Hello beautiful Optimists!
During this call we actually had a really great discussion on feedback for Season 4 from a variety of perspectives (voter, delegate, mission proposer).
Recording is here: July 6th Community Call Recording.mp4 - Google Drive
Slides link: July 6th, 2023 community call slides - Google Slides
Being a well deserved vacation week, we had the opportunity to have lively involvement from participants in this call, which led into deep discussion over a variety of topics. This might (i know it is) seem longer than the usual recaps done before, but i assure it’s worth giving it look (and faster than hearing 50 minutes of talking). 
- Updates:
- RetroPGF3 was announced, 30M OP will be distributed, one of the differences is that there are now four different categories. Project registration will take place in the following months and the voting will take place in Fall 2023. For more details check: RetroPGF Round 3
- Voting is live for missions: there’s active voting for Intents #1, #3, #4, and remember intent #2 is Grants Council, the rest is voted by Token House. To see more in detail: Optimism Agora
- Grants Council: we are currently in cycle 13, remember this is for Intent #2 and it’ll have three different cycles. Cycle 13 will end on the 12th, over 106 proposals and 49 are in final review. If you have submitted a proposal don’t forget to look out for feedback! Cycle 14 will start on July 14th and the submission deadline will be on July 27th. For more information: Cycle 13 Preliminary Review
- Season 4 feedback, discussions and concerns:
- Lack of feedback and guidance during proposals submissions: newer community members found confusing and difficult getting feedback from delegates for their proposals, resulting in many projects being looked over. There were a few solutions mentioned for this issue, such as having a “guide delegate” that’ll help with the process. There were also Pitching sessions made on discord before the hard deadline for proposals ( Optimism Mission Proposal Pitches - Season 4) which had a good impact and was a simpler way for the collective to see and show the proposals, thanks to these sessions another solution for this issue was including pitching sessions or video presentation as a regular for proposals. In addition to the idea of including “mentors proposals” for a more easier process for both delegates and community members.
- Voting apathy: due to the numbers of delegates vs the amount project proposals and a poor structure for reviewing all the projects, there has been a “voting apathy” which we can see due to the projects that are going through the voting process being significantly under the approval threshold, concerning, considering we are already into a week of voting and there’s just another week left. Some of comments over this issue were ideas to improve the general structure and a public and simplified UX for delegates, some mentioned hiring more delegates and including a “Delegate manager” for the division of the reviewing, mostly between volunteers delegates. Another great idea was to give more incentives to delegates by boosting their reputation, also making the process more simple as mentioned before with pitching sessions, making the workload less heavy on them.
- Another concern was the duplication of alliances, proposals and organizations, having the same group of people doing missions and applying for grants at the same time but we are not aware of any rule that forbids Missions and Grants overlaps, one of comments was that “many people don’t know proposals can be on both sides”. Another possible reason for the duplication of proposals was the lack of guidance for newer members that found the process quite confusing, bringing back the idea of a “mentor” for members and alliances to go to and clear those doubts and avoid any kind of issues during the proposal process.
There were many interesting comments during this call, having fewer members led to a deeper discussion with more understanding, new interesting ideas and refreshing feedback about Season 4.
I hope everyone that was on holiday had a great time!
See you soon,
Michael 
