by 0xd11a019a70986bd607cbc1c1f9ae221c78581f49 (Yemel#1f49)
Should the following Tier 5: up to $120,000 USD, 6 months vesting (1 month cliff) grant in the Community category be approved?
Abstract
Create a task force to follow up with grant beneficiaries and support their progress. The goal of the project is to guarantee the effectiveness of the Grants Program, holding grantees accountable for their projects, and signaling to the DAO if a vesting contract needs to be revoked.
Grant size
84,000 USD
Beneficiary address
0x658497d7681e4Fb18C65AbD5Ce066A1e3082c1e5
Description
The Community Grants Program is one of the most important vehicles the DAO has to accomplish its vision of supporting and facilitating the sustainable growth of the Decentraland platform.
In the past year, the DAO awarded more than $3.5M USD to 58 community led projects working in different areas such as content creation, developer tools, research, events, game development, among others.
Up to this moment, grant’s beneficiaries update their progress voluntarily using different platforms, such as the DAO’s Discord server, the forum thread of the grant proposal and sometimes presenting their process during the monthly town-halls. However not every project has informed their progress, nor shipped a final result. This is an issue the DAO should invest energy to address. The return of impact of our grants is a key asset to build a better platform, and it is our responsibility to support their development.
Most of the grants are given through a revocable vesting contract, in other words, the DAO can revoke the contract and recover the unvested funds if the beneficiary fails to deliver what was promised. However this mechanism has not been used yet, we can argue it’s because of the DAO’s weak oversight capabilities or missing incentives to do so.
This proposal is to build a team of experienced producers/project managers to build relationships with grant beneficiaries, hold regular meetings with them to track their progress and, in the case a team fails to deliver, escalate the issue to the DAO to revoke their contract.
Specification
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 Pablo Lewin, Yemel Jardi and Manuel Araoz in their respective capacity as Squad Member, DAO Committee Member and Trusted Community Member.
Personnel
The proposed team of the Grant Support Squad is the following:
- Advisor - Gia Castello ( Linkedin )
- Sr. Producer - Pablo Lewin ( Linkedin )
- Ssr. Producer - Juan Pablo Cassinelli ( Linkedin )
The team will count with a Board of Experts providing technical knowledge about different areas such as: wearable making, scene development, software engineering, product design and marketing.
Total Hours: ~230 monthly hours or ~55 weekly hours.
Budget: 14,000 USD per month or a total of 84,000 USD
This includes:
- Team compensation: $61,800 USD
- Board of Experts compensation: $7,200 USD
- Operational expenses: $3,000
- Travel and accommodation expenses for 1 event: $12,000 USD.
Roadmap and milestones
Initially, the team will focus on the following 3 points:
- Diagnose: Initial contact with current grant beneficiaries and evaluation of results.
- Support: Recurrent follow-up and set up of advisory calls.
- Process Definition: Document the process to onboard and support grants.
These guidelines can be broken down into actionable steps like:
- Team set-up and diagnostic tool creation
- Interview all beneficiaries of +58 grants.
- Recurrent follow-up with active grants (frequency based on project size).
- Build an advisory team of different areas of expertise.
- Set up advisory meetings with grantees.
- Documentation of the process, draw conclusions and develop future roadmap.
