A place for badgeholders to provide feedback on a series of anouncements providing more insight into Round 3. We will also be kicking off monthly community calls to collect feedback from badgeholders and conduct a series of small workshops as we prepare for Round 3. More details on calls to follow, for now please leave your feedback here.
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Hey thanks so much for making this thread. Two first questions would be:
- Is the set of badgeholders going to persist for round 3?
- Will the projects in retroPGF 2 automatically also participate in round 3? For some of them it would make sense for the reasons of continuity in funding.
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For question 2, In my opinion, all of the projects should be self nominate or was nominate again, there will be a sign up page for RetroPGF3.
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suggestion apart from feedback would also be great to hea on impact driven KPIs with learning every month for evaluation of success and new experiments and introspection.
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Badgeholders feedback is going to be important as they bring value also adding impact and KPI is equally important.
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Detailed experiment, only suggestion is posting clear impact driven KPIs with learning every month for evaluation of success and new experiments and introspection.
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- There will be a new set of badgeholders, made up of existing badgeholders and new additions. More details on that coming soon
- No, all projects who want to participate will need to sign-up for round 3
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It would be helpful to have guidelines on what constitutes a separate application if the work is done by the same parent org but involves different set of contributors.
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great Hope that it will come true!
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Hello fellow badgeholders! I wanted to start a conversation for feedback from this round so we can share our experiences and make improvements for the next round.
Too Many Projects
The biggest piece of feedback from the last round was that the volume of projects applying was overwhelming, but somehow this round we ended up with 6 times the amount of projects, so it feels like that piece of feedback wasnāt heard. Imo there needs to be some kind of barrier to entry for applicants, and not put the responsibility entirely on badge holders to review such an insane amount of projects, most of which are out of scope.
Lists
Lists are a great idea in theory but not in practice, which is the case with many things in governance. Thereās no level of expertise required to make a list, so weāre seeing a large amount of lists that include low impact projects which then highlights them to other badge holders. This is harmful because low impact projects receiving funding takes away from high value projects receiving funding that have actually contributed to the ecosystem in significant ways. There have been some useful aspects of lists, like I have personally looked at some of the technical lists. But overall, I think lists are more harmful than helpful.
Voting Experience
The voting experience this round has been slightly better, but I have a few pieces of feedback I shared with the agora team before voting started that I think could make it better
-have the ability to mark a project as seen or ādonāt put in ballotā option
-have the ability to allocate percentages as well as dollar amount
-get rid of the lists function
I was also under the impression that there were going to be tools incorporated into the voting experience, like what happened to Pairwise?
Summary
Really my biggest piece of feedback is that we need a way to filter projects applying so we donāt end up with over 600 projects again, most of which are low impact. I realize this is still very early stages for retro PGF but I am really disappointed in how this round is going and Iām hoping we can make some big improvements going forward.
I would love to hear the opinions and experiences of others so we can hopefully work together to make the experience better for badgeholders and applicants as well. Thank you for all of your hard work!
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We do see the pairwise tweet 
which categorizes the different projects but not sure 
if they filtered anything out based on quality. Pretty sure it includes everything that passed the review process.
There are also some interesting things happening in the OP discord chat 
for RetroPGF discussion surrounding a few projects that are in this round who are being called out for certain actions as a result of grant funding received from Optimism governance in the past.
I do remember some talk about Pairwise being used as a tool to help build lists. Not sure about the level of integration into Agora UI for round 3 but definitely wanted to point this out in case you might have missed it.
https://www.twitter.com/pairwisevote/status/1728096861167169559?s=46&t=_8dkepIOA6H5XhasVM4F9g
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If I had to give a single positive bit of feedback it would be that amount of effort being expended, the care people are taking in making votes, and the high level of discourse is really nice.
If I had to give a single negative bit of feedback it would be that it seems incomprehensible to me why there was not a question on the application form concerning VC funding. Clearly, this should be included. Especially if youāre asking for how much funding a project has received from grants. (And make it more clear that this only meant grants from the Optimism community, as Iāve seen someone say ā if thatās the case.) Iām not making a comment on whether or not VC funded projects should be included, just that you must ask for the number if youāre going to ask for grants. Itās very unfair otherwise.
