Retro Funding 6: Badgeholder Manual

[system]

Retro Funding: 6 Badgeholder Manual

• Voting period: Oct 31st - Nov 13th 18:00 UTC
• Participation: Selected badgeholders and guest voters are expected to allocate up to 10 hours to participate in round 6
• Reward Amount: Maximum per project: 12.5% of total round allocation; min per project: 1,000 OP
• Impact Period: October 2023 - September 18th 2024
• Voting Transparency: Votes on round allocation and category budget will be public, votes on individual projects will be private, Conflict of Interest disclosures will be public.

Retro Funding 6: Governance

Retroactive Public Goods Funding (Retro Funding) is the mechanism by which the Optimism Collective ensures that its contributors are fairly rewarded for their impact. We imagine a future in which Optimism core development, governance contributions, developer tooling, onchain applications, and more, are sustainably rewarded for the impact they provide to the Optimism Collective.

Retro Funding 6 rewards contributors to contributions to Optimism Governance, including governance infrastructure & tooling, governance analytics, and governance leadership. Impact generated between October 2023 - September 18th 2024 will be rewarded. You can find the full details of the round’s design and its components here.

Voting

Voting app here
The thesis behind this Retro Funding voting design is that sorting voters into smaller groups dedicated to evaluating a specific set of applications will lead to an improved voter experience and allocation of rewards, compared to past rounds.

Voting on Budget

As a voter in Retro Funding 6, you are tasked with deciding the overall token allocation for the round, as well as determining how rewards should be allocated across the three scope categories.

1. Round allocation: You will vote on the total amount of OP to be allocated for the round, within the Foundation’s set range of 1M to 3.5M OP. Choose an amount that you believe fairly reflects the impact of the projects in this round. The final round allocation will be determined by taking the median of all votes.
2. Category allocation: You will also vote on the percentage of OP that should be allocated to each of the three categories. This allocation should represent the impact of projects within each category. The final category allocation will be determined by taking the median of all votes and normalizing results.

You can change your votes at any point before submitting your ballot. Your votes on round allocation and category allocation will be public.

Voting on Projects

You have been randomly assigned to evaluate projects within one of the three categories. You can check the category you’ve been assigned on the ballot page.

1. Rate projects: To unlock your ballot, you must first rate each project on a scale from low impact to high impact.
2. Declare Conflicts of Interests: If you have a Conflict of Interest with any project, you are required to declare it. You will then be excluded from voting on that specific project. A Conflict of Interest is defined as an organization where you expect any portion of funds to flow to yourself or any projects from which you derive income. More information can be found in the Self-dealing policy.
3. Rank Projects: After rating, you’ll see a preliminary ranking of projects based on their impact. You can adjust this ranking to ensure it accurately reflects your preferences.
4. Allocate rewards: You can then allocate a percentage of rewards to each project, either by selecting one of the suggested allocation methods or by creating a custom allocation. Note that your reward allocation will remain private.

You can find a walkthrough of voting functionality here

The final project allocation will be determined by taking the median to all votes and normalizing results.

Useful Tools

1. Pairwise: Pairwise is a fun voting option to gamify and simplify the decision making process, allowing Badgeholders to create their ballot by comparing projects.
2. Impact Garden: Impact Garden is a protocol designed to generate reputation based onchain impact data to improve funding allocation for public goods.
3. DeVouch: Signal your support for legitimate projects applying for Retro Funding rounds or flag suspicious ones using on-chain attestations.
4. **Retrolist.app & Retropgfhub.com**: Browse all projects which applied to the round

Impact = Profit

Retro Funding’s purpose is to reward projects for the impact they have created for the Optimism Collective. Following the axiom of “impact = profit”, the Collective believes in fairly rewarding each contributor for the impact they have provided. In no way does Retro Funding reward expected future work or impact of projects, it’s only concerned with retroactively rewarding the impact that has already been created.

Within this round, you will find information on the Optimism grants projects have received since January 2023 and investment, defined as “funding provided by individuals or investment firms in exchange for equity ownership”, since Jan 2020. In addition, there’s information on the pricing model of a project to gain insights into their business model. The Foundation believes that venture funding should not be a factor when evaluating a project’s impact. In fact, the original vision of Retroactive Public Goods Funding encourages the development of a venture capital market specifically for public goods. You can read more about this topic here.

Voter Selection Experiment

Retro Funding Round 6 introduces a new approach to voter selection, with Guest Voters chosen randomly from the broader community. Two primary research questions guide this experiment: whether selection methods, such as Web of Trust or Proof of Work, yield voter groups with distinct characteristics compared to random selection, and whether these methods influence voting outcomes in resource allocation. Approximately 80 Guest Voters will participate, and their aggregated voting impact may be adjusted by Citizens to prevent system capture. This research will help optimize future selection processes for a more representative governance structure.

Self-dealing & Bribery policy

• Voters should not vote for organizations where they expect any portion of funds to flow to them or any projects from which they derive income. Voters will need to disclose their conflict of interest during their review of projects in the voting process. For each project they review, badgeholders will see the option to disclose a Conflict of Interest. Projects for which a badgeholder has disclosed a Conflict of Interest will be removed from the badgeholders ballot. Any voter can vote on the Round allocation and category allocation, independent of conflicts of interests relating to individual projects. Conflict of Interest disclosures will be public. See the Retro Funding: Self-Dealing Policy for more details.
• Voters should refrain from engaging in bribery. Please review the Retro Funding 6 Bribery Policy

FAQ

[TO BE ADDED]

Made with <3 by Gitcoin, Agora, OS Observer and Optimism Foundation.

[willscott]

The voting period is listed as Oct 1st - Oct 14th 18:00 UTC - presumably this is Nov 1st - Nov 14th 18:00 UTC

[joanbp]

@system

min per project: 1,000 OP

Minimum for the project to receive anything, right?

