blockchain infra for scientific outcomes. But it was more like, hey, I'm a researcher, I have a scientific research project, I want to raise some web three grants for this, which is also a valid point, right?
Broadening Scope in Projects
But what we saw over the last couple of rounds was really these evolution of grantees, not only building out decentralized science tools, blockchain, infra for scientists, but also these different industry applications ranging from biotechnologies to climate technologies, water systems, closed loop systems, fusion energy, space tech, and then also the regional distribution of all these independent projects. So again, in the beginning it was mainly the US and Europe.
Expansion into Asian and African Markets
Then we open up the asian markets to also give more people in the asian markets the opportunity to raise some Web three grants for their decentralized science project on Gitcoin. And then we open up this whole african section, african region also with all of the majority of our stewards, they are based in Africa, they are developing the Desai ecosystem in Africa. They are working with real universities in Africa to educate them about the opportunities we have in web three as well. So yeah, these were the things I'm really proud of. And I also believe that our whole community can be and must be proud of the evolution of deci that we had over the past couple of years. And yeah, I hope that we can collectively continue this journey altogether, because it's just the beginning. We are not even one person there where Desi should be. So it's yeah, very exciting times.
Community Engagement and Retention
You said something a little bit earlier about that you were surprised about the engagement in the last two rounds that people came and approached you. And I think a lot of the time that's like maybe under evaluated in a way that these rounds, yes, they're about funding, but so much of it is about community building too. Right? Can I mention one more thing? Can I mention one more thing? So, yeah, I think it's all about retention. So how many projects actually reapply to be part of the Deci Gitcoin community, but also about the rate of how many projects that were, for example, external to web three or external to Gitcoin are new to the round. So it's a good mix in the best case. Again, if you want to have this bottom up, community driven effort, I would say you should have at least 40% of the projects coming back to you. So roughly 40% retention rate from the past round to the next round to make this an effort.
Community Engagement and Marketing
If you have more. Okay, cool. They also stay for the money, but they are also here for the community. And especially if you measure how many grantees actively engage in, for example, the marketing efforts, the X basis, how many people also engage in telegram channels Onx, how many people actively promote their grant because they are also proud to be in a round in the community round on Gitcoin. I think these are really the KPI's that we can track for our community rounds on Gitcoin. And yeah, super excited for that. And yeah, handing it back to you, Lina. I'll hand it off to Matilda. Nice. Amazing. Awesome. Well, I. It's. Yeah, really great to hear both of your stories and the insights.
Success of Gitcoin Platform and Community
I would love to dig into more about Gitcoin and GG 21. But before we get into GG 21, I'd love to throw this question to both of you. Feel free to come off mute or just raise your hand if you'd like to jump in first. But I'd love to find out from both of you how Gitcoinst platform and the community has specifically enabled the success of your round. You know, are there any unique features or support systems that have been particularly beneficial? Manu. Manu. Yeah. Your hand went up first, so go for it. Okay. Yeah, for sure. I mean, I love the Gitcoin community again. For me, I started out because I wanted to be a grantee, but then there were like some. Yes, some hurdles that I.
Democratizing Access to Capital Allocation
That I faced while sending in the application. So I wanted to change that and then had enough room to play with the other protocol, Gitcoins grand Stack, also to bidde novice systems, how we coordinate our community. And I mean, this in itself is like a big win that you democratize access to capital allocation for web three communities and beyond. And then I think the obvious thing was also in the last GG 21 that you not only, for example, support your own rounds, as we saw it before with the open source round or whatever, but also that you actively support people who are organizing community rounds because then you're seeding the seeds around Gitcoin and you have real incentives for people to use grand Stack and maybe if you have, let's say, a weak quarter with your community engagement, as I said, which is totally natural and normal, especially if you're in a bear market, that you still have the will to see these community rounds happen.
