[DAO:b1593e6] Renewal Grant Support Squad 2023H2

Governance
1

by 0xe6af22b8fd4a2fdfec9a0b18c6be9683882d70e6 (Yararasita)

Should the following $114,600 grant in the Core Unit category be approved?

Abstract

After a year working with the grants program, the Grants Support Squad has gathered insights from more than 150 grantees to make adjustments to the program, and launched a initiatives based on the requests of the community such as the Ask Me Anything Sessions, a Revocations Committee, Testing Tuesdays initiative, providing public roadmaps, publishing articles from grantees, with the main objective of providing all they need to make successful projects and promote their work.

With that in mind, our goals remain the same: Make the best grants program Decentraland DAO can have by supporting the grantees to make the best projects on their ability, to foster transparency from the grantees to the community, and take care of the DAO treasury.

Grant size

114,600 USD in DAI

Project duration

6 months

Beneficiary address

0x658497d7681e4Fb18C65AbD5Ce066A1e3082c1e5

Email address

gia.castello@decentraland.org

Description

Since June 2022 the Grant Support Squad has onboarded 100% of the grantees that entered the Grants Program at Decentraland. The team was able to understand their needs, identified in the last 6 month period 15 blockers and 55 requests (2 being solved by the team) and provided solutions to them.
We wrote the grant’s FAQs to the DAO documentation, added security recommendations, we contributed to 17 AskMeAnything sessions to connect the community with the Decentraland Foundation since Oct 2022. More recently, in March 2023 we have launched the Testing Tuesday Initiative, to give the grantees a space to demo their projects and get feedback from the community. So far we have hosted 11 sessions, and we’ve given POAPs to the community as a way to acknowledge their valuable contributions. We would like to continue updating the documentation and fostering spaces of collaboration between the Decentraland DAO and Decentraland Foundation, and provide support to the grantees in these or other initiatives that might arise based on their needs.

Another frequent request from our grantees has been promotion. We hired a copywriter (Luis Mienville) who so far had written 13 articles in the Decentraland Blog about the amazing work our grantees are doing. We also encouraged grantees to show their progress in our bi-weekly Townhalls. Since September, we have an average of 3 grantees showing their progress in each Town Hall, who create videos and socialize with the community their advancements. We would like to continue nurturing these spaces of promotion, which are crucial to showcase their work.

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. In our last grant, we had recovered $565.842, and since then, 3 grant vesting contracts were resumed as they resolved their blockers, recovering from legacy revoked grants $181.619, and $75.000 from the renewed grants program adding a total of $256.619 to the DAO treasury during this first year. We are creating a Revocation Committee to distribute this responsibility with selected members of the community.

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 via promotion and the governance dApp respectively. We’ve also collaborated providing insights to the DAO Committee to restructure the grants program.

We’d love to continue improve our grants program not only with the grantees, but with the broader Decentraland systems, and applying ongoing changes to better serve Decentraland’s sustainable growth.

Here you can see our financial report (jan22-apr23)

Roadmap and milestones

We will continue working on

  • Grantees onboarding
  • Generate public roadmaps
  • Frequent calls based on project size
  • Collaborate with the Governance Squad, DAO Committee and Facilitation Squad.
  • Organize & host grants section in TownHalls
  • Provide technical support to grantees connecting them with stakeholders from the community and from the Decentraland Foundation.
  • Provide space to share their work and gather feedback from the community with Testing Tuesdays
  • Implement the strategic path of grants “exits” to nurture Decentraland (as verified partners, advisors, grant renewals, service providers)
  • Collaborate with bidding and tendering process

During these 6 months, we’ve had learnings and would like to implement:

Provide Support to grantees

  • Develop a Landing Page to ease the access of information about the Decentraland Grants Program and its initiatives.
  • Sending Decentraland DAO branded kits of swag to welcome future grantees, and help brand awareness.

