I see where you’re coming from, and agree on a normative level, but I think this can easily stray into a bureaucracy where we’re devoting too much time and resource to shepherding the accountability process, and where projects are committing the minimum amount of resource possible to meet the requirements for more funding.
Take for instance the idea of quarterly reports. Some of the largest recipients (Aave, Lido, etc) are already doing similar, and can easily provide regular updates of what the project as a whole is doing, but without explaining how the RPG funding is being used or being held to account separately for their RPG funding. It feels like we would then require pretty detailed scrutiny of their abundance of reporting material to give feedback on what our community need from them… and how could we criticise them when they’re already providing so much? It’s in the project’s interests to just keep slowly giving us nuggets of information we request, and otherwise keep pumping out the same reports they’re providing for every chain, to keep costs down. And then is the idea that every delegate must keep track of this feedback and scrutiny, and bare it all in mind for the next proposal? That’s a lot of extra work on all sides.
On the flip side, imagine asking for quarterly reports from the small project providing a valuable service on Optimism only that’s difficult to monetise other than for RPG funding. Setting a prescriptive reporting standard may mean that they’re draining a decent chunk of their funding just on the cost of reporting. Or accepting that reporting could scale with the organisation, the little project may really only be able to say “here are our current financials and stats, all of our funding comes from RPG funding”. If that’s the case, then would we just accept a dashboard page on their site that shows the current state of their operations and finances? And if so, what’s to stop bigger projects taking the same approach? It feels like we may get so bogged down in figuring out the correct approach to accountability that we lose sight of the bigger picture - the little project doesn’t need much and is doing important things, so we don’t really need much accountability from it.
The synthesis that I’m reaching is that the larger and more complicated our approach to accountability becomes, the more it’s likely to damage the effectiveness of our RPG funding program. Some accountability may be of benefit, but we should aim for this to be flexible and accommodating to the needs of the recipient. We should also aim to make it manageable and easily digestible for our delegates, to keep the funding process light and accessible. Perhaps I’d suggest to start with that projects need to give feedback on their use of funds already received before they can receive more funds… that at least provides an incentive to give good feedback.
I would go as far as saying that no OP should be given until measurable KPIs are in place for us to track against. We shouldn’t be handing out money then scrambling to see if it was a good idea or not afterward. That’s a position of weakness
No one gets funding until we agree on a mechanism that proves whether you’re earning it or not. How else can we learn and iterate without good measurable results?
This will cause fewer people to apply as there’s more work involved, but it will also filter out the kind of people not willing to set up and commit to real world KPIs. I think the number of “super stars who only do great work without supervision or formal commitment” is relatively slim.
Don’t be afraid to make people work for their free money. Don’t be afraid to make demands in return (IF they help us iterate and better use future funds)
I love this very much! Transparency to me is so important and one of the primary reasons I am so enthusiastic about DeFi.
I am just seeing this post now; after I posted the initial draft for Saddle Finance - but actuallly had similar thoughts as you @OPUser which is why I linked to the Gnosis Safe Wallet Address that Saddle will be using on Optimism so anyone viewing the proposal and simply click and immediately see the address on-chain. I think all submissions should really have this be a requirement as part of the template.
In addition - the address was one I created with my public wallet/ENS: westonnelson.eth to further increase confidence in this regard.
If you copy/paste the address into the web app of Gnosis Safe at (it works on mobile, but the Desktop web app is what you want to use) you can actually easily see the address, confirm that it is in fact a 4/7 Multisig, and in settings, who the addresses that are the owners on the Safe with signing capability are! This is something I think hopefully should be helpful and perhaps a best practice for teams to be considered.
So as an example; even not as an owner, you can still view and verify this information about the Safe, which is excellent. In Saddle’s case it looks like this:
**And this can be accessed by you (or anyone) by heading to the URL:
As far as on-going tracking… I think as someone mentioned, this could quickly become overwhelming to the point where it would just feel like too much for anyone… so I did have an idea though here:
To actually create a small database of sorts (all the addresses that Optimism/Delegates have sent $OP to etc.) And then add them into Forta and subscribe to alerts about activity (which you can customize) so you can be kept up to date essentially real-time with the wallet activity. It’s one of the tools I use myself and so firsthand highly recommend it.
Really like the thinking here @OPUser - not an easy problem, but certainly very important for more effective allocation of grant funds. My comments are coming from the project/protocol perspective (GYSR).
For content creation, R&D, etc, agree that the deliverable is probably the most important and objective thing to show. In theory, any sizing for budget costs should happen during proposal, so granular receipts on which developer/designer/contributor happened to work those hours are likely less important.
For incentives, it’s easy to show a funding or airdrop transaction. No issue there. (In fact, for any projects that launch incentives on GYSR, we can help provided standardized reports on funding and distribution transactions.)
And agreed with this suggestion. We should be including a plan for tracking/reporting up front in the initial proposal.
