The Retroactive Public Goods Funding (Retro Funding) application review process is applied to decide which applicants are eligible to participate in retro rounds and is used to enforce application rules and eligibility criteria. This process is run by a selected group of Citizens during a 2 week period following the project sign up process. For a full overview of the application review process see Retro Funding: Application Review Process.
Reviewer Expectations
Any Citizen who participates in the review process should meet the following expectations
- Time Commitment: As a reviewer you should expect to commit a minimum of 10 hours to participating in the review process. There’s a need for you to have ongoing availability during the process running from October 14 - October 28.
- OP Governance: You should have high level familiarity with the OP Governance and its components to enforce the eligibility criteria. Please make sure you understand and are comfortable with enforcing the eligibility criteria before you sign up.
- Communication & Synch calls: Stay attentive to messages, announcements, and action steps provided by the Lead Reviewers. Attend the onboarding call and attend regular reviewer sync calls.
- Stick to the rules: Thoroughly review applications according to the application review checklist. You need to provide a written explanation for your review. Diverting from the rules to implement your personal values is unacceptable and will result in removal from the review process.
- Conflicts of Interest: You are required to declare projects you have a conflict of interest with when applying to be a reviewer. Badgeholders with a COI will not be able to participate in the round.
Reviewer Selection
Citizens will be selected as Reviewers via a combination of an opt-in process and random sampling. This allows for a smaller group to engage in the process, while still being fairly selected via random sampling.
- Opt-in: Citizens can opt-in to participate in the application review process until Oct 11th 19:00 UTC. Only Citizens can participate who do not have a Conflict of Interest with a project applying to the round.
To opt-in please fill out this form and be sure you have read the Reviewer Expectations listed above.
- Random Sampling: 22 reviewers will be randomly selected from the citizens who have opted-in to review. Selection will take place on October 11th and citizens will be notified via email about the outcome of the random selection.
- Lead Reviewers: Diego, the Citizens’ House Gov NERD, will act as a non-voting lead reviewer, responsible for resolving questions, collecting votes, managing the timeline of the process and facilitating collaboration.
- Reviewer Groups: Instead of randomly assigning reviewers to cases, there will be 4 reviewer groups with 5 reviewers each. Each reviewer will be randomly assigned to a group. This design aims at reducing the operational and technical complexity, as well as allow for more collaboration among reviewers.
Application Review Process Overview
- Application is submitted via retrofunding.optimism.io
- Application is assigned to reviewer group (see “Reviewer Selection”)
- Appeal: If a majority of reviewers rejected the application, the applicant can hand in an appeal. The appeal will then be reviewed by 5 reviewers from a different reviewer group to the one that did the initial review. The reviewer group decides if the application is rejected/approved by majority vote.
- Application Edits: Edits to a project’s application are only allowed in cases where the application form itself is misguided or deceived applications, bugs caused input errors or the application category was selected wrong. The Foundation decides which applications are allowed to be edited. Relevant edits are made following the Full Review and are considered within the Appeals process.
Application rules
Below are rules for which violation will result in the removal of an application from a Retro Funding round.
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False statements & deception - false claims about your contributions, past impact or funding & grants are not allowed.
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Hateful Content - No racist, sexist, or otherwise hateful speech, no discrimination as defined by the rules of engagement
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Deceiving badgeholders - Malicious content that could cause harm or unintended consequences to users.
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Fraud & Impersonation - Claiming to be a brand or person you are not. The Grant owner must be directly affiliated with the project; the funds must go to the project.
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Advertising - Using Retro Funding application to showcase something you are selling like a token sale or NFT drop
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Outside of Retro round scope or not meeting eligibility criteria - Contributions that do not have a clear relationship to the scope of the retro round, or do not meet eligibility criteria
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Spam - Applications containing spam, such as irrelevant answers, plagiarized content, broken or unrelated impact metrics and contribution links. Applications in languages other than English .This will help simplify the process as English is the working language of the majority of Badgeholders. Please ensure you translate any content that’s part of the application.
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Duplicate applications - Multiple applications from the same individual, project or group which apply for the same impact.
Members of contribution paths (Council Members, Ambassadors, NumbaNERDs, SupNERDs, TechNERDs, Translators) or Councils can’t submit individual applications for their work within the relevant workstream, as each workstream will apply as a project.
Review Checklist
Reviewers will be asked to go over this checklist when performing the initial review of an application. Please note that this is an early draft.
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Spam: Does the application contain spam, such as irrelevant answers, plagiarized content, broken or unrelated impact metrics and contribution links? Is the application in another language than English?
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Eligibility: Is this application Eligible, following the eligibility criteria of the round? [Reference category specific criteria checklist]
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Category: Is this application eligible for another category, different to the one they have selected?
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Optimism Grants: Has the application correctly reported the grants they have received from Optimism (including Token House, Citizens’ House an Foundation grants)?
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Venture Funding: Has the application correctly reported their venture funding based on public information?
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Pricing: Has the application correctly reported their current pricing? See by checking the pricing on the projects website.
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Impersonation: Does the application have a verified Github repo which belongs to the organisation they claim to be? Do any linked artefacts not belong to the project?
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Future promises: Does this application make promises about work they will do in the future?
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Advertising: Does this application actively promote a token or NFT sale in their application or on their website?
Conflicts of Interest rule
A large number of citizens will apply with their project to Retro Funding 6. To prevent possible bias within the review process, only citizens without a Conflict of Interest with a project in the round will be allowed to participate.
