RetroPGF Round 2 Voting Rationale

Badgeholders are not required to disclose how they’ve voted but may share their voting rationale here if they choose.

17 Likes

I will be focusing on projects/people:

  • Education or public goods funding
  • No/limited commercial funding (no VCs, no tokens)
  • Directly related to Ethereum L2s, bonus if Optimism-specific
  • Votes will be allocated by past impact (subjective judgment)

These are areas that a) I understand well and b) can benefit most from RPGF.

15 Likes

I will allocate a certain percentage of my vote to each category, to simplify voting, I have divided each category into impact subcategories, so I will allocate a certain percentage of my vote to each subcategory, and as I mentioned my strategy previously, ā€œA Public Goods Ecosystem will create value and grow when those who seek inspiration find it in impact and those who seek motivation find it in profit.ā€
But since I cannot allocate my vote to all nominees (189 nominees + 5 collections), I will allocate part of my vote to a few or at least one nominee with maximum impact in each subcategory, who can be an example of motivation and inspiration for other nominees in the same subcategory, who received a smaller allocation or no allocation.
Most interestingly, if I set the subcategories as vertical structures it is simple to establish the correlation of impact between the subcategories in horizontal lines (or vice versa)).

12 Likes

My criteria is (1) impact (of course), (2) potential impact (is the idea sound), (3) current funding status.

I weigh these things in order 3, 2, 1.

If a project has raised money (through either token or VC), most likely I won’t be voting for that project.

If a project has a great idea but is just starting to see impact, I will vote for them with the thinking that supporting a great idea is a good thing. And hopefully the support will help that team to execute on the idea in the future. (Yes, I know this is supposed to be retro-active, but see below…)

If a project has already had impact, I think that’s excellent and deserves support, but many times early impactful things fade in the long run. Use Yahoo as an example. It had a huge impact in the early Internet, but it faded to insignificance. I’m not sure past impact is a good measure. Also, there’s a winner-take-all aspect to all of this. Everyone votes for ā€œwell known projectsā€ and then ā€œwell known projectsā€ become more well known because they have a marketing budget, spiral, spiral…

For these reasons, I think I’m going to do something similar to this.

  1. Identify project that I won’t be voting for due to already existing funding through VCs or token raises. Allocate 0% to those projects.

  2. Identify the 10-20 projects that either have great future potention and growing impact or past impact and a really good idea. Allocation about 50% of my vote to those project split up in a way that makes sense.

  3. Use the remaining 50% of my vote to vote evenly across the remaining projects in the belief that even 1% of my vote (or whatever it works out to) is a significant amount of money, and especially for small projects, any amount of money keeps them going and is a huge encouragement.

15 Likes

Not sure if I can post here since I am a project owner. Please delete this msg if not appropriate.

I think it is very important to give projects a stage to showcase and demo their products to badge holders. Otherwise, it is very difficult to evaluate projects based on a few lines in the profile page.

Regarding the impact of projects, one source to look at is gitcoin voting results. Since Gitcoin uses passport to verify donor IDs, the voting results should be fairly accurate to measure project impacts among retail web3 users. Latest results for alpha round is here

For example, our project Chaineye received 2530 donations and ranked 16th in terms of match amount among all open source projects. Such numbers could be used to measure project impacts.

5 Likes

I plan to prioritize funding projects that improve the new user experience in the ecosystem. Specifically, I will focus on two areas:

  1. Adoption: Projects that aim to make blockchain and Optimism more user-friendly and accessible, with a focus on safety and ease of use. This can help drive adoption and attract more users to the ecosystem.
    for example, a project that prevents users from being scammed

  2. Education: Projects that focus on creating educational resources and communications to raise awareness about optimism.

11 Likes

I just published ā€œRandom Thoughts on 10 Random Optimism Retro PGF Projectsā€ https://link.medium.com/UXIhuVbsfyb

@trueblocks

7 Likes

I’ve published my thought process here as I go through the projects for allocation.

