[DAO:fa97bc8] Should we temporarily pause DCL's grants programme until Q1 2023?

[dao]

by 0xaca8fbbdddfce169114f344d8ee739bde665f4f4 (Seanny)

TLDR: The grants program has shown to be a key aspect and fantastic addition to Decentraland, however, the time might be right to pause and review its current structure, identifying valuable lessons from its shortcomings. A pause in the grants program would allow us to do this; coupled with a period in which governance and community roadmaps can be actively prioritized.

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Hey everyone! I know this post is long, however, this is likely one of the most important governance decisions being proposed to the DAO this year, and requires quite a bit of context to lay out the reasoning behind this proposal. I encourage you to read and debate, especially if this is a proposal that you fundamentally disagree with.

The reasoning behind this proposal is fundamental to the debate, which is one of the reasons why this post is so long. You can find rest of the content in the comments section below.

Contents:

-> The Current Grant System

-> The State of Our Treasury

-> The State of Our Community [IN COMMENTS]

-> General FAQs [IN COMMENTS]

The Current Grant System

With its inception dating back to May 2021, the Decentraland grant system has been one of the Metaverse’s most innovative, decentralized solutions to community-driven prioritization and community-led project management.

Since the approval of the first Tier 6 Grant in November 2021, the Decentraland grant system has seen an exponential increase in both interest and activity; with sharp inclines in grant volume and voter activity.

So far, the grants programme has contributed a total of $2.6 Million Dollars to community-led and backed initiatives. This multi-million dollar investment has been split into the following grant priorities:

Content Grants: $269,369, 20 Grants [Average: $13,468]
Platform Grants: $1,236,100, 14 Grants [Average: $88,293]
Community Grants: $596,300, 19 Grants [Average: $31,384]
Gaming Grants: $539,600, 12 Grants [Average: $44,967]

The total amount of grants accepted thus far stands at 65 grants. This means that as a DAO, on average, we’ve been approving around one grant per week. 52% of these grants were grants over the size of $5,000 US dollars, with over 32% of the total grants approved being over the size of $50,000.

This exponential growth in DAO Activity has been coupled with some brilliant work conducted by our various governance squads, especially our grant support squad, who have actively been leading the application, implementation, and reporting of the DAOs grants for the last 8 months.

However, whilst this system has generated quite a few success stories over the last twelve months, we are now facing new growing pains and paradigms that are not currently described and defined in our governance systems. The lack of clear, community-approved accounting guidelines for grants, alongside governance ‘code-of-ethics’/‘best-practice’ guidelines, has already been applying unnecessary pressure to grantees and DAO members alike. Additionally, our lack of a roadmap and collective vision as to what should be prioritized in the DAO leads to frequent and unfortunate misunderstandings/disagreements between DAO members in the process of reasoning the value of a Grant Proposal, which in the long-term, can prove to be detrimental to the DAO’s ability to generate far-reaching consensus.

In short; the current grant system is a victim of its own success, and in the run-up to 2023, it would be sound and prudent to temporarily pause the program for a short ‘grace-period’, which would allow us to assess, debate and review both the past, present and future of our grants system, with the aim of applauding our community’s successes, and learning from our collective mistakes. This data-oriented approach towards better understanding the outcomes of the $2.6M US dollars we have collectively invested thus far will be fundamental in setting the foundations and understanding necessary to begin solid footing for a potential upgraded grants system, alongside a potential community-led roadmap for the DAO.

Treasury

One of the largest lessons we can learn from FTX’s collapse is that overexposing one’s treasuries and assets to a single type of asset as your primary source of funding and liquidity, is a major risk.

Currently, our DAO’s vesting contract is actively releasing 222M MANA over a 10-year period. This vesting contract started 2/20/2020, and so far, has vested a total of 60,871,487 MANA as of 16/11/2022. From this 60,871,487 MANA, 48,870,797.432 MANA has been released, and 12,000,689.536 MANA remains releasable.