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I feel you Katie.
As a RPGF apolicant, i have seen that few badge holders completely discarded The Optimist media and just added it back in their list cause i raise the interest.
Same feedback was given: Ooops we miss you out of the 600 projects
I feel that smaller projects are passing below the radar due to this.
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I think itās impossible to expect every badge holders to go through 600+ project and vote on them. Itās also quite impossible for a lesser known project to be voted on by enough badge holders for quorum. Last round was more fair for smaller or lesser known projects as there was no minimum vote requirement. The result would probably be only the most well known projects are funded that get the lionās share of the OP, while the majority of applicants get nothing or struggle to reach Quorum. I know there is 1 week left but for now itās not a great look.
Our project brought in 25k coinbase users and is being overlooked while some project that created game that no one plays can potentially be getting hundreds of thousands of OP.
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For RetroPGF3 Iād like to see:
- lists without values.
- vote of zero not count for quorum
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On Lists
Lists create recency bias by elevating whatever the creator decides to highlight. I have seen projects listed incorrectly where they do not belong, while others are completely neglected when deserving. A reputation system, or perhaps the ability for badgeholders to comment directly on applications would be far more constructive. The sheer number of applications (over 600) means that any list created will be prone to error.
On Ballots
There are plenty of deserving projects that have no visibility. I think the quorum is quite arbitrary and it is strange to see some meme projects and small blogs getting more ballots than heavy hitters in the industry. Many projects have resorted to shilling their applications on Discord and X. I think this is enigmatic of a wider visibility issue. I have heard people say that its early and all votes havenāt been casted but if youāre a smaller project you face the risk of not meeting quorum and their is an oppurtunity cost to doing nothingā¦ which is probably why there has been so much feedback
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Just to coin in here. I havenāt been on the forum in a bit because Iāve had a really hard year and the grieving process has taken a toll.
I agree with the points that RPGF needs improvements, but I also think it is important that we make strides toward the change we want to see instead of waiting for the change to happen.
As an applicant for this round, I am discouraged by the current results but I have faith we may meet quorum and that others will get the recognition they deserve as well, even if itās not this round.
One thing Iād like to point out, it takes courage to apply to any round or for any type of funding. For others itās easier, for those with charisma and marketing skills itās also easier.
Raising funds is simply not easy for everyone, but RPGF is meant to be accessible, not within arms reach and floated like a carrot.
We didnāt apply previously as we already donāt feel like we contribute enough compared to popular projects and known brands. Even though we dedicate 99% of our time and resources to developing open source and publicly accessible goods and services. (1% spent touching grass)
We made the decision not to apply for Round 2 and instead worked tirelessly and put our best efforts toward creating impactā knowing we would shoot for Round 3.
Now, RPGF feels skewed and personally, a bit like a popularity contest.
Since we started our project weāve put every dime we have toward building for the public and in public. It really does feel like at some point we should of tried harder to just raise capital and sell out. Instead, we have debt from borrowing and have actual overhead because our office space is open for the public and anyone can use it to access technology. And, we donāt ask for any money for providing a safe space to grow.
Iāve lost track of the number of people weāve helped within our community or green pilled with what it means to build in Web3. But, none of that has added up to anywhere near the āimpactā supposedly created by other projects.
Not sure, how many projects can claim their users are actually real? or that they interact with real people on a day to day and inform them of what Web3 really is? What is being built with blockchain and cryptography.
Not, āincentivesā in the form of token handouts because woah APR is high, let me deposit and farm 
Not sure how yield farming is really considered proof of impact aside from sequencer revenue getting compounded and then shovelled back into the farms. But MoAr TxNs. Unreal.
What about bank statements? Proof of Expenses etc.
Edit: Project didnāt make quorum.
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If contributions, regardless of their size, could be recognized and rewarded, that would be excellent. I donāt believe there should be contributions that are ignored. Currently, it seems that we only acknowledge major contributions.
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