6 Likes

This process has been a wonderful crash course for me in the amazing talent of the optimistic collective. Having limited

  • information and prior knowledge of the majority of nominated projects
  • limited time to fairly assess, to the (pedantic) degree I typically would

I have elected to vote for all nominees based on only the information provided in the project discovery profiles while also accounting for my personal user experience.

What this means is that my allocation is in many cases below the OP value I would allocate using a less standardised [randomised] approach yet a clear process allowed me to

  • minimise bias through broad funding distribution
  • assess & fund value creation on terms that I best understand
  • support smaller teams, community growth & diversity

No doubt there are many other forms of value being created however this scoring profile reflects elements of value creation that I am confident to assess

Purpose Percentage Rationale
Infrastructure 0.00600 Base score, all teams
Education 0.00300 Base score, all teams
Tooling 0.00300 Based score, all teams
Value Percentage Rationale
User 0.00075 Support my web3 journey
OP 0.00075 Optimism specific focus
ETH 0.00050 ETH specific focus
Team 0.00050 Smaller teams < 16 >1
Build 0.00050 Supports builders
Other 0.00050 Discretionary allocation
Community 0.00030 Expands Collective Community
Diversity 0.00030 Expands Collective Diversity
Governance 0.00030 Governance Application

Voting Outcome

Based on this voting rationale I was able to allocate 0.97330. The remaining 0.02670 was split three ways to the top-scoring project in each category by adding 0.00890 to ā€œOtherā€ allocation. My top-scoring projects and unadjusted averages for each category are as follows

Education

Note I have abstained from voting for TE Academy

Project % Score
Kernel (Adjusted) 0.0163
ETHGlobal 0.00570
0xPARC 0.00530
Week in Ethereum News 0.00530
RadicalXChange 0.00510
Optimism Ambassador collection 0.00490
Optimism en EspaƱol 0.00490
OptimismArabia 0.00490
Support NERDs collection 0.00490
Translators collection 0.00490
Unadjusted Score
Mean 0.00380
Median 0.00380
Mode 0.00300
Range 0.00290
Infrastructure
Project % Score
Solidity (Adjusted) 0.01900
Blobscan 0.00830
Erigon 0.00830
Infinitism (ERC-4337) - Account Abstraction 0.00830
MerkleTreeJS 0.00830
Safe (previously Gnosis Safe) 0.00830
Vyper 0.00830
Unadjusted Score
Mean 0.00770
Median 0.00780
Mode 0.00780
Range 0.00280
Tooling & Utilities
Project % Score
Commons Stack (Adjusted) 0.01710
Agora 0.00610
Gitcoin 0.00590
TypeChain 0.00580
Snapshot 0.00570
Otterspace 0.00560
Hop Protocol 0.00560
Pairwise 0.00540
Quark ID 0.00540
Attestation Station Interface 0.00530
Slither 0.00530
Smock 0.00530
Unadjusted Score
Mean 0.00450
Median 0.00450
Mode 0.00450
Range 0.00370

Given the approach I’ve taken, my thoughts are that if we include more binary questions and required more specified (quantitative) answers then much of the work to quantify funding allocation could be automated

Binary

  • Is your project primarily Optimism focused Y/N
  • Is your project primarily Ethereum-focused Y/N

Specified

  • what resources were committed to work completed in the current funding period (quantify all that apply)
  • what sources of funding do you currently have access to (quantify those that apply)
  • what level of funding do you see as a fair reward for the impact delivered (select funding range)
15 Likes

I’d like to share with you an article I recently wrote. As you all know, RetroPGF is currently in its voting phase, with the final results expected to be announced on 3/24.

Although there are only 90 badge holders in this round of RetroPGF, everyone can actually see the application information for all projects. As a Web3 media in Chinese, I wrote an article inviting readers to become unofficial badge holders and host a mock vote, helping them get to know the 195 proposals participating in RetroPGF.

In addition, I included my evaluation criteria at the end of the article. This article not only sparked discussions among Chinese readers, but we also used AI to translate it into English and made it publicly available to English readers as a reference. I hope that through this approach, RetroPGF’s voting can become a process that everyone can participate in together, rather than just being the task of the badge holders.