Financial Support and Community Relationships
So, yeah, the financial support, for example, in this GG 21 was really changing the way how we operate and also how we communicate also our relationship to Gitcoin overall. So, yeah, I'm just proud to be part of this community, excited that we can play around with cutting edge capital allocation tools, civil resistant systems to distribute funds in the web. In the web three. And, yeah, I think that's it. Thank you. Thank you for everything. Yeah, I think just building on that, I think obviously Gitcoin has just been at the very cutting edge of innovation on the mechanism of quadratic funding, which I think has been really exciting as well, to see the evolution of the platform and opening that up, as Manuel says, for any community to be able to do.
Challenges and Opportunities of Usability
Of course, there are still challenges with usability and accessibility and outside the web three space, there's a few things there. And also, it's worth noting, it's nothing, the only mechanism that should be used or like it's not perfect, you know, like it has a very clear, specific, good use case, as Manuel is great for, Manuel mentioned, it's great for like marketing and community building and collaboration and whether it's always the most optimal, you know, allocation in every situation, depending on your objectives and et cetera, you know, maybe more questionable and in conjunction with other mechanisms and other rounds and other funding and support things I think is crucial.
Gitcoin's Impact and Innovations
But I do think it's been incredible to see Gitcoin continue to push the frontier here in terms of some of the cluster matching stuff, which I think, from my perspective, for both the two seller rounds have worked really well. And looking through the list and seeing which projects it's identified as clustered and how it's boosted and seems from my perspective, to have worked really well in starting to reduce some of that bias. And of course, moving from having to mint your passport stamps to just doing that in the backend model based detection system. Also a huge win, I do think. Of course, there's still some nuance there. Of course people might not have a robust history in web three, and should that always mean they're penalized or counted as a Sybil?
Expanding Accessibility Beyond Web Three
I think in our context that's fine because we've got web three based projects. So having a web three background is probably a relatively good signal. But if were starting to think about us just on a call with Samantha Power and thinking about could we do a bioregional QF round and bring in all these bioregional grassroots projects? And to get there, I think we're almost there, but we just need the tooling to be that slight bit more accessible. Get over some of the web three abstraction and chain bridging and even the passport model detection system have other kind of civil mechanisms. I did also love to see that the first PayPal donations happened this round. Again, just making these things more accessible.
Pushing the Frontier and Continuous Improvement
So yeah, like I said, I think we're kind of always at the frontier. They're pushing things forward. It's continuing to get better, but there's still work to do and that's in a way an exciting place to be. So yeah. Yeah, this is honestly one of my favorite parts of what I do at Gitcoin is I've said it a few times in the last few weeks, it's always these deep retrospectives and learnings and evolutions and experimentation and just kind of seeing how we can improve round over round. And yeah, it's great to hear that from both of you as well, specifically around the mechanism. You know, as Gitcoin is moving into a multi mechanism future, I'm really excited to see how that is going to play into the Gitcoin grants rounds and into community rounds as well.
Reflections on GG21 and Future Steps
So yeah, super excited about that. But yeah, you both touched a little bit on GG 21, but if there's anything specific that either of you want to share. I know, Monty, you just dropped, I think you are the first round that has dropped their retrospective. So congrats. It's super exciting. I can't wait to dig in. I've been in calls since you posted it, but I can't wait to dig into it. So why don't I throw it over to you first and if there's anything you'd love to share about it, specifically around GD 21. Yeah, let's chat.
Innovations from the Recent Round
Let's chat. The most recent round. Yeah, sure. Absolutely. So I don't know which, there's quite a few different threads to pull on. But one of the interesting things we tried this round was we partnered with regentips, who have the kind of regen tipping token and one as a mechanism to incentivize participation in the seller round. So just by donating, you could get a regen token airdrop and get a kind of tipping boost if you're on farcaster and tipping people, etcetera.
Experimentation with Funding Mechanisms
But also we started to experiment with this tunable quadratic funding. Essentially what that is it was a mechanism developed by the token engineering commons to take a signal and use that to influence the matching results. So what token engineering commons have done is say, okay, if you're an expert token engineer, we can give you some sort of signal or badge. And then when you come in and donate to the rounds, that's going to have more of an impact in deciding the allocation of the matching funds because you're a recognized expert in that field. And so that's kind of tweaking the quadratic funding allocation kind of calculations and weighting it towards expertise or other signal.
