[FINAL] Improving Governance Accessibility through Praise and Contribution Based Attestations

[kristofer]

Hey Optimism! On behalf of the Praise team I am happy to submit our Mission proposal with the goal of helping Optimism increase governance accessibility through the deployment of Praise as well as contribution based attestations and (possibly) OP token rewards. Praise can be used to easily and efficiently bring the wider Optimism community into the Citizens House, with natural sybil resistance and use of attestations.

Cheers // Kristofer

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S4 Intent: Governance Accessibility (Intent 4)

Proposed Mission: Increase governance accessibility by deploying Praise to Optimism and integrating it with Attestation Station and OP token distributions.

Proposal Tier: Fledgling Tier

Please verify that you meet the qualifications for your Tier: Praise previously received 9,286.72 OP through retroPGF 2

Baseline grant amount: 140k OP 112K OP (2023-06-27)

% of total available Intent budget: 3.73%

Alliance: Praise

Alliance Lead: Kristofer

Contact info: Twitter @kristoferlund

L2 recipient address: 0x0B7246eF74Ca7b37Fdc3D15be4f0b49876622F95

Please list the members of your Alliance and link to any previous work

• Kristofer Lund: Serving as our lead developer and technical co-founder of Praise, he is an experienced entrepreneur and developer with comprehensive expertise in end-to-end development across various industries. In addition to working with Praise, some of his latest engagements include work for Commons Stack, Token Engineering Commons and Holochain. GitHub
• Justina Svitraite: As our Organization Designer, Justina brings to the table an impressive background in UX, user research, and community building. Having led a web3 design agency, she has contributed to the development of over 40 web3 products, including notable platforms such as Maker DAO and Arbitrum.
• AnaMaria: AnaMaria is a marketing expert with a solid track record in social media management for Web 3 projects and design agencies. Her proficiency in crafting resonating messages and managing digital communication channels plays a crucial role in ensuring our project’s visibility and reach.
• Ahmad: Ahmad holds significant roles at General Magic and Giveth. As the Head of Business Development & Growth, he is instrumental in driving strategic initiatives to broaden General Magic’s influence. Ahmad’s expertise in growth strategies, partnerships, and recruitment is key to accelerating our project’s growth. On the Praise team, Ahmad offers support with onboarding, business strategy, and marketing.
• Designers and developers from General Magic and Giveth: Our team is further strengthened by the backing of General Magic and Giveth, both respected entities in the Web3 space. Their support ensures high-quality design and development outputs.
• Advisor @thegrifft: Griff, a co-founder of Giveth, Commons Stack, General Magic, and DAppNode, brings valuable guidance and strategic direction to our project. His vast experience and leadership in these pioneering projects provide critical insights that help shape our course towards achieving our objectives.

Please explain how this Mission will help accomplish the above Intent

(Have a look at the Praise Explorer or this video to learn more about Praise)

Praise enables community members to acknowledge and reward one another’s contributions. It not only helps us identify who is contributing but also provides insights into the nature of their contributions. This information can be utilized to discern the types of contributions most valuable to the community.

Employing Praise cultivates a culture of gratitude and appreciation. Receiving praise for one’s work can bolster motivation to continue such work, particularly vital for community members who contribute voluntarily. We believe this is directly aligned with the fourth intent’s stated goal of promoting a welcoming community.

We aim to implement Praise on the Optimism Discord server and facilitate the necessary deployment process to ensure Optimism maximizes the benefits of using Praise. We will engage stakeholders, handle technical deployment, prepare the community, help “launch” Praise, and provide continual support.

Praise creates a dataset containing information about who contributed what, when, and its impact. This data, apart from promoting a welcoming community, can serve as a basis for rewards and reputation.

We plan to integrate Praise with Optimism Attestation Station and collectively define what attestations should be created with the community. Possible attestations include:

• Praise certifies that recipient A has received praise from giver B and has been awarded an impact score of X.
• Praise certifies that recipient A has accrued a total impact score of X during the defined praise period Y.
• Praise certifies that recipient A is among the top 10 praise recipients during the praise period Y.

