Hi everyone <3
I could not upload my explanation to this thread earlier, so I apologize and here it is now.
Nomination as a badgeholder.
The nomination as a “badgeholder” came to me through delegate 0xJoxes from SEED Latam. On January 13th, I accepted to be a badgeholder. About me, I am currently the Community Leader of SEED Latam since 2021, but I also recently joined ETH Kipu as a general coordinator and head of the Public Goods commission.
What is ETH Kipu? A meta-community conceived as a public good that brings together all the regional Ethereum communities of Latin America. Our mission is to educate the Latin American community about the Ethereum ecosystem in Spanish, English, and Portuguese using sustainable formats.
After a few days of accepting to be a badgeholder, I thought that my vote could have more legitimacy and objectivity if it carried the criterion of the Public Goods area of ETH Kipu, instead of being carried out as an individual. That is why I will refer to “our vote” instead of “my vote” from now on.
I brought this proposal to my commission, and it was positively received. Given the titanic task and the deadlines, my vote was agreed upon with part of the Public Goods team at ETH Kipu - instead of the entire commission - where I was accompanied by Cris Garner and Lucy Aguilar. Both have previous experiences in quadratic funding rounds and were pioneers in organizing a round in Honduras, which became the first Latin American country to organize a QF round for public goods. You can read the summary of that round here.
Personally, I volunteered in the quadratic funding round of ETH Colombia (with Cris Garner as well) where we worked hand in hand with the clr.fund team and the Ethereum Foundation team. I also led the quadratic funding round in 2022 as part of ETH Latam Buenos Aires, and you can read the round report here.
The process
Cris’s vision was fundamental in understanding the technical proposal of each project since I don’t have a technical profile, and that limits me when evaluating infrastructure and tool applications. Cris is a Solidity developer and has extensive experience working on Web3 protocols.
Lucy’s work was key in ordering all our thoughts since she made a scoring scale so that we could assign percentages to each project and vote. She has extensive experience working in state areas of Honduras in assigning education scholarships.
And both have worked for years to make Ethereum Honduras a community with a strong sense of ethos and a real awareness of Public Goods when this notion was not mainstream.
I can proudly say that we carefully reviewed all 195 applications. It was important for us to make a decision with an overall vision and not ignore any of the applications. We voted for 95 projects, while the average vote of other badgeholders was 40 projects. I do not mention this from a moral superiority, but I include it as a quantitative fact. I think that my performance as an individual badgeholder would have been much lower if I didn’t have Cris and Lucy’s input. I am very grateful that they joined such a task and based on our experience, I hope to incorporate more criteria for future rounds.
Our 95 votes.
How did we vote? We decided to base our vote on our experience in previous rounds, the badgeholders manual, and the scope indications of the round in the governance forum of Optimism. We tried to vote for regional communities around the world, as building from the periphery is generally more difficult than in major hubs of global innovation. We were surprised by the number of individual projects that applied, and we supported them. It was gratifying to know that people in Asia and the Middle East are creating communities and tools to help their regions. Our vote was also a long-distance salute from Latam to communities and individuals who are contributing their effort from every corner of the globe to the Optimistic Collective.
The review process took several days, and at times, we thought we were not going to make it, but 24 hours before the voting deadline, we did. Later, I voted according to the committee’s decision. You can see our votes in this link.
Numbers in Latam
Some projects have anonymous members or prefer not to disclose from which region they are building. But we have been able to identify more than a dozen projects from Latam that received funding. In total, they add up to more than 250k $OP tokens for the region. We hope that this amount will translate into greater diffusion of the Optimistic ecosystem. For my part, although I did not manage to make my disclaimer on the forum due to time constraints, I did not vote for SEED Latam as stipulated in the code of conduct.
Conclusions.
I will send my feedback in the corresponding form. But we didn’t want to miss saying that it would have been great to have a pre-filter for nominations. Many of the projects submitted, both from Latam and in general, had not previously contributed to the OP Stack in any of the categories. To be consistent with this, we did NOT apply from ETH Kipu/ETH Latam because although we have had Optimism panels at in-person events with hundreds of attendees (through Optimism Español with @AxlVaz, @NicoProducto, @Joxes and many more), we did not consider it sufficient as an objective contribution. However, in the results, many projects that had no previous contribution to the OP Stack or that “inflated” their nominations with not entirely true data received funding.
On a personal note: I don’t like to talk in terms of “fair” or “unfair” but I would like this to set a precedent that some teams chose to be intellectually honest and strictly respect the rules of the nomination to not drain OP from the total funding that could well go to teams that have been working on the OP Stack for a long time and in a real way.
That is why we only voted for those who HAD contributed. Anyway, we are happy that there is increasingly more enthusiasm and awareness in our region for the paradigm of public goods. From our side, we are fully available to work on criteria for the allocation of OP tokens and help projects manage their funds in the most efficient way.
We believe that the more voices there are, the more realities will be represented in web3. The ideation, creation, financing, and execution of public goods in Latam requires the commitment and promotion of all of us. So if you are from Latin America and want to join the discussion, we are waiting for you in our public goods channel on Discord. May the next RPGF find us better and more prepared. 
Click to join 
You can read all of this in Spanish here.
Muchas gracias 