This means that DCL DAO has a total of 161,128,513 MANA left to use until the 20th of February, 2030.

As of 14th November 2022, the DAO holds the following funds:

Aragon Agent:
41,755,500 MANA | 18,437,056 USD,
21 ETH | 26,957 USD,
17 WETH | 21,686,
16,738 DAI | 16,749 USD,
2,607 USDC | 2,614 USD,

DAO Committee:
262,253 MANA | 115,797 USD,
62,849 DAI | 62,893 USD
8 ETH | 10,057 USD
8,488 USDC | 8,511 USD
1,428,019 MANA | 655,270 USD
7 WETH | 9,104 USD
56 DAI | 48 USD
29 MATIC | 27.43 USD
22 USDC | 20.60 USD

This amounts to a total of US Dollars 19,367,107, as of 14th November, 00:00 CEST Market Valuation. From this treasury of $19.3M USD Dollars; 99.1% of those assets are held in MANA, and only 0.9% of our assets are currently held in “other” tokens.

Currently, our grants programs are distributed in USD Value; meaning for each grant we approve, we usually sell the USD-Dollar Equivalent of MANA from our treasury to fund the said grants, which means the more grants we approve, the more sell pressure we are placing on MANA, as an asset.

As we increase sell pressure through the process of funding grants from our treasury, we open doors to potentially drop the price of MANA further, which further limits our available liquidity (in USD), and in turn places further pressure on both the treasury and the price of MANA as an asset.

Moreover, we currently lack a prudent, clear vision on how exactly we plan to use our funds as a community; with no clear prioritization, roadmap, or goals being set by the community on what we collectively wish to achieve from our grants program. Coupled with this, there’s uncertainty surrounding how grants themselves should be accounted for, with an unclear direction being set on the financial reporting, due diligence, and overall compliance requirements for grantees (which is a fundamental best practice in most regulated industries).

The lack of a yearly budget, alongside discombobulated expectations across the community surrounding the ‘value’ the grants program should bring to the table, is not only a facet for severe catastrophic risk and potential mass-liquidation, but is also a sure-fire way of generating and accelerating community discord and societal fragmentation.

• Yes, we should pause the grants programme
• No, we should not pause the grants programme
• Invalid question/options

Vote on this proposal on the Decentraland DAO

View this proposal on Snapshot

[Seanny]

The Community
Decentraland’s most valuable asset was and will remain its Decentralized community; however, that community today risks suffering stark, palpable division, as a consequence of misaligned expectations and priorities.

If you are reading this right now, the likelihood is that you’re an active member of the Decentraland community. Over the last four months we have witnessed our community grow, mature and face new, unexpected growing pains that are a direct consequence of the increasing success and interest in the grants platform. However, alongside this growth, we all know that we have also witnessed an increase in community in-fighting; with disagreements, factions, and social-divisions actively growing over the past few months. I have personally witnessed people disrespecting each other, community members threatening each other, factions forming to counter-balances ulterior agendas, and even valued community members deciding to quit Decentraland as a consequence of how we’re beginning to treat each other.

Now, I want to be clear; I am no saint, and this is no ‘holier than thou’ statement, however, I do feel I’m addressing the biggest elephant in the room in this part. I have been doing my best for the last few months to be as objective as possible; to constantly listen to what others in the community have to say, and this is my genuine, clear observation; the community is fragmenting at the moment, and a lot of that conflict seems to be stemming from grant proposals. I don’t believe this is inherently anyone’s fault, as we lack rules, guidelines, and best practices as a community; and without a roadmap/vision/community-instigated leadership, it is very difficult to find common ground when we’re already in disagreement.

Pausing the grants program is not just about giving us the space and room to upgrade our program with a data-oriented mindset; it is also an opportunity for the community to come together to begin ideating and building an ambitious framework and roadmap; for both Governance and the DAO. Our grants program is currently taking up a lot of our community’s decision-making bandwidth, and the diversity & scale of the grants we are discussing is only set to grow in both scope and ambition in 2023. Without finding common ground on where we stand, what we want, what we expect for ourselves, and mostly, what we collectively expect from each other, I fear we will stumble when facing the more arduous and challenging roads ahead, as DCL begins to expand.