These attestations can then be employed to promote more equitable and diverse access to the Citizens’ House governance process, including RetroPGF rounds. Praise is a bottom-up process where anyone can appreciate anyone else for a contribution they deem valuable to the community’s goals. This inclusive method significantly lowers the barrier to participating in governance.

In addition to creating attestations, we also aim to support Optimism in rewarding community members with OP tokens using Praise (subject to separate grant/governance decision). The token rewards are determined by the impact scores calculated by Praise. We will assist the community in defining the rules for distributing OP tokens based on these scores. Rewarding contributing members with OP tokens is an effective method to increase the votable supply and reduce the concentration of voting power.

Using Praise to distribute retroactive rewards is very aligned with RetroPGF and is also a great way to distribute OP to the active and appreciated community members.

What makes your Alliance well-suited to execute this Mission?

Praise has been tried and tested over several years and proven to be a useful tool for community building. We, the team have been working with the new version of Praise for the past 2 years and have deployed it for several communities including Giveth, BanklessDAO, GnosisDAO, Shapeshift, DAppNode and more.

We have a deep understanding of the technology and community dynamics and are well suited to help Optimism deploy Praise and use it to its full potential.

To exemplify, here are two successful deployments of Praise:

Giveth uses Praise to continuously reward contributors with GIV tokens.

Quote from community member Suga:

Praise is essential. I don’t think anyone in the community could imagine not having it. Praise is an integral part of the community, that is to say, being able and encouraged to support one another and recognize each other’s contributions forms part of the basis of what the Giveth community believes in.

Token Engineering Commons used Praise to track contributions during a number of months leading up to the launch of the Commons. Community members were awarded with the non monetary Impact Hours token for their Praise. Impact Hours were then used to determine how many TEC tokens each community member as how much they were trusted to be able to buy in the closed presale (that they called a Hatch), as well as how much they were rewarded at the launch of the token.

Please list a critical milestone

The critical milestone of this proposal is the development and integration of the attestation feature in the Praise Dashboard UI. The successful completion of this milestone would not only make issuing attestations easy and user-friendly but will also serve as a measure of the proposal’s overall execution.

The steps to achieve this milestone include

1. Mapping out the custom attestation needs of the Optimism community: This involves engaging with stakeholders and gathering feedback about the requirements and expectations for the attestation feature.
2. Deploying Praise to the Optimism community and organising a demo session for the community members.
3. Development and integration of the attestation feature into the Praise Dashboard: After successfully developing the feature, it will be integrated into the Praise Dashboard, enhancing its functionality and usability.
4. Testing and refinement of the attestation feature: Rigorous testing will be performed to ensure the newly integrated feature functions optimally. Any issues identified will be promptly addressed and resolved.

How should Token House delegates measure progress towards this Mission

Task Description	Measurement of Progress	Expected Completion Date
Map out the custom attestation needs of the Optimism community	Completion of the stakeholder engagement phase with the needs and feedback integrated into the project scope	July 26
Implement Praise in Optimism community Discord	Successful integration and usage of Praise in the community Discord	Aug 10
Build and integrate the attestation feature into the Praise Dashboard	Completion of each stage in the feature development process (planning, design, coding, testing)	Aug 24
Test and refine the attestation feature for Praise	Successful completion of the testing and refinement process, readying the feature for deployment	Aug 31
Deploy the attestation feature on Praise	Deployment of the attestation feature on the live Praise Dashboard UI	Sep 6
Organize Retroactive Attestations Workshop	Successful facilitation of the workshop allowing members to acknowledge past achievements and give Praise	Sep 13
Issue Attestation	The successful issue of a number of verifiable proofs of Praise	Sep 20

How should badge holders measure impact upon completion of this Mission?

• Positive feedback or testimonials from community members using Praise
• Praise volume
• Number of active community members as measured by analyzing Praise data
• Amount of new Citizen house members who received their eligibility to participate to the governance based on their attestations
• Amount of OP tokens distributed as a rewards mechanism (subject to separate decision)

Breakdown of Mission budget request

We are requesting 140K OP 112K OP to improve governance accessibility through stakeholder engagement, implementation of praise in the Optimism community, the introduction of a robust attestation integration in the Praise dashboard UI, and providing community support. Our goal is to lower the barriers to participation, foster a more informed and engaged voter base, and ultimately lead to a more horizontal governance structure.