Foster transparency

  • Implementation of Public Roadmaps to open up our follow up process as GSS with the rest of the community.
  • We are documenting all our processes and want to create the open Operational Guide of the GSS

Take care of the DAO treasury

  • Onboard the Revocations Committee selected by the community and support them until they are autonomous.
  • Support Bidding and Tendering initiative, sharing our knowledge and resources with its stewards.

Vote on this proposal on the Decentraland DAO

View this proposal on Snapshot

2

Could you help me better understand your performance metrics and how you will be measuring them?

impact metrics
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must be clear
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3

I think its crucial to have the GSS team, Someone needs to hold some grants accountable.
There is a small thing I am worried about which is the team compensation based on your team I can see that there are 4 Squad members and to split 96,000 dollars for this in 6 months seems like a expensive deal!

$4.000 per monthly,
$923,08 per week or $24,000
squad member seems to much for me but this is just an opinion.
9e2d6affe8fc362daa2f9ea2466a50d7

Also I dont understand the travel budget?
What does the GSS has to do with traveling when you can do it remotely, how does attending on conferences bring value to the Squad?

4

I also dont believe the $75,000 is really an accomplishment you should count unless you really believe or know @DuelArenap2e wont get the new proposal passed, I dont know how to feel about this aswell.

5

Hi! Sure!

We are measuring our support by:

  • Counting how many of the grantees that passed, were onboarded. This will be measured by listing how many grantees passed (100%), and how many grantees were fully onboarded, which today includes sending a first email, scheduling a call with the grantee, and creating the public roadmap in that call with the grantee so both parties have clarity on de deliverables.

  • Number of blogposts produced in coordination with our copywriter, the grantee being featured, and Decentraland Foundation to share the projects of the grantees for broader audiences. This will be measured by counting the blogposts published in Decentraland’s blog section.

  • Number of TestingTuesdays sessions held, which is a space for the community to gather, for the grantee to preview their work and for the GSS to have feedback from the community on the projects being developed. Each session includes coordinating with the grantee the things to be tested, scheduling it, publishing it, sharing with the Facilitation Squad for them to share the session with the community, holsting the session and issue POAPS for attendees. This will be measured as 1 for every one of these sessions held.

  • Measure how many of the 100% blockers and requests from the grantees were solved. Each PM of the GSS has its own grantees, and if a grantee requests something or has any blocker, an issue is created. So this is measured by counting how many of the total of blockers and requests of a period (100%) were solved (X%)

Then we are measuring how we foster transparency by:

  • Getting the compared number of grants enacted and public roadmaps, and roadmaps that were monthly updated, to make our follow up process more transparent.

  • The number of processes that we have set up in place, documented publicly, opening the way we do our activities not only for our DAO but for sharing that knowledge with other DAOs that might be interested in making strategies for their programs.

We will measure the impact of how we take care of the dao treasury by:

  • The number of cases generated and comparing it to the number of cases closed through our formal request form to raise concerns for grantees.
  • From that total, we’ll compare it with the number of cases that were elevated to the Revocations Committee
  • From those, the comparison with the percentage of cases revoked / resumed
  • And another impact metric is how much money is recovered to the DAO treasury.

For this specific category, the goal is to make a healthy grants program where the community makes good investments and the revocations are not needed. So the goal is that with all the other areas we can create a healthy system where revocations tend to zero.

And last, we will measure how we implement the changes of this period to make a better grants program by

  • Counting how many of the grantees have successfully received the onboarding pack (physical) that we are implementing for brand awareness and warm-welcome the grantees during this period.
  • And counting the pull requests made into doc.decentraland.org to update the program as it evolves.

I hope this helps understand the criteria on how we are measuring these. If you have further questions let us know!

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As for @InJesterr questions,

  • About your opinion on how much an expensive deal it is to run the operations of the GSS, according to glassdoor a medium compensation of a grants manager is $76,403 which divided by 12 months is an average of $6366 per month. And we are not managing grants with a strategy already given, but building a whole strategy from scratch, making dynamic adjustments every single month to adapt grants frameworks to what Decentraland DAO needs. So yeah, I think we are charging less than a median salary for this position regarding what we do, but hey, we enjoy it and are happy to do so: the team is awesome, the pay is decent, and we contribute to Decentraland, which is a project that we believe in.