Using Signals to Enhance Funding Allocation
And so we said, what if we could utilize the proof of regen signal on regen tips, where you can collect a bunch of badges, say you're a giveth donor, a Greenpool network member, a refi DAO member, an optimism badge holder, or any other number of regen badges they have there. If we feed that in to the quadratic funding mechanism, how does that influence the results? And in the spirit of experimentation, I have to say that we ended up not using the results for two reasons. Mainly, mainly because there were some technical challenges that mean we would have had to delay payouts and stuff, and we wanted to do that in a timely way.
Challenges in Implementing New Mechanisms
But also, to be honest, I don't think the initial results we got weren't, I think, optimizing exactly in the way that we necessarily would want to. I think there's already in bitcoin rounds a not a bias, but a weighting towards projects that are able to mobilize people who have a background and extensive history in web three. And then this almost like further amplified that. So the projects that didn't have communities and people supporting them who are, as in deep in the web three space, would get further penalized. So, yeah, we ended up not using the mechanism, but hey, we learned a lot.
Innovative Solutions and Future Directions
And actually now the tool is being further developed such that it can be a self serve tool and we can have essentially kind of tweak to see what signals we want to bring in. So maybe if you're like a Refi DAo member OG and you've been so involved, we maybe want to give you a boost, or maybe if you're an environmental expert, then maybe you deserve a boost in the thing. And so just having the customizability for round operators be able to kind of adjust this signal, I think is a really interesting experiment. But anyway, I appreciate that maybe is a bit niche of a topic of interest, but it's just one of the things that we've been thinking about and playing with.
Future Mechanisms and Coordination
But yeah, overall there's some other reflections on the round in terms of the matching results and the mechanisms and some of the feature requests we'd like to see in gitcoin and some of the next steps for the region coordination, including the kind of impact tracking stuff that we're doing and the retroactive rounds and things like that. So yeah, do check it out if you're interested to go deeper. Amazing. I did also see that there was a Greenpool podcast also that just dropped. I think that dropped today, if I'm not mistaken.
Podcast Insights and Conclusions
So I'm sure there's also lots of good snippets in there as well. Manu, I saw your hand was raised, so I'll throw it over to you. Oh yeah. I also wanted to reflect a bit on the learnings and the reflection of the past round.
Collecting Feedback and Community Involvement
And yeah, because at this moment we are working on collecting the feedback from our stewards, from our operators, from our grantees, also from community members and donors who saw the GG 21 decay round on Gitcoin. And yeah, so the learnings that I saw and that I heard from the majority of the people were, for example, also in educating our own community of stewards and operators about the definition of Deci. Because again, we are a web three movement. The definition is continuously evolving over time. So we also need to adjust the definition, the eligibility criteria and also the exclusion criteria for projects to participate in this round. Because I think over the past we tried to make it as inclusive as possible with a very open definition of Deci. For sure we had eligibility criteria, but we also had a good will in our community to let as many people in as possible. So this was really important for the majority of our community as well.
Signal Boosting and Community Engagement
I believe that the signal boosting is a very good idea where we can also, for example, just upload a whitelisted or a signal boosted list of wallets from, for example, operators or stewards, and then they can donate to projects, excluding their own projects for sure. I think this was also like one learning how we handle, for example, steward or operator affiliated projects, because it's not an easy question and not an easy answer to this question, if or why we, for example, should or must include steward and operator affiliate projects in the round. Again, over the past rounds, we learned that even sponsors encourage us to also apply with our own projects in the round, just to make the incentives more clear. Besides the, for example, operator incentives in the decel rounds on Gitcoin and then, yeah, again, it's mainly about training people, training stewards, training operators, sharpen the understanding and then also having the right signal from these community experts to kind of guide also the donors to our round to make valid decisions and also at the same time ensure a certain level of quality from the grantees.
