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 “well known projects” and then “well known projects” 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.
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Identify project that I won’t be voting for due to already existing funding through VCs or token raises. Allocate 0% to those projects.
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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.
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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.