Update 2023-06-27: Budget decreased with 20% after delegate feedback.

Task Description	Task Breakdown	Budget Allocation (OP)
Map out the custom attestation needs of the Optimism community	Stakeholder Engagement & Analysis	10,000 OP
Deploy Praise in Optimism Community	Process & Onboarding	27,000 OP
Build and integrate the attestation feature into the Praise Dashboard	Integration & Testing	40,000 OP
Test and refine the attestation feature for Praise	Refinement & User Testing	10,000 OP
Deploy the attestation feature on Praise	Deployment & Documentation	5,000 OP
Organize Retroactive Attestations Workshop	Workshop Planning & Facilitation	10,000 OP
Issue Attestation	Attestation Issue & Verification	10,000 OP

I confirm that my grant will be subject to clawback for failure to execute on critical milestones: Yes

I confirm that I have read and understand the grant policies: Yes

I understand that I will be required to provide additional KYC information to the Optimism Foundation to receive this grant: Yes

I understand that I will be expected to following the public grant reporting requirements outlined here: Yes

[Guil]

Love this proposal! By implementing Praise, community members can acknowledge and reward each other’s contributions, fostering a culture of gratitude and motivation.

Praise not only identifies valuable contributions but also creates a dataset that can inform rewards and reputation systems. Integrating. Also this proposal will support the distribution of OP tokens based on impact scores calculated by Praise, increasing votable supply and reducing voting power concentration. Let’s build a more appreciative and inclusive community.

[vonnie610]

Hi @kristofer

I’m Vee from the Optimism Foundation.

I want to better understand what permissions your Discord bot will need. At a high level what permissions does it need?

Additionally I wanted to confirm that the attestations will be carried out using the Attestation Station on Optimism mainnet correct?

One other thing I want to confirm is in your current budget break down no OP is currently going towards community rewards correct? The following line made me a bit confused:

• Amount of OP tokens distributed as a rewards mechanism (subject to separate decision)

Otherwise looking good! Excited to experiment with more gratitude in the server

[Justina]

Hello @Vee,

Thanks for reaching out and for your interest in our proposal. I’m glad to clarify these points for you.

1. Discord Bot Permissions: To deploy Praise, we will need to invite our Discord bot into the Optimism server. It will require read/write permissions to send, view, and manage messages in a specific channel, which is commonly named “praise”. Here, all the praises will be visible to the community. The bot will also require the ability to react to messages as it is an integral part of the interaction with the Praise system. However, users can give praise throughout the server without having to go to this specific channel. This ensures flexibility and encourages the continuous recognition of contributions.
2. Attestation Execution: Yes, we plan to carry out the attestations using the Attestation Station on the Optimism mainnet. By utilizing the Attestation Station, we aim to provide verifiable proofs of recognition, thereby making contributions tangible and ensuring a fair and transparent distribution of rewards in the future.
3. Community Rewards: You are correct. In our current budget breakdown, no OP tokens are allocated for community rewards. The line “Amount of OP tokens distributed as a rewards mechanism (subject to separate decision)” refers to a potential future scenario where Optimism might decide to use Praise data to distribute OP tokens as rewards for community contributions. This decision and the corresponding budget would be separate from our proposal and completely under Optimism’s control. Our role would be to assist in defining rules and mechanisms for distributing such rewards based on the Praise data.

I hope this clarifies your queries. Looking forward to fostering an environment of gratitude and recognition in the Optimism community!

Best,

[lavande]

Hi @kristofer! Wanted to make sure you were aware of the Optimism Season 4 Pitching Sessions to help find the 4 delegate approvals you’ll need by this Wednesday at 19:00 GMT for your proposal to move to a vote.

These sessions are happening in Discord on Monday, 26.06 2pm ET / 6pm GMT / 8pm CET and Tuesday, 27.06 11am ET / 3pm GMT / 5pm CET.

You can sign-up here!

[kristofer]

@lavande

These sessions are happening in Discord on Monday, 26.06 2pm ET / 6pm GMT / 8pm CET and Tuesday, 27.06 11am ET / 3pm GMT / 5pm CET.

Thanks @lavande, see you at the pitching session!

