by 0xf0480e7b09edb7229d4f7b3b25ef77429c5754cf (Palewin)
Should the following $61,500 grant in the Core Unit category be approved?
Abstract
The Grant Support Squad is an important team for the DAO as long as the grants program exists. Currently, we are providing support and monitoring for 40 active grants. The Squad has 3 key objectives:
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to analyze concerns from grantees and help recover funds if grants need to be revoked;
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to provide support through the entire grant to drive grantees to success;
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to collaborate in the creation of processes, improvements, and transparency in the grants program.
Based on the comments on the first version of this renewal, the budget was reduced by 35%: hourly rates for the team were reduced, advisor hours were cut by 50%, and the work hours for the rest of the team were reduced by 18% (non-fundamental tasks were cut).
Grant size
61,500 USD in DAI
Project duration
5 months
Beneficiary address
0x658497d7681e4Fb18C65AbD5Ce066A1e3082c1e5
Email address
Description
Since Jun22, the Squad has worked with more than 190 grantees. We onboard them and provide support along the way. The team participated in governance processes updating the grants program, developed a grants landing page, published articles to showcase grants, provided transparency in public roadmaps, launched initiatives such as Testing Sessions, sent welcome kits to strengthen DCL brand awareness, and published a Manual of Operations. We have also created a Revocations Committee (RC), and so far we have recovered $433.778 DAI since this squad was created.
The GSS has been active and working under 3 main goals:
1) For taking care of DAO Treasury: $433.778 has been recovered.
Before establishing the RC, were our squad revoked vesting contracts based on gather information, engaging with the grantee, and seeking inputs from advisors to confirm or refute our findings. This approach served as a double-check on the information available. After nearly a year of following this procedure, our team and the community began to recognize that it concentrated a significant amount of power within a single entity. As a response to this concern, the RC was established through a governance proposal. Its purpose was to review our recommendations and allow grantees to engage with an impartial third party, thus ensuring a more fair and transparent process. In this stage, funds related to 8 projects were revoked or recovered, totaling $291,330 (all made possible thanks to investigations or interventions by the GSS) and 13 cases were dismissed.
2) For supporting grantees, we have onboarded 100% of the grantees that entered the Program. On our last renewal, while providing more than 784 hours of support, we shipped more than 45 onboarding kits to raise brand awareness. Since the squad was created, we have solved more than 128 problems/requests to lead grants to success. So far, we have also produced 20 articles, published in the DCL Blog about the work our grantees are doing. More recently we have launched Testing Sessions, to give the grantees a space to demo their projects and get feedback. So far we have hosted 27 sessions.
3) For fostering transparency & accountability, we have launched Public Roadmaps, to make a follow up on grants milestones and impact metrics to 100% of the projects (Grants’ Framework 2023). We are proud of having built a grants program with community input, with 16 step-by-step guides to provide transparency about our work: Grant Support Squad’s manual of operations. We’ve also created the DAO Grants Github REPO to compile all the available codes from open sourced grants.
And to make overall updates and changes to the grants program, we have published 11 governance proposals, and have done 9 pull requests made into docs.decentraland.org to update the Grants Program documentation. We have written security recommendations, and a sensitive data handling policy and we created the Grants Program Landing Page .
Here you can see our financial report (Jun to Nov23). It continues in comments.
Roadmap and milestones
Our work is a continuous effort of support, guidance, analysis, and accountability for grants projects, along with the ongoing effort to improve the Grants Program. That is why our roadmap includes the daily tasks we perform in an ongoing process. With the spirit of making our processes open, we have published a Grant Support Squad’s manual of operations in which you can find the description of the processes.
1) Take care of DAO Grants Treasury
- Analyze and elevate cases to the Revocations Committee provide support with meetings, advice, and contacts.
- Report on funds recovered.
- Collaborate with bidding and tendering process
2) Support Grant Projects
- Periodic Follow-up with grantees to identify problems and requests, audit the grant projects with onboardings, updating roadmaps, monthly calls and facilitating contacts.
- Analyze problems and requests, identify and solve them.
- Ensure the accessibility of information about the grants program and promoting grants work on blogposts.
3) Foster Transparency and accountability
- Write a status update monthly on grantees public roadmap, and provide spaces to share their work and gather feedback with Testing Sessions and Townhalls.
- Provide information about the accountability of grants, by publishing concerns raised, and analyzing the cases.
