Preconditions
Round scope
RPGF6 was designed to reward contributions to Optimism Governance. Impact must have been generated between October 2023 - September 18th 2024, and the following 3 categories were recognized:
- Governance Infrastructure & Tooling
- Governance Analytics
- Governance Leadership
Voting design and my role in it
Along with the total allocation (no less than 1.1M OP, and no more than 3.5M OP), each voter was asked to vote on the distribution of funds between the three mentioned categories, and on the distribution of funds between the individual applicants within one of the categories.
Each category was assigned two groups of voters: A group of ārandomā guest voters and a group of citizens.
I was assigned to the group of citizens and requested to vote in the Governance Leadership category.
The round also included a small additional experiment on the generation and use of impact attestations via Impact Garden. I participated and look forward to seeing what comes of it.
Conflict of interest
As a pilot member of the Collective Feedback Commission (Introduction, retrospective) which applied for retrofunding in RPGF6, I was not able to serve as a reviewer in this round.
The pilot CFC consisted of two subgroups - one for the Citizens House, and one for the Token House. Both groups applied separately. I have declared a conflict of interest with regard to the Citizens CFC application. I was asked to still vote on the Token House CFC application. To keep my bias in check, I decided to use the Foundationās budget for the next version of the CFC as a guideline.
Voting rationale
Round and category budgets
While governance is undoubtedly central to the value proposition of Optimism (along with the core technology of the OP Stack), we should strive to keep things real.
After having looked through the applications in all three categories, I settled for a fairly modest total round budget of 1.5M OP, distributed as 50% for Infrastructure & Tooling, and 25% for each of the two other categories.
There were relatively few elligible applications (88 across all three categories), and I found that a number of applications were low impact or not clearly impactful within the round scope. This impression seemed to be shared by some of the other voters (examples can be found here and here).
Among the high impact applicants, several seemed to be familiar faces who have been well supported in the past - be it through various proactive grants, retroactive governance rewards or rpgf.
In the Governance Leadership category, in particular, there were many applications from core governance contributors (commissions, committees, boards, contribution paths), most of which already have agreed-upon budgets. In that particular scenario, I believe that rpgf should only be a supplement if there is clearly an outsized impact compared to the initial expectation - as for instance when a small experimental governance structure turns out to be a success, or when unforeseen events have required a massive extra effort.
I think that it is important to not set up the expectation that retroactive public goods funding should be given as a bonus to anyone that performs a good job they were already paid to do.
Retroactive public goods funding is a great as a way to reward impact that canāt or shouldnāt be planned. But commissioned work should result in a secure paycheck, not a lotto ticket (āyou can always apply for rpgf laterā). Budgets and retroactive governance participation rewards should be fair and realistic, and those who propose or accept a budget should only do so if the terms are clear and satisfying. Otherwise, the result will be employers who are not willing to bear the risk of their business, and work-takers who do not feel responsible for reality-checking the promises and proposals they make.
Project allocations
I allocated 0% to a few projects that I donāt consider to be part of Optimismās governance.
I also allocated 0% to the Anticapture Commission, as I believe that retroactive governance participation rewards for active delegates and members of the ACC (4000 + 4000 OP in Season 5, with an expectation of similar rewards in Season 6) is already more than fair.
Furthermore, I allocated 0% to the Security Council because they are receiving non-disclosed funding from the Foundation which makes it impossible, at this time, to evaluate impact =?= profit. The specific case was discussed at length in the citizens channel, and there was talk of either disclosing the Foundation funding or withdrawing the SCās application, but to my knowledge neither happened.
The SC is clearly very impactful and valuable, but the north star of rpgf is āimpact = profitā, and I donāt see how we can take this seriously unless we insist on knowing what previous funding an applicant has already received from the Collective for the impact in question. There may be cases when it makes sense to pay undisclosed amounts to certain entities, but then those entities should not be allowed to also apply for rpgf.
There were two very small individual projects in the category which I considered in scope. I allocated 0.5% to each of them.
On the other end of the spectrum, I allocated 20% to the Deliberate Process on the definition of profit. This may be a controversial decision, but I really appreciated this initiative. It was a grassroot initiative in cooperation with the Foundation, and it encouraged in-person debate among a large group of citizens on what is arguable one of the most foundational definitions of retroactive public goods funding. I was genuinely sad to not be randomly selected to be part of this experiment, but I read all of the documentation, and I think the subsequent discussion on the results clearly showed that there is a great need for deliberations such as this to show us what we donāt know.
I allocated 5-15% to the rest of the applications in the Governance Leadership category, taking into account that many of these applicants were established structures with their own budgets, and that some projects had submitted separate applications for Season 5 and 6 (the rationale being that their membership and/or mandate had changed, which makes sense to me).
Other notes on the voting process
The voting software was basically the same as in Round 5. My only new observation is that it would be good to be able to edit your answers to the voting survey if you re-submit the ballot; your perceptions may have changed for the same reasons that made you want to change your allocation, and you probably ended up spending more time because of this.
I spent about 10 hours in total on the voting, maybe a bit more, which I think is reasonable given the complexity of the task.
I would love to see much more communication among citizens - and other stakeholders - in future rounds. In this round, the debate in the citizens channel actually picked up in the last week of voting, though almost exclusively concerning the Governance Leadership category. It seemed clear to me that this debate was very fruitful (I personally went back and substantially edited my allocations based on what I learned), and I have no doubt that similar discussions on the other categories would have been equally powerful. As I see it, this may well be the biggest unexplored potential in Optimismās retroactive public goods funding so far.
I have written more about that here.
(There may have been some impactful in-person discussions taking place at DevCon - I wouldnāt know, because I wasnāt there.)