  • About travel budget, we have been attending Web3 conferences such as DevCon on our first grant, or Eth Denver for this period. You can check the learnings and outcomes of how attending to those bring value to the squad in their respective links. After EthDenver for example, we have noticed a lack of awareness of Decentraland Grants Program so we have been actively working on looking for web3 ecosystem grants listings. So far we have been featured in the Web3 research institute, Ethereum Foundation Ecosystem Grants,UseWeb3 Academy, and Web3Native grants listings. There is no better way to study the Web3 Ecosystem and what is going on lately but these spaces, and it is our responsibility to be updated and apply the learnings from others, but also to share that knowledge in return to them.

  • Regarding revocations, this is something dynamic, and this was the status at the moment the grant has been proposed as an analysis. Revocations are not accomplishments for us, but a status update on what we are working on. As I mentioned to @jar0d the goal is that with all the other areas the GSS is working, we can build a healthy grants program where the community makes good investments and the revocations tend to zero.

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Oke Thank you for enlightening me @yararasita will vote yes sounds good!

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Thank you for your thoughtful reply.

I ended up having a pretty long conversation with @NikkiFuego about some of my objections to the nature of metrics and how I think they could be improved. My primary issue was that they are primarily measuring the content created or the events hosted and not the impact of those events.

For example, “Number of Testing Tuesdays sessions held” is a valid way to determine you are doing something, but Metrics around participation and engagement, similar to those used to measure people applying for a grant to host events, would be a better way to measure the impact.

Part of these concerns was motivated by the idea that if you guys are going to be responsible for suggesting a grant should be considered for revocation, then it would be ideal if the GSS held them to the highest standard with well-defined metrics and failure states.

As someone outside of the Grant Program, you really only hear about the instances where grants are revoked, and the person is upset and feels unjustly treated. Having spoken to Nikki, she has made it abundantly clear exactly all the ways the GSS has been an invaluable asset in the development of Vroomway.

While Given the fact that you have worked with “more than 150 grantees,” it seems that if only a few projects have had experiences that left them feeling frustrated and unheard, it seems that while my concerns may have some merit and there is room for improvement, there is no reason to believe that you guys aren’t doing a fantastic job.

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Can you clarify if these are all full-time positions of if your team members hold other working roles outside of the Grant Support Squad?

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10

I appreciate you elaborating on how the success criteria will be measured, but I agree with jar0d that it is also important to know where the threshold for success lies. What numbers in each category deem the GSS successful for that area?

I definitely believe the GSS is an important part of the DAO and deserves to be funded, but I also believe they should be setting the best example of how to propose a grant with measurable goals for success.

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11

Just push it through now while Decentraland is at an extremely low participation. Keep the same up, and you will get the same. Maybe get a grant for Mark Zuckerberg to shout “Metaverse” and we will get some attention.

12

Hi @noh0mie , sure!

Thank you for bringing up this topic. To ensure clarity and transparency, I would like to provide an update on the time commitment and role we play within the Grant Support Squad:

@yararasita (Gia): is an Advisor who dedicated 10 hours per week to the squad. Gia co-directs another project, and her expertise, particularly in other Grants Programs, makes them an invaluable asset to our team.

@palewin (Pablo): is our Partnership Manager who dedicated 20 hours weekly to support grantees, managing partnerships and fostering collaborations among the Community and between the Community and the Foundation.

@fifitango : (FifĂ­) As the Grant Manager, they hold a full-time position within the squad, dedicating 30 hours per week to ensure the success of our grant projects, for example, doing tasks like leading Testing Tuesday and Onboardings.

I, Zino (Juan), serve as the Accountability Manager, also in a full-time position, devoting 30 hours per week to ensure accountability in the Grant Program and smooth operations within the Squad such as management tools.