2023 could be set to be a big year for Decentraland; and as a community, we have the opportunity to take the reins and truly begin building the Decentraland we’d like to see. A new revitalized grants program, alongside a community-led vision for the future, and community-written guidelines and governance practices will set us up to experience DCL’s most exciting and ambitious year yet.

[Seanny]

This Proposal in Practice
Here’s some quick-fire FAQs I got from a multitude of community members on how this process could potentially play out. Remember: this is just a Poll Proposal, so there’s still two more rounds of discussions left for this idea to materialize (if approved).

Why not change the program without pausing?

This is a good question, and this has been the case for the last 18 months. Financial planning, active updates on the proposal page, and the potential ‘reimbursing’ of the DAO are all new additions that were added to the expectation for grants over the last 6-8 months. However, these are still soft-power induced expectations, and there’s no clear governance guidelines/rulebooks that can guide both the community, and grantees, on how to properly proceed with launching, implementing and delivering a ‘successful’ grant.

Actively changing the guiding documents of the grants program, whilst still actively writing, debating and voting on new grants can lead to more miss-matches in community-member expectations from the system. A pause however, can include the entire community in governance decisions, whilst giving our squads breathing room to really break down the data we received over the programme’s last 18 months, so we can collectively develop new KPIs and ‘definitions for success’ in our grant system, without the pressure brought about from a potentially ‘miss-managed’ treasury.

What will happen to active grants if the program is paused?

The ‘pausing’ of the program is simply halting new grants from being proposed and voted on for approximately a 2-4 month period. This would mean currently active grants will still be ongoing, and their journey will go ‘unchanged’. One must consider that, if there will be any governance changes to the grants programme and requirements from grantees, grants accepted by the old system would have been approved under different governance requirements.

Why are you stressing so much about the community, and above all, why are you proposing this?

As a community member, you form part of Decentraland’s most valuable asset. The DAO should not be taken lightly; it is a disruptive new methodology of conducting wide-spread decision-making and governance in a decentralized way, which is a feat in itself. The last two weeks had me questioning what Decentraland would look like if the DAO was actually united behind a common-cause and a common-goal. What would an undivided Decentraland DAO look like? One that is built on empathy and dialogue; where individuals are more concerned with the sparring of minds as opposed to the sparring of characters.

My personal bias here is that I’m all-in in DCL as a project, and whilst the graphics remind me of my PS2, the platform causes me pain and SDK7 feels like a long-lost Christmas present; the DAO, time and time again, remains to be the ultimate reason as to why Decentraland just makes sense, and is, and remains, ahead of the curve when it comes to infrastructure and purpose.

Like most of you, I personally stand to gain a lot from Decentraland’s success, but in all honesty, I feel that I stand to lose so much more should this project face an untimely end. The DAO and the implications it can have on the future of digital decision-making and globalized empowerment are some of the reasons I get up with energy in the morning, and if I were to see that entity crumble in the face of risks we could objectively observe, I feel like a part of my optimism would crumble with it.

What about our Grant Support Squads?

Our grant support squads, and other governance squads would and should remain unaffected by this temporary pause. They will ultimately be crucial in the reporting and ideating phase when we begin collecting and assessing the data surrounding the programme. I would also suggest that squad-related grants would begin working under a separate category system to Community/Infrastructure; where we can build a better framework for approving and dissolving our ‘bodies of responsibility’.

So we paused the grants programme… now what?
If this happens, we can choose to follow up on a multitude of different priorities, such as:

Revitalisation and Restructuring of the Decentraland Forums

Aim: To build a permanent, accountable platform in which we can debate ideas, discuss strategies, and actively build consensus.

Assessment and analysis of the Grants Programme, with observations made by the GSS to the community

Aim: To utilize the forums space to make the outcomes of our community-investment as transparent and accessible as possible, as a ‘seed’ for future debate.