[Jonas]

Thanks for catching! Fixed

[Jonas]

Yes that’s correct @joanbp

[pfedprog]

Very cool experiment

Regarding ranking, I am not sure if we can call it that way. By default application flow I am given only 1 project at a time to rate from very low to very high. Effectively from 1 to 5.

Also, to double check, the conflict of interests option is not clear if a person that cheats faces any consequences.

Next, I would definitely need somebody help me understand the work accomplished by one of the projects because the clear impact statement is not clearly highlighted. I have not found a guideline for rating such project.

Very curious if there is a point of contact in the application, I can reach out to ask additional questions.

Finally, I am also perplexed by how am I supposed to rationally allocate the funding between three categories. When I am encouraged to only dive into one.

[joanbp]

@pfedprog

Regarding ranking, I am not sure if we can call it that way. By default application flow I am given only 1 project at a time to rate from very low to very high. Effectively from 1 to 5.

It may help you do a rough first sorting. You can always adjust later in the process. Or you can rate all projects the same initially and do a completely customized allocation directly in the ballot.

The rating is only supposed to be a tool to help you; if you don’t think it’s helpful, you don’t have to use it. (I agree that this is not entirely intuitive, but it is my understanding from last round).

@pfedprog

Also, to double check, the conflict of interests option is not clear if a person that cheats faces any consequences.

You can read more about it here:

500×500 5.4 KB

It is expected that Optimists refrain from self-dealing. While opportunities for self-dealing in the Citizens’ House will be reduced via incentive design and voting mechanisms, the Foundation may implement additional measure to discourage self-dealing, to be defined at the beginning of each Round, while these mechanisms are further developed. The Foundation has defined the below process to address self-dealing in Round 6, if needed. Conflict of Interest Disclosure Voters should not vote for org…

Don’t cheat.

@pfedprog

Finally, I am also perplexed by how am I supposed to rationally allocate the funding between three categories. When I am encouraged to only dive into one.

I agree. I think diving at least somewhat into all categories is necessary. You need to have at least some idea of the overall size and quality of all contributions to do a proper job at budgeting.

You may discuss with other voters and use their experience too - are you a guest voter? You guys have a telegram group of your own, right? Maybe try to come up with ideas for allocation methods, and then discuss with the others. (We are encouraged to not share voting strategies between the two groups of voters - citizens and guest voters - which I find sad, but that is the way the experiment is designed, so…)

@pfedprog

Next, I would definitely need somebody help me understand the work accomplished by one of the projects because the clear impact statement is not clearly highlighted. I have not found a guideline for rating such project.

Very curious if there is a point of contact in the application, I can reach out to ask additional questions.

I would start by posting my question in my voter telegram group. Someone else may know something. Or have ideas as to how to handle applications with unclear impact statements.

If you think there is a technical issue with the application, maybe tag Jonas. But if it’s just that the applicant is unclear, try instead to come up with what you think is a fair approach to that. (Some might decide that if there is no clear impact, then they allocate 0; others might do extra research and find that there is an impact that should be rewarded - different voters, different voting strategies).

Whatever you end up doing, I hope you share your voting strategy afterwards, here in the forum. There will probably be a dedicated thread for it. You ask good questions - I’m sure it will be interesting to read about your answers and/or remaining open questions by the end of the experiment!

[alexsotodigital]

I’d like to ask the @system (or @optimistic_emily, who I understand is leading part of this effort) if you could clarify the current status of badge distribution.

That is,

• How many badgeholders are there currently?
• How many badgeholders are expected to participate in S7? What is the growth trend?
• Will the invitation to become a badgeholder continue to be from those who are already part of it?

I understand that the experiments that are being done this season (with guests and experts participating in the Retro Funding) will probably result in some of these answers; but I wanted to ask if there is public information that I simply don’t know about.

[optimistic_emily]

Hi @alexsotodigital

this year instead of growing the number of Citizens, we have invited Guest Voters to participate in Retro Funding Rounds 5 and 6 (see forum post here for Round 5 and here for Round 6).

In past rounds, the Citizen set was grown through the ‘Web of Trust’ method. Instead of continuing this, we decided to test two new methods of selection to gather data and compare these to the Web of Trust method.

You can see the current Citizens via this attestation and the voters in Rounds 5 and 6 via this attestation.

Stay tuned for updates about Retro Funding in S7

[alexsotodigital]

Thanks for the clarification @optimistic_emily.

I’m looking forward to the results of the test.

Personally, I’d be excited to participate at some point in any new experiment that comes up.

I’m also wishful to be a badgeholder at some point, so I’ll stay tuned to whatever approach emerges after the reflection period for S7 and beyond.

[TEKNNUKU]

Hi Alex, please what badge are you referring to here!

[alexsotodigital]

Hi @TEKNNUKU,

With badgeholders I am referring to Citizens.

I leave @vonnie610 synthesis of that.

@vonnie610

What are Citizens?
Citizens are members of the Citizens’ House, which comprises one half of the Collective’s governance system. The Citizens’ House operates a reputation-based governance system (one member = one vote), and is primarily responsible for the allocation of retroactive public goods funding.

Who are Citizens?
Citizens represent individual human stakeholders of the Collective: builders, users, and community members who are aligned with the project’s values and are interested in the long-term benefit of the Collective.

What do Citizens Do?
The Citizenship process is evolving! Currently, Citizens are responsible for:

• Allocating Retroactive Public Goods Funding
• Vetoing Protocol Upgrades

How are Citizens’ Selected?
Citizenship has been distributed via a web-of-trust mechanism to date. In the future, Citizenship criteria will be defined by the Citizens themselves in a process managed by governance. You can join the conversation on Future Citizenship Selection Criteria here.