by 0xe6af22b8fd4a2fdfec9a0b18c6be9683882d70e6 (Yararasita)
Should the following Tier 5: up to $120,000 USD, 6 months vesting (1 month cliff) grant in the Community category be approved?
Abstract
Hi community! This proposal is to renew our Grant Support Squad. So far we have supported +100 grantees, fostering transparency and guaranteeing an efficient use of the DAO treasury. We’ve had the privilege to work closely with the grantees, and validated that the Grants Program is a key asset if we want to create a metaverse owned and created by their users, and enable the sustainable growth of Decentraland. Based on our work, the community now knows how many grants finished their projects, there is an onboarding, the updates are frequent, the grantees have a dedicated space in the TownHalls to promote their projects, and they have a clear space to ask for support to solve blockers and make requests. Here we present our following plans.
Grant size
103,200 USD
Beneficiary address
0x658497d7681e4Fb18C65AbD5Ce066A1e3082c1e5
Email address
Description
The Grant Support Squad was created in June 2022 to support the grantees. During this period of time, this team was able to understand the grantees’ needs, identified blockers and requests and provided solutions to the community. We have collaborated providing insights to the DAO Committee to review Voting Power thresholds, the grant’s categories and budget requests to the Grants Program.
We’ve classified the main issues from our grantees into four categories (Tech support, Financial Support, Promotion Support, and others). We wrote the grant’s FAQs, to the DAO documentation to provide responses to recurrent questions. On the other hand, we have started to work on advisorships with the Decentraland Foundation’s team to organize frequent calls for the 5 and 6 Tier Grants (platform category), and an AskMeAnything sessions to connect the community with the Decentraland Foundation, based on 4 tech support topics (Catalyst, SDK, Explorer, and Dapps). These facilitations will begin in November 2022.
Another frequent request from our grantees has been promotion. We hired a copywriter (Luis Mienville) to write the #Community Highlights category (with the help of the Decentraland Foundation’s MKT team) on the Decentraland official Blog . We have published 6 articles and our idea is to have more frequency, having Luis as an internal member of the team. We also encouraged the creation of the 2nd monthly Town Halls (on European timezone), to have more grantees showing their progress. Since September, we have an average of 3 grantees showing their progress in each Town Hall, who create videos and chat with the community. Since the beginning of our grant period, 20 projects were highlighted in TownHalls. We work with the Gov Facilitation Squad to spread the videos everytime we can in Social Media, Discord and DAO Newsletter.
To take care of the community treasury, we have recommended to the DAO committee to revoke grants that were delayed, not delivering their grant projects, or unable to finish due to technical blockers, until they can deliver their commitment with the DAO. We helped to recover more than $565.842 to the DAO treasury during this 5 month period since the Grants Support Squad was created. We are aware of the negative connotation of this action and that this method is not the best. But today, it is the only tool that we have to make sure the funds are going to projects that nurture our community. To decentralize this decision making, we asked who would be the best entity to revoke grants and the community decided to create a Revocation Committee to address these matters. They will be the stewards of the DAO treasury.
Last but not least, we have collaborated with the DAO Facilitation Squad and the DAO Governance Squad to provide them with continuous feedback and partner with them to generate synergy among our efforts to build transparency in the community.
Specification
For this renewal, here are the goals, background, activities and methods we’d like to implement:
Support the grantees in Decentraland to make successful projects:
We have supported +100 grantees, solving more than 80 requests and blockers and in the next 6 months we want to continue with this goal in mind, creating better and longer partnerships with the community. We are doing this by onboarding the new grantees, meeting virtually to provide support, constant communication on Discord/email, facilitating contacts, and creating strong relationships between Decentraland Foundation and our grantees to address blockers and requests.
Fostering transparency in the grants ecosystem:
In the next 6 months, we want to keep on building along with the Governance App Squad a friendly platform for our grantees to post updates, communicate, receive feedback, support and review their project´s progress.
On this renewal, we will work on requests for changes to the form for requesting grants, that follow the Grants Framework, with the objective of giving the DAO more information about the grant being requested to have better context for voting. We are also requesting to implement a Final Report for the grants finished, to understand how our grantees add value to Decentraland, and how our Grants program adds value to the community contributors. Measuring these impacts will help us understand the changes needed to make the Grants Program better in the future.
Guarantee an efficient use of the community treasury:
We have been able to advise the DAO committee to execute preventive revocations for projects. This has been a difficult position, as it created friction on our relationship with some of our grantees. Nevertheless, all preventive revocations have been done with the commitment from the Grant Support Squad and the DAO Committee that if the grantees demonstrate that they deliver their projects, their vesting contracts would be resumed and paid fully. In this next period of 6 months, we will continue our efforts to design a Framework for New Committee who decides when to revoke grants, to provide transparency, decentralize the role of the Grant Support Squad and the DAO Committee, and start our role as providers of information to the New Committee.
This grant will set up a budget to run this team for the next 6 months. This grant could be extended upon a further decision of the DAO if the grant succeeds its objectives.
The proposed DAO Grant Support Squad will be implemented under the same non-profit foundation created for the DAO Governance Squad. This foundation provides a flexible vehicle to manage a budget with autonomy while still giving authority to the DAO to steer its direction.
The grant will be provided as a vesting contract of stablecoins assigned to a 2-out-of-3 signatures wallet. The key holders are the same as the previous grant.
Personnel
Sr. Grants Manager - Gia Castello
Sr. Grants accountability manager - Pablo Lewin
Sr. Grants Partnerships manager - Juan Pablo Cassinelli
New member - Ssr. Grants Manager: Due to the extra amount of hours worked by the Grant Support squad, we are hiring a new member to build capacity. We are creating an open call for this position and we will encourage the community to apply and join us in our mission to support the grantees.
Blog copywriter Luis Minvielle
Time Investment: 360 monthly hours or 90 weekly hours, 56% workload increase from previous grant project).
Budget
$18534 USD per month or a grand total of $ 111,200.00 USD.
For this renewal we are asking for $ 103,200.00 as we had a remaining from the last grant of $8000.
This budget includes:
Team salaries: $94.800
Operational expenses: $3.000
Board of experts compensation: $5.400
Travel and accommodation expenses for an industry-related event attendance: $8.000
Financial report of the previous Grant period here.
Roadmap and milestones
Our north star remains the same: We will continue to provide onboarding and support to the new grantees to help them achieve their goals, and take care of the DAO Treasury with recurrent activities such as:
- Grantees onboarding (email, dedicated discord channel among other activities).
- Calls to follow-up with active grants (frequency based on project size).
- Collaborate with the DAO governance squad and the Facilitation Squad.
- Host the grants updates section in the Town Halls.
- Provide technical support to grantees
- Generate polls to include the community on decision-making
- Implement the strategic path of grants “exits” to nurture the Decentraland Ecosystem (as verified partners, advisors, grant renewals, service providers, among others)
During these 6 months, we have gathered feedback and have learnings that we’d like to implement for this renewal:
Provide Support to grantees
- Promotion
- Technical support: Foster collaboration between the grants program and Decentraland Foundation, receive feedback and make adjustments for the support to succeed.
- Test the support of “Grants exits” to nurture the Decentraland Ecosystem
Foster transparency
- Implement End Reports for grants, and learn from their feedback to propose improvements.
Take care of the DAO treasury
- Facilitate the selection and implementation of the New Committee selected by the community and provide support to the New Committee.
