As a first time badgeholder, I found it very meaningful to participate in such a wholesome and innovative governance structure. My favourite part was learning about all the projects that have been impacting the ecosystem! I see so much potential, but at the same time I found it quite overwhelming at times. Some specific feedback below:
This round was too big. It needs more facilitation or needs to be broken down
~640 projects, 30m OP, ~150 badgeholders. With the only formal coordination being Lists, it was extremely overwhelming. I fear that only a few badgeholders did deep dives and created lists and the majority of badgeholders relied on lists. By doing this, we are not harnessing the full potential and diversity of our badgeholders pool.
There are many potential solutions for this:
- Break rpgf into smaller rounds with a more clear focus. I think smaller projects would benefit a lot from this.
- Intentionally divide and conquer. Divide the projects into subcategories and then divide the badgeholders into small working groups (by expertise and/or interest). Each working group can tackle 1 or 2 subcategories. Ensure that each category is covered by 2+ working groups to ensure we get multiple opinions. This ensures ALL projects get fairly looked at. Each working group can then post their lists and rationale. This will encourage intentional collaboration and discussion amongst badgeholders. It will give us all a thorough, comprehensive, and diverse collection of opinions to base our individual votes on. It will also make the process less overwhelming because you can focus on a smaller subset of projects, knowing that collectively we will do justice to all the projects.
Voting Mechanics
Not everyone allocated 30m OP. However, this means that those who allocate the full 30m have more of an influence on the outcome. If the goal is to allocate 30m OP, than people’s votes should be scaled to 30m if they allocated less (or there should be an option to do that on the voting app). However, if the goal is to allocate whatever feels appropriate (up to 30m) given the submissions, then I think using the votes as is (regardless of the total allocated is sensible).
Same goes for the quorum of 17. I think it would be better to decide what the quorum should be after the fact so that it doesn’t impact people’s votes too much. Especially since some badgeholders didn’t vote.
VC Funded Projects
This was quite a conflicting topic this round. That being said, VC funded projects do deserve recognition and perhaps even some rpgf funding. However, grouping these with the other projects made it hard to figure out how to distribute funds fairly between teams with funding and teams without. If the goal is to reward impact retroactively (and create a positive feedback loop that encourages teams to strive for more impact), I think it’s important to make sure the lesser known teams without VC funding get prioritized. This would be much simpler if we had two different rounds (one for VC-funded organizations and one for bootstrapped orgs).
Communication on Telegram
It was overwhelming to follow the communication in Telegram. A simple solution would be different topics for different types of comms. An announcements channel for critical information from the organizers, a channel for lists, a channel for philosophical discussions on public goods, etc.
** Badgeholder Expectations**
As discussed by others here, I think the expectation of 5-10 hours was far too low. It took significantly more time to do justice to the projects (and even then I felt like I should have done more). A more facilitated process could reduce the work everyone does while ensuring we have a more effective outcome.