Discussions on a new Framework for Grant Voting, Auditing and Managing in the DCL DAO

Aim: To utilize our experience and data collected by the GSS to build an even stronger, more accountable grants system, which meets the community’s expectations.

Discussions on a new Community-Built Roadmap for the DCL DAO in 2023

Aim: To collectively develop a ‘vision’ for where we would like to take the DCL DAO in the next year. We must establish our ‘Why’.

Discussions on a new Code-of-Ethics regarding interactions in the DAO

Aim: To clarify, beyond any doubt, what we expect of each other in our day-to-day interactions in the DAO, and how we can collectively keep each other accountable to higher standards, with the ultimate aim of building bridges, instead of facilitating further divisions in the community.

Discussions on the Diversification of the DAO’s Treasury

Aim: To seriously identify what processes must be established in order to begin diversifying the DCL Treasury as a hedge against risks rising from market-volatility and systematic uncertainty.

[ArtReYou]

Thank you @Seanny for bringing this up!

Voted YES

[web3nit]

Simple and wise decision at current situation. @Seanny

[pablo]

Did you read my mind?

While Im pro-supporter of new content for the platform, I agree isn’t bad moment to put a break, let some time for the current projects to progress and see the results.

I think it’s time to be responsible and prudent as a community of the current situation, my preference is that instead of a total pause, some rules are changed to be efficient on granting, repeating myself again:

• Changing rule to pass a grant: should be the difference between yes and no votes
• Progressive grant requests from Tier 4, same address cannot request a Tier 5 without first completing a Tier 4 period, same with Tier 6.

However, as I already proposed these points in the past and these weren’t success, with this proposal here with really good argumentations, I’m voting yes for now.

[AaronLeupp]

haha after so many long discussions on twitter spaces with you all on this cool to see someone finally put it in writing. Please someone debate, me on this but since I come from a business and Entrepreneurial background from running companies from a business standpoint I see this as illogical. Here is why:

Let’s say X company gets 220 Million Mana and as VC and let’s call X company Decentraland. They are in the “metaverse” space and are currently compeating against other y&z companies let’s call those Meta, Sandbox and Otherside to name a top few. Those other companies are currently spending there hundreds of millions even some billions out of there VC war-chest to dominate and to become the monopoly in the space while X company Decentraland has only invested so far about 7 million which is about 3% of it and now wants to hault oppurations for an indefinite period of time so a bunch of people can debate on what they subjectively think is right way to do things lol

So again I am defiantly for more ideas we can create to make this system better for Decentraland and the community lets defiantly continue this. However again someone please debate me on this but I think we can still do this without halting all building. Defiantly since we have zero idea when things will start up again. I have joined several twitter spaces you all have had on this subject and some last 3 to 5 hours long with just discussion and no resolution or anything resulting to action so god knows how long the end result will be for the subjective desired outcome everyone wants. Days, Weeks, Months Years centuries? lol. How about a win win for all? We also can do both simultaneously since still 97% of the war-chest has not been invested, and we will also not create more friction on those trying to build, help grow, and lead the community and X company aka Decentraland the best it can to victory. Open to everyones feedback before I vote. Thank you.

[szjanko]

100% yes, this is a much needed change for DCL and will give the community time to be able to come up with a better DAO grants structure that will bring back more value over the long term. Would be nice to see some type of structure in place for grant proposals to have a long term sustainability plan for their project and a more transparent accounting of how exactly the grant funds are being used month to month once they are actually receiving the funds.

Great proposal, thank you for writing this all up @Seanny, hoping it brings the DCL community back together again and we can see a big improvement in how efficiently the DAO grants will be used going forward after this pause / planning / restructuring period.

[maryana]

I vote YES on this proposal. I’m glad to see this being brought up.