It’s important to note that neither Fifi, Palewin nor I have additional roles or commitments outside of the Grant Support Squad that require this level of time commitment. However, we do engage in side artist projects and participate in courses to improve our skills continually.

If you have any questions or concerns, please feel free to reach out!

Thank you,
Regards

1 Like
13

Are the salaries you listed in the budget for your previous grant still accurate?

compensation
compensation750Ă—222 41.2 KB

Based on these numbers and the hours you are saying are actually being worked:
Gia is making $100 an hour
Pablo is making $50 an hour
and Zino is making $40 an hour

Those numbers seem pretty astronomical and no matter how fantastic a job you are doing, $100 an hour doesn’t seem reasonable.

14

Do they work an average of 10 hours a week?

I find this answer really disingenuous now that we are aware you don’t work anywhere close to a full-time work week.

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15

Hi!

Regarding impacts, how we work about it is that we craft activities, outputs, and outcomes. What we could do is draft “expected impact” which are the long-term consequences of our work, but because of the short-term period of the grants we have in Decentraland it is really difficult to draft ecosystem responses without a Monitoring, Evaluations and Learnings process done, but we are taking notes of this as something the community is interested in exploring.

About the fee per hour, I charge between 100 and 400 per hour, depending on who am I working with and for how long. 100/hr is what I charge when I am an advisorship consultant, which means I have regular duties with the teams, and work 10 hours per week. For the first term of the Grants Support Squad for example, I worked 5 hs a week, and charged $150/h. After those 6 months, within the GSS team we noticed I was needed for more hours to design processes, and then was when I started working more, and adjusted the rate per hour accordingly.

There have been these discussions in the past in Decentraland, and if you do a quicksearch, you will find many, many, many, many sources that find out this rate is a very normal rate per hour for this type of work.

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16

That article is about funding Committees, specifically the DAO Committee, and I do not believe particularly relevant to the compensation being requested by grant recipients. The role of the DAO Committee is to safely enact the transactions that move the treasury funds. It makes perfect sense to pay enough money to ensure that the people in those positions have the proper incentive to not be tempted to succumb to greed.

While I agree there is an argument to be made for paying skilled professionals adequately for important roles, I think that the level of compensation you, and other members of the squad, are receiving is high enough that the expectation that the Milestones and Objectives are better defined with metrics that measure impact instead of effort would make sense.

If you are going to be receiving high-end compensation for your work it only makes sense that you are capable of effectively demonstrating and communicating why that work warrants that compensation.

1 Like
17

Hello, here are my questions for the squad:

  1. How did you contribute to the 17 AMA sessions with Foundation? I thought that they are organized by Facilitation squad.
  2. What does “Equipment refund” mean in your financial report? I don’t see anything around equipment in the budget of your last proposal. Can you provide more details about operational expenses you had in the last period (paying subscription for some tools or what exactly)?
  3. How exactly the Landing Page for the Grants program will be implemented? Is it going to be a separate website or just a new page in the https://governance.decentraland.org/?
  4. What is meant with “Sending Decentraland DAO branded kits of swag to welcome future grantees”? Are they going to be physical items sent to grantees?
  5. Can you provide more details about how each member is contributing to the squad? In the personnel section you have given a description about each members experience, but I think the most important part is missing - what exactly are they doing in the squad and what are their responsibilities. “Advisor”, “Partnership Manager” and so on seems very vague.
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18

This team pays for itself. Rejecting the renewal of their grant would easily add inefficiencies. Easy yes for me!

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It would just be nice if they had performance metrics that could prove that.

Metrics that measure the impact of the work and not just the existence of it isn’t an unreasonable thing to ask.

I think it is concerning how eager you are to dismiss constructive conversation, it isn’t like the grant is in jeopardy of not passing based on the questions being asked.

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20

This is a LOT of money you all are asking for. Are you seriously requesting this much money with a straight face? SMH - LOL what a racket, who voted yes? and why?? I’d vote yes if the asking price were reasonable because I do believe you should be compensated, but jeeez come on now.