Cluster Matching and Allocation of Capital
I think with cluster matching, really it's taking away a lot of the heavy workload and doing a Sybil analysis. If we use automated Sybil analysis and the cluster matching algorithm compared to, for example, traditional QF, where it's solely a popularity contest. So the more people you attract, the more you get out of it. I think cluster matching is considering a lot of hidden aspects when it comes to distributing and allocating the capital. So this is a big win for community rounds, I would say. But again, we are not there yet. We need to improve how we coordinate, we need to improve how we train people, we need to improve what tools we use and then also do the homework on our own to understand really what's happening behind the tech, what's happening in our round, where did the donations go and donations flow, and what do we want to, for example, do about some people who might have a hostile or malicious intent in attending these rounds? So these were like a lot of the questions that we asked over the last couple of months.
Redefining Inclusion and Exclusion Criteria
How do we want to redefine, again the inclusion and also the exclusion criteria? Do we want to see a good mix of mature projects and newcomers? Do we want to incentivize more retroactive, for example, contributions or proactive contributions? Because if we want to support the underdogs and the newcomers of Desai, it's a lot of proactive support because they need to show a proven track record and they need to show that they are actually building things and creating impact in their respective communities. And I think again, if we have a weighting based on the boosted signal wallets, just uploading a list of signal wallets to grand Stack, that definitely have an expert voice, a signal in the community rounds. I think this can be a huge win. Besides that, obviously, the passport waiting, which is also partially included in the cluster matching, I guess, and then also maybe a weighting based on the karma gap.
Future Roadmap and Community Engagement Plans
So the people who actually filled out the impact report that is requested from the operator team, I think a combination of these three things might make it easier also for the community to make valid and solid decisions which projects they want to support. But in the end, again, I'm super happy how everything went so far. And, yeah, these were some of the reflections from my end. Amazing. I love it. I know we've only got about eight minutes left, so we can start closing out the space. I mean, I actually think now, because I would actually have loved, if we had more time, I would have loved to dive more into, you know, impact measurement as well. But I think that actually deserves a whole space for in itself. So that's just given me an idea that we should host a space on that in the next few weeks. So more on that to come, because I do think that's such a juicy topic, and there's so many learnings that I'm already seeing from GG 21 and from GG 20.
Plans for GG 22 and Community Inclusiveness
Yeah, I just want to also give a huge shout out to both of you and to other rounds in GG 21 for just the big experimentation that everyone just really leaned into this round. It's been incredible to see. And, yeah, with every round comes a lot of learnings. I'll definitely dive into your retro today or tomorrow, and, yeah, I'm super excited to dive deeper into it. So the last question that I'll leave both of you with, I do have to hop to another Twitter space on the hour, so I do have a hard stop, but I would love to leave you with this question, is, what is on the roadmap for both of you? Are you planning on running in GG 22? Is that something that you can share, or is there anything that you can give us also on what the future of both of your rounds look like? I'll throw it over to you first.
Future Projects and Collaborations
Yeah, I've got. Got quite a few different plans, as usual. I'm not jumping on another Twitter space right after this, so, thankfully, it's the end of my day. But, yeah, so, obviously we touched on it a little bit, but I really started to go deep on this common approach and a kind of architecture for the impact tracking. How do we do that across a decentralized network of local nodes? How do we aggregate that data, how do we best communicate it, et cetera. It's very difficult challenges in there. Luckily there's a whole body of work which has started to figure some of that out and working on our impact model, not just the business model, so that hopefully should have a good version, one of that by next week, and start to gather all of the regen coordination nodes, from Refi nodes to Greenpool chapters and et cetera, and form the plan for the retroactive roadmap where we'll build towards getting all of that reporting of the info and then ultimately doing a retroactive round towards the end of this year.