[mastermojo]

I am one of the Synthetix Ambassadors, and a Optimism Badgeholder. I am an Optimism delegate [Delegate Commitments - #65 by mastermojo ] with sufficient voting power, and I believe this proposal is ready to move to a vote

[brichis]

Honestly, I would love to have Praise on the Optimism server. Giving and being able to receive Praise is beautiful, it encourages me to give my best and to thank those who teach me, help me and accompany me. Praise is one of the best products on web3 and everyone should use it

[lefterisjp]

Hey @kristofer! I would love to see praise used in Optimism. I am not using it much myself but have seen it used in TEC and other servers.

But I am concerned that the overall budget ~($182k) is way too much just to deploy the praise system in Optimism discord.

[kristofer]

Hey @lefterisjp! Thank you for voicing your concerns. Deploying the bot to the Discord server is one task in the project. I’d like to add some detail about the other tasks. I hope this helps clarify the work that will be done and the value it will bring to the Optimism community.

Worth noting also is the budget 12 month lock-up. What the final budget will be is still to be determined.

1. Map out the custom attestation needs of the Optimism community

This will be conducted as a series of workshops with the Optimism community. The goal is to understand the needs of the community and how they would like to use attestations to promote more equitable and diverse access to the Citizens’ House governance process.

2. Deploy Praise in Optimism Community

This is what I believe you are referring to as deploying the Praise system? The technical deployment is one part of this task. The other part is onboarding the community to the Praise system. This will be done through workshops and demos. The goal is to ensure that the community is comfortable using the system and understands how to use it to its full potential. The deployment process usually takes ca 3 months.

See the Praise Deployment Guide for detail.

3. Build and integrate the attestation feature into the Praise Dashboard

This is the technical development of the attestation feature. No development work has been done on this yet. Praise attestations will allow the community to issue verifiable proofs based on Praise data. These could either represent a specific contribution or a general acknowledgement of a community member’s contributions. The process of issuing an attestation needs to be easy and user-friendly, at the same time as it needs to be secure. Some kind of multisig approval or vote before attestation creation will be needed. Most likely we will build this feature as a standalone app tightly integrated with the Praise Dashboard, Optimism Attestation Station and the governance tool of choice (Gnosis Safe, Snapshot, etc).

4. Test and refine the attestation feature for Praise Refinement & User Testing

Continued development and testing of the attestation feature. This will be done in close collaboration with the Optimism community. The goal is to ensure that the feature is easy to use and functions optimally.

5. Deploy the attestation feature on Praise

Starting and launching the attestation feature on the live Praise Dashboard UI. Documentation and support will be provided to the community to ensure a smooth transition.

6. Organize Retroactive Attestations Workshop

This is a workshop to issue retroactive attestations to community members. The goal is to acknowledge past contributions and give Praise to community members who have not yet received it.

7. Issue Attestation

Support Optimism in issuing a first batch of attestations to community members.

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I hope I managed to clarify the scope of the project. Just let me know if you have any other questions.

[vonnie610]

Thanks for getting back to me!

1. Those permissions seem very minimal, which is perfect!
2. Love to see it.
3. I see. Thank you for clarifying.

[Griff]

RE: Price.

I helped price this out and these grants are very risky for two main reasons.

#1 Tight time pressure.

All milestones need to be done by Sept 20th. This means working through the summer where many people in Europe and the US are supposed to be taking vacation, and instead, we need to develop a lot at breakneck speed to get something out in 2.5 months, despite potentially running into a technical blocker!

#2 Volatility of OP & 1 year lockup.

We don’t get this funding cash in hand, we have to really make a 1 year bet on the OP token price, and this is very, VERY risky. I have been in the space long enough to see this go wrong many many times. When put on my OP Steward hat, I believe we can give OP a solid economic footing, and am personally pushing for real token utility. But at the same time, the issuance rate for OP is very high and getting higher and there is no real demand or utility for the OP token. We do this work now and get OP tokens in a year that will be worth ___? This week alone it has fluctuated nearly 30% in price!

Source Coingecko - accessed just before posting

I won’t gain any friends by saying these things in this forum but the reality is, we do not know when the bear market will end, nor do we know when investors will cash out or when the regulators in the US will give clear guidance and we will get the green light to give the OP token utility (that’s pure speculation on my part on why there isn’t utility for the OP token yet).