English:RetroPGF Simulated Voting: 13 Selected Impactful Projects Eligible for 10M OP
Chinese:RetroPGF ęØ”ę“¬ęŠ•ē„Øļ¼šē²¾éø 13 é …åÆē²å¾— 8 å„„č£œåŠ©ēš„å½±éŸæåŠ›å°ˆę”ˆ - by čØ±ę˜Žę© - 區唊勢

5 Likes

thanks for sharing! It gives a good perspective on your standards and how you approach it. a good way to learn from your XP!

I have many thoughts about bringing quantification to governance, and overall it’s necessary for any starting point. in this case, the clear voting weights are very useful + fair + sensible.

The voting criteria process can always be changed and extensively discussed, but when you reach a calculation aligned with the values behind, it’s easy to last and be reliable. I recognize the Token Engineering in your process!

4 Likes

Nice work on the article, you raise several importants points. i laughed at your assessment of the process as.ā€œā€¦probably the most labor-intensive content in the history of Blockchain projectsā€¦ā€ I hope as we conitue to iterate the voting citizenship will continue to expand and Im excited to see the learning from RFPG2 and the next evolution. Keep up the great work and your community leadership fwiw you have my vote because I value community and diversity as strengthing the ecosystem.

7 Likes

Love this. We actually need to focus on development and making sure our future only gets the best of us to keep improving

1 Like

Hi governance and community members.

Voting ended a few days ago and I don’t want to pass up the opportunity to share here what we did at SEEDLatam, as me as bagdeholder, delegate representative for the community.

As you may know, our delegation is iterative and in different instances, the community has some say over our votes for Optimism governance, and this time was no different. In RPGF 2, we allow the community to help us decide which projects to fund.

The scope

For this round, we focus on funding a high number of projects horizontally, that is, without a particular preference for any topic. Additionally, in addition to the importance of the impact, for this round we focused on projects that could benefit more significantly from funding, compared to those with a token launched or previous private financing; also eliminating potential conflicts of interest.

We conducted our own community RPFG voting: we believe that collective intelligence can be harnessed in a controlled environment and we extended our decision-making power to our community, raising the awareness of Public Goods Funding and incentivizing to the people to participate. In this round, we grant 20% of the voting power to our members previously interested in the Optimism governance to vote on their projects that they consider worthy of financing. Our thesis is that even if the badgeholder reviewed all the projects, each unintentional bias could be relatively reduced by members of the community with different appreciations of the applying projects, where the experience of each one in the Ethereum ecosystem would mark which project has impacted positively.

The process

We launched our snapshot page https://snapshot.org/#/seedlatam.eth/ and opened three polls, one for each category, using the weighted voting system,the same used for RPGF2.

We used the 1 address 1 vote strategy, guaranteeing to be sybil-resistant, in which each address holding at least 1 POAP of our governance calls was enabled to vote. In this way, our experiment prevented any possibility of inappropriate behavior in our results, while handing this decision power to our community members with some context of how Optimism governance works, having been on at least one of our governance calls (and then POAP claimed).

The results were faithfully respected, meaning this time 20% of the badgeholder’s voting power, of which 80% were later selected by this delegation considering variables such as size of impact, need for funding and quality/uniqueness; a plus if it’s dedicated to OP. We had a small particular focus on the collections, since these heterogeneous groups are the type of nominations that most closely match the collaborative spirit for public goods.

The results

24 community members participated among 107 eligible. 87% of community members participated in all polls. Each voter in our community selected between 1 and 12 nominees per category.

A total of 121 projects were voted on. The weighting was enormously distributed among those selected. The projects received between 0.03 and 3.87% of the voting power.

As a consequence, it is to be expected that our decision will not influence the total ranking of the top voted, and it will do so for the projects that will receive fewer votes by the rest of the badgeholders.

Our full results can be found below: Copia de Voting scratchpad Seed latam JOXES - Google Sheets

6 Likes

I shared my rationale and approach here — learned a lot and had fun while doing this. Excited to keep iterating on the process and learning.

2 Likes