Upcoming Projects and Collaborations
An exact date for that is not nailed down yet because there's a few things to figure out first, but that's in terms of regen coordination, some of the next steps. And then other than that, I also do a lot of work with Celo and Celo public goods and we've got multiple things cooking and I think, yeah, for GG 22 we haven't necessarily. We're not necessarily going to run directly around for regen coordination or the real world builders round again. We're still kind of evaluating options, but I think what we would love to do, potentially, is partner with some awesome community rounds, support them in running around on Celo and I and various other things, and exploring what kind of collaborations could go on there. We kind of talk of a bioregional QF round, but maybe that comes in Q 120 25. And then finally, the other big thing that we're working towards is the first salo citizens RPGF.
Impact Tracking and Future Discussions
So we did a retroactive round beginning of this year for Ursala's first one for projects, and now we're looking at sello citizens. And yeah, we use the easy retro PGF tool, which is based on alloy protocol, part of the Gitcoin family. But this time, yeah, we're looking at pairwise and a few other tools. We're even building something called prosperity passport so that we can get all of the on chain data of citizens and evaluate that. But anyway, that's a whole other topic and we're running out of time here, so I'll be quiet. But thanks so much, Lena, Matilda, for hosting the space. Manuel, great to jam with you. Everyone listening, hope you have a good rest of your day. And yeah, we'll see you at the next one.
Closing Remarks and Future Engagement
Amazing. Manu, I'll throw it over to you if you've got a three minute quick show on your roadmap. Sorry for being a stickler on the time, but I do have another call to hop to. Sure, sure. Yeah, same here. So yeah, for us, it's first of all creating the reflection report. So collecting all the feedback from our stewards, operators, grantees, community members, donors who want to share their voice, then publish this on gitcoin governance forum. Same with the impact report. So how did the round evolve from the GG twenty s to the GG 21 round? With some more stats. And then it's about for us about the impact onboarding. So onboarding pass grantees to Karmagap to fill out a report or at least communicate with us what they actually did with the funds. Then were in touch with glow dollar even before in GG 21 if we want to include glow dollar and the matching pool.
Future Prospects and Closing Intentions
So we want to consider this for the next Gitcoin deci round. Maybe even if you consider distributing GTC instead of USDC. I think this can also be a good opportunity for gitcoin to increase the token holder size for the gitcoin token. And then if we can get some funds in our multi zigs, for sure, we are planning to do a retrieve PGF round with all the operators and all the deci heroes who stepped up over the last couple of years. I mean, at this moment in time, we are in touch with some people who are exploring crypto business models to create sustainable ways of funding ecosystem growth and desi. But this will probably take some more time if we want to accumulate, compute and then run some blockchain nodes or staking rewards or whatever.
Community Engagement and Training Initiatives
And other than that, it's about training and community engagement. So we need to find more people who want to become a steward, who want to be an operator and then onboard them properly with the adjusted eligibility criteria and all the processes and structures, how to use Gitcoin grand stack in the best possible way. So, yeah, that's on our roadmap. And yeah, again, thank you very much, Matilda and Dina. And yeah, good to have you also up here, Monty, to talk about your rounds. And yeah, thanks to you all. Much love and see you in the next Gitcoin X space. Hopefully see you soon.
Final Thoughts and Acknowledgments
Amazing, amazing. Well, with that, look at that, perfect timing. I love it. I love it. Winter space. This has just been such an incredible conversation. So really huge. Thank you to Manu and to Monty for joining us and for, you know, allowing us to deep dive into both of your rounds. Yeah, it's been really amazing to see both of them grow overdose the time. And thank you so much to my amazing co host, Lena super awesome to have someone else's voice on these spaces for a change as well. It was lovely to be up here with you. Yeah. Thanks, Manu. Thanks, Monty. Obviously, I enjoyed also the interviews with you, and it was cool to be able to follow up on that now.
Farewell and Future Engagement
Amazing. Awesome. Thanks so much, Matilda. Thanks, Lena. You guys rock. Thank you so much. See you next time. Alrighty. Bye bye. Goodbye.