Coming from an auditing/finance background, year-end is the time where companies review their forecasting/budgeting analyses and accounting policies. We are currently at this point of the year and need to evaluate what grant governance we need to implement/reconsider, what platform projects via grants should be paid out next year, and the management approach of the Treasury. Additionally, reviewing the DAO’s financial controls and the risk assessment of the platform, market condition, inherent risks, etc. While some may argue this to be centralized and regulatory, we need to bring in some basic principles to sustain the DAO moving forward.

Unfortunately, it sounds like we don’t even know what we want as a platform, what our budget is long-term (1,5,10 year projection), and what to prioritize, what our roadmap is. Do we want more games, more onboarding efforts, better infrastructure? Based on the FY22 grants, we wanted to fill our platform with games and platform “solutions”.

While I understand why grants are crucial right now to build the platform, we must do it in a responsible way, and not be too aggressive too early before mass adoption arrives. Given the current market conditions, we may need to be more conservative in our grant budgeting. Applying some basic fund accounting strategies as well (restricted funds, temporally restricted funds, tracking of grant liabilities/ DAO contributions back from the grant).

Let’s begin 2023 better and set up Decentraland DAO to have longer, sustainable years to come.

[Seanny]

Yo @AaronLeupp!

@AaronLeupp

Please someone debate

You know I can never say no to a good debate .

I like your points, but as you probably can tell, I’m going to have to disagree with you on a few of your remarks; especially from the business & entrepreneurship standpoint.

@AaronLeupp

Those other companies are currently spending there hundreds of millions even some billions out of there VC war-chest to dominate and to become the monopoly in the space while X company Decentraland has only invested so far about 7 million

Spendthrifting is one of the most dangerous ways in which a company/organisation/entity/individual can run itself to the ground. In truth, it’s not about how much you spend, but rather how effectively you can transpose an investment into achieving effective KPIs which allow you to reach your predefined objectives.

Currently, as a community, we lack both the Key Performance Indicators, and the Objectives with regards to assessing the true return on our investments, which fundamentally means we’re voting/investing blindly more often than we should.

@AaronLeupp

indefinite period

This pause should definitely not be indefinite. If on the off chance we cannot find a consensus on best practices/guidelines/accounting principles by Q1 2023 (which I doubt will be the case), we can always resume the current system. This should definitely be a key mitigator writing in the next draft, should this poll pass. At the bare minimum we’d have a better data-oriented understanding of how the system has been working for the last year and a half, which would allow us to establish some solid KPIs.

@AaronLeupp

Decentraland has only invested so far about 7 million which is about 3% of it

@AaronLeupp

We also can do both simultaneously since still 97% of the war-chest has not been invested

This, unfortunately, is not the case.

Remember that our treasury is currently undiversified, with the vesting contract being entirely in MANA. Under current market conditions, the remaining 161,128,513 MANA left in the vesting contract amounts to a total of around $69,250,000.

Remember, that the DAO is currently one of the largest dumpers of MANA on the market. With our grants being structured in USD Value, we are actively applying sell pressure to the very asset that sustains our longevity. The risks from a business standpoint are real, and I feel the illogical approach would be to pretend that they’re not there.

@AaronLeupp

We also can do both simultaneously since still 97% of the war-chest has not been invested

Finally, I would genuinely avoid doing both simultaneously, for two reasons:

1. It is genuinely hard to prioritize governance when there are so many grants being uploaded every single week, with each one deserving both attention and feedback from the community.

2. The cleanest solution is to have a ‘cut off’ period, where grants are approved under a different system, which would mean new grantees in the revised and updated programme would have to guidelines which are outlined by the community, instead of ones which are haphazardly developed mid-grant.

Hope that makes sense, and I’m looking forward to keeping the debate going!

[Canessa]

I’m voting yes because as we’ve seen, great institutions can and do fail. We cannot continue to extract value from our ecosystem through mana and not expect to see the price reflect this. We need a code of ethics to be developed so we have clear expectations as we move forward.

The Decentraland DAO will be a case study for future DAO’s… either because it failed, or because the users made it the most comprehensive and robust DAO possible. I hope we go down in history as the latter.