We have to do this work on the price of OP a year from now. For that to make sense we have to consider OP economics, and the risks involved with finishing this work. When tasked with estimating how much OP we to ask for to do these grants, it would be irresponsible to do it at the current market rate of OP. The goal is supposed to be to make a profit and an impact, not just an impact.

Risk #1

Short timeframe means high risk of running into blockers and not getting the full grant amount.

Risk #2

1 year lock up means high risk of OP token issuance to investors, core team, RetroPGF, grants and other issuance mechanisms while there is no clear demand case outside of pure speculation.

–
I hope I don’t get shunned for all this :-/ but I am the one who advised them to set this price, and I want to be transparent about my reasoning.

[Justina]

Dear delegates @katie @lefterisjp @polynya @linda @ceresstation,
Our team has recently put together a proposal that we believe could bring significant value and impact to Optimism ecosystem. It is the result of much thought, hard work, and many hours of collaboration.

We, the Praise team would highly appreciate your feedback and support on our endeavour. Big thank you!

[linda]

Thanks for the proposal. I like the vision of Praise but have similar concerns as @lefterisjp that the amount requested is far too high for me to approve personally.

[kristofer]

Hi @linda ! Thank you for taking the time to review our proposal and sharing your feedback. We understand your concerns regarding the budget.

As mentioned earlier, our budget estimation takes into account three main factors - the tight timeline, the 12 month lock up and the volatility of the OP token. We believe those factors have to be accounted for. At the same time, we really believe Praise attestations on Optimism could be a game changer for the ecosystem and we would love to work with you on this!

In light of your feedback, we are willing to reduce our budget with 20% to 112K OP. We hope this can make you reconsider our proposal. If you still believe our budget is too high, we would love to hear your thoughts on what project tasks that possibly could be removed or reduced in scope.

Also, pinging @lefterisjp @katie @polynya @ceresstation @Griff about this change.

Let’s keep the conversation going and massage this proposal into something that works for everyone!

[Jishu]

Much needed process driven and impact driven.

[blockchainatusc]

We believe that the price is a potential concern as @lefterisjp and @linda have mentioned, but we also believe that the proposal is well thought out and could provide real utility for the Optimism ecosystem. Thus, we believe that the proposal should be considered by the wider tokenhouse.

We are an Optimism delegate with sufficient voting power, and we believe this proposal is ready to move to a vote

[lefterisjp]

Hey @Griff and @kristofer thank you for your comments and taking the time to reduce the budget and to engage in disussion

@Griff as someone who has asked for grants in the past too I get your point, but from the PoV of a delegate judging the funding I need to do it with the current price in mind. This should be some feedback for the lockup period which is imo quite weird. I (as rotki) am also on the other end of such a lockup grant with optimism with the price having dropped from $2.5 so I understand. (50k $OP to implement a ton of protocol integrations in rotki). But again I need to judge with current price. I have no other way to judge. @lavande this is something I find very very difficult in general. Take this as feedback for the process.

@kristoferlund Thanks for the breakdown of what needs to be done. I understand what you will do with this better now but as a project it still seems too expensive to me and I don’t feel comfortable approving. (112,000*$1.32 = $150k)

Perhaps take out the workshops or reduce the assigned budget to some things. To get it closer to $100k. Or tell me how many developers and how many months of work this is. I need something to judge the budget and what I see so far seems too high.

You can also wait until some other delegates look at it and give approvals. I am notoriously strict at this.

[katie]

Although I agree with the sentiment that the budget is on the high side, I appreciate that it was lowered and it’s clearly been well thought out. I would like to see in our community.

I am an Optimism delegate with sufficient voting power and I believe this proposal is ready to move to a vote.

[polynya]

This is a well thought out proposal, and contribution-based attestations will be valuable for both assessing delegates in Token House and for Citizen House. The grant request is high, but if successful, such a system will be well worth it. That said, I’m skeptical about some of the limitations in a system like this, though - Optimism Collective is a much larger DAO with many more moving parts and participants than the communities mentioned above, but still worth building and giving it our best shot.

I am an Optimism delegate with sufficient voting power, and I believe this proposal is ready to move to a vote.