This post outlines the changes and updates which are being made to OP Atlas in preparation for Retro Funding 5.
The infrastructure for the application process is created and hosted by Agora, you can find the relevant code here.
Timeline
- Sign up: Aug 22nd - Sept 5th
- Application Review Process: Sept 6th - Sept 20th
- Voting: September 21st - Oct 4th
- Results & Grant delivery: October 10th
Organizations
In previous Retro Funding rounds, we’ve seen that individual applications are often overloaded with many different types of projects. For example, in Retro Funding 3…
- Test-in-Prod applied with 5 distinct projects, ranging from work on OP Stack client implementations to data analytics work.
- Department of Decentralization applied both with their work on conferences and hackathons, such as ETHBerlin and Protocol Berg, as well their work on the Goerli Testnetwork.
This mixture of substantially different projects in a single application adds difficulty to the voting process. It makes comparisons among applications harder and increases the complexity of voting.
Organizations aim to solve this problem.
An organization is a new entity within OP Atlas that reflects a company, DAO or team which is working together. Each organization can create one or multiple projects that reflect distinct products, services, or contributions.
- Organization: Team, DAO, or business working together on one or multiple projects
- Project: A distinct product, service, or contribution that reflects a significant amount of work
What should not be a project: Individual activities within a larger project, such as a commit, a contract deployment on a new chain, a single call or presentation.
With Organizations, Test-in-Prod can represent itself as a team, and then create distinct projects with which they want to apply to Retro Funding. Each project will then be judged separately within the relevant retro round.
While in some cases creating an organization is helpful, projects do not need to be associated to an organization. For example, individuals building things by themselves can simply create a project and submit it for Retro Funding consideration. Groups of people who worked together on a single project, for example as part of a hackathon, may also choose not to create an organization. Creating the right framework for organizations and projects remains a challenge that we’ll continue to iterate on, and we appreciate your feedback.
Application Questions
As a continuation of the involvement of badgeholders in the design process of Retro Funding rounds, the Foundation hosted a workshop with the aim of refining the project application form to collect more insightful information for the Retro Funding 5 voting process. The workshop provided valuable insights into the kinds of questions and answers that will help badgeholders better evaluate projects impact across the three scope categories.
Workshop Outcomes:
- Refined Questions for Impact Evaluation: Through group discussions, we identified key questions that should be included in the project application form to help badgeholders assess impact more effectively. For instance, we determined that for Ethereum Core Contributions, it’s crucial to ask questions that clarify how a project supports or is a dependency of the OP Stack. Important feedback has been the desire to have more verifiable information about projects impact, instead of self-reported statements, user testimonials were highlighted as anexample of this.
- Targeted Asks: The workshop also shed light on the nature of the data submitted for the different categories through an exercise of evaluating the answers received in Retro Funding 3. A more focused set of questions, anchored in tangible, specific impact related proof were brought forward to avoid broad, or at times unrelated, information being submitted by projects.
We collated the most effective questions that emerged from each group discussion per category and sent out a survey to the broader badgeholder set to gather additional feedback and enable broader voting and calibration of these questions. The aim of the workshop & survey is to make the application process better aligned with the needs and expectations of badgeholders, ultimately leading to more accurate rewarding of impact in Retro Funding 5.
Below are the final application questions which were selected as a result of the workstream:
- Ethereum Core Contributions: How does your project support, or is a dependency of, the OP Stack? How would it impact the OP Stack if your project ceased to exist?
- OP Stack Research & Development: How has your project advanced the development of the OP Stack? Who has benefited the most from your work on the OP Stack and how?
- OP Stack Tooling: How has the infrastructure you built enabled the testing, deployment, and operation of OP chains? Who has used your tooling and how has it benefited them (Please reference relevant data sources which surface the impact of your tooling, such as user surveys, testimonials, attestations etc)?
Other Updates & Changes
- Project grant and funding reporting: See Retro Funding 5: Grants & Funding within the application process post for more details.
- Add Links: Applicants can now add links to their projects. They can add any link which supports them in showcasing their impact. They may also provide a name and description for each link.
- Improved project creation to application handover: The final step in creating a project in our system is to publish that project’s metadata onchain. Some projects completed this step, but then failed to also submit an application. Messaging has been added to make it clear that after publishing a project, applicants must also submit an application to participate in a retro round.
- Round details and application: We’ve made the round details (found in the round application) visible to anyone before signing in.
- Markdown support: In the round application, free form input fields will support markdown.