[KevinClark]

Love the initiative to reform the DAO grant program, however don’t believe we need to impose a pause or self assigned deadline to commit consensus on a topic that will no doubt be highly contested.

For that matter, I’m voting to continue the DAO Grant program while encouraging the community to continue this discussion and present a proposal with action to move forward with that will make actual change, rather than an action to halt others from creating/building.

[Seanny]

Yo @KevinClark

Quick replies to the above:

@KevinClark

we need to impose a pause or self-assigned deadline to commit consensus on a topic that will no doubt be highly contested.

The pause is so much more than the hopeful potential that we’ll find a consensus on contested issues. Beyond the current position of the treasury, there’s the opportunity to follow best practices from other established grant programs by actually segregating programs into phases, and taking pauses to assess data en masse, without the ongoing pressure of new documentation entering the data pool. Additionally, it’s a good cooling period for the community to fully focus on governance, with it becoming a main agenda point for the short period that the grants program will be paused.

@KevinClark

that will make actual change

Prioritizing Risk Management as a governance principle is actual change, and is a fundamental pillar of preserving the longevity of any organisation/enterprise. Our treasury position should not be taken lightly, especially when the second-largest cryptocurrency exchange on the market recently faced bankruptcy and insolvency as a consequence of an undiversified portfolio. The risks are very real, and hedging against them would be a prudent direction to take (especially when we still have 7 years ahead of us from the perspective of the vesting contract).

@KevinClark

rather than an action to halt others from creating/building.

As one of the most active builders in Decentraland, I couldn’t agree more that creating and building on the platform is a fundamental priority. So much so, that in my opinion, the restructuring of our grants system is a fundamental change required to better empower creatives and builders; and not halt them in any way, shape or form.

First off; a quarter is quite a short period to pause a grants system; especially when most of our grants are enacted over half a year. The temporary pausing of grant schemes is an extremely common best practice and is often seen as an opportunity for both grant givers, and grant receivers to pause, take stock, and develop strategies for upcoming grant rounds.

This even happens with large-scale governance grants such as Horizon 2020; which is built upon shifting granting rounds, despite the actively maintaining multi-billion Euro budgets it has. Erasmus+, and other grants schemes such as the EYF also follow a very similar pattern; and as an ex-grant receiver of both programs, I can attest to the fact that the pauses in the system helped us improve in both grant management and grant applications over time.

Additionally, our current lack of best practices, auditing guidelines, and code of ethics systems leads to our community often being divided on issues relating to the implementation of grants; with the brunt of the discord often being placed on the grant receiver. This paradigm has been increasing steadily over the last few months and is actively becoming a key stressor on our community.

As a fellow builder, I genuinely feel that establishing better guidelines is one of the best and most important ways in which we can empower creatives and builders across the board. By making the grants program more accountable and transparent, we will no longer have to waste time questioning the integrity and intent of players within the system, or arguing with each other due to a lack of rules, whilst simultaneously allowing our builders to do what they do best: build.

The more I think about it, the more I feel that a pause is the best way to push for this kind of change, whilst also giving us breathing room to adopt more risk-averse policies within our governance framework.

[KevinOnEarth]

I hear where you are coming from, however as even you said, 1 quarter isn’t that much time. I’d rather hear a proposed series of application period timing rather than a quick fix. We can look at data from a segregated period of time so I don’t see why new grants should make all the difference. I’m in agreement with the initiative to reform the DAO, but I don’t see why people who may be entering even just now as the holidays and new year take shape shouldn’t be able to continue building.

[AaronLeupp]

haha hell ya thanks bro. Yes “Spendthrifting is one of the most dangerous ways in which a company/organisation/entity/individual can run itself to the ground.” 1,000% agree, however no company on the planet got to where they by not investing there capital that was legit intended to invest, and in fact its even worse in our case.

Our 220M mana at all time high was worth almost $6 which have made the DAO value at $1Billion$320Million. From a pure subtraction standpoint by simply not investing in future revenue streams we lost over $1Billion $240Million by not diversifying and doing nothing. And this proposal is requesting that we continue to do that lol. Also yes you say for minimum 1 quarter but again until “If on the off chance we cannot find a consensus on best practices/guidelines/accounting principles by Q1 2023 (which I doubt will be the case), we can always resume the current system” who is the one that gets the final say? What are the concrete goals and mile stones before we turn it back on?

Lastly the irony on timing on this where one of our founders @esteban legit tweeted 11 hours ago “time to build” and you all are response is requesting us to stop all grants for people that want to pitch things to build lol

So those things aside 1,000% agree on everything else and open to more things we can do to restructure all systems to make it more satisfactory for everyone. Just like people can continue to build without the grant system we can also restrictor the grant system simultaneously without de-incentivizing investment in future growth. As I also agree with @KevinOnEarth lets spend our time on hearing proposed series of applications and do this right rather then a “quick fix.”

Since I too agree I am very confused on on what high VP whales want. I have had many proposals with lots of Yes votes from the community but, no votes from high VP whales or small few no votes from high VP whales which get turned down that I even focus on growth, community growth and more importantly future DAO revenue growth. These clear directions can help builders like me and others craft our pitches to what they want to see which will save all of us a ton of time so we can focus on building.

Lastly in the end I know what I say is really indifferent since I don’t have much VP but was worth saying and open to any other debates too as well. Thanks again @Seanny and if this does pass I look forward to the outcome of a more clear set of goals and roadmap of what high VP whales want so we can all continue to grow together.

[Seanny]

@KevinOnEarth

I don’t see why people who may be entering even just now as the holidays and new year take shape shouldn’t be able to continue building.

Because if we’re not careful with how we use DAO funds, and fail to invest with some foresight, we may run the risk of having no funds to build with all together.

[KevinOnEarth]

Realistically, I don’t think that in 1 quarter enough grant funding would be passed that would have that impact which could really put us at risk of having no funds to build with all together. As you have I believe more than 2M VP (feel free to correct me!), I’m pretty sure any project you deemed “unfitting” you could easily deny.

I’d hope the ongoing “ineffective” grant program would be motivation for us to come to consensus on reform sooner than Q1 2023. I believe the imposed Q1 2023 is actually slowing us down from getting quicker results.

In addition for the further analysis we should put together a Bid as to who would lead this kind of DAO program results analysis to get the most value out of such research, even using DAO funding to pay for the best team to get this done.

Question:
What about our Grant Support Squads?

Our grant support squads, and other governance squads would and should remain unaffected by this temporary pause. They will ultimately be crucial in the reporting and ideating phase when we begin collecting and assessing the data surrounding the programme. I would also suggest that squad-related grants would begin working under a separate category system to Community/Infrastructure; where we can build a better framework for approving and dissolving our ‘bodies of responsibility’.

How will we be determining which projects quality under community/infrastructure? Also, community and infrastructure are two different things I suppose, wouldn’t we want to consider those 2 separate categories or do you mean Community Infrastructure?

These are the kinds of questions which I don’t think a “pause” appropriately addresses, especially if you are suggesting waving this pause for specific groups deemed to be community/infrastructure.

[Vaporizador]

It worth mentioning that most people voting on pausing grants are the ones that already benefited from it in the past or secured a grant recently. We should not stop incentivize building in the middle of a bear market.

[TheCryptoTengu]

lol that dont matter to the vampires who already sucked the dao blood.

[CheddarQueso]

I agree a short pause is needed. When there is disagreement on something I like to have an SOP, bylaws, rulebook, ethics code, roadmap, mission/vision statement, SOMETHING to guide my decision making, stick to the plan, or reiterate core values. There is little clarity as to the purpose, goals and processes… we are disbursing funds while lacking the answers to BASIC ethics questions that are now the subject of much contention in our decision-making. Thank you @Seanny for taking the time to put this in writing. I support.