Hard to think I have anything to add here given the astonishing amount of feedback here. I’m just thinking that Optimism itself is having such a huge impact that Optimism itself should be the biggest recipient of impact grants! Amazing work in building a community that cares.
Random brain dump
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There is WAY too much work to be a “good” badgeholder. I’ve felt guilty since the start because I don’t have the time to do what I feel like I’m supposed to do. Perhaps there could be an explicit “Minimum Expected Behaviour” checklist. “If you do X, Y, and Z, you’re an amazing badgeholder…if you do more you’re beyond amazing.” As it is, I suspect most badgeholders feels they didn’t do enough.
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Lists are counter productive. I feel that lists almost certainly lead to group think, winner-take-all, and allow badgeholders to be lazy. Plus, it’s very unclear how lists work. Are they just a list of things I might be interested in? Is there a button that say, “vote for all items on this list?” If yes, what happens if I do that for two lists? If no, how are lists useful? People used the amounts on lists in two ways that I’m aware of – in some cases they assigne the same amount of all items on the list (signaling that the list was informative only) and in some cases the amount differ indicating a value judgement. Confusing to have both types without a disctiction.
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There’s no built in coordination among badgeholders. Each badgeholder is “on their own” in the sense that I can’t really see what other badgeholders are thinking (other than through reading tons of forum posts or getting spammed by shillers). We should allow the badge holders to coordinate more. Randome sub-groups of badgeholders could be assinged random groups of projects to answer simple questions such as “estimated impact score” or “is public good?” or “is VC funded?” This information could be collected in a pre-round round and perhaps you could reward through a small stipend badgeholders for doing this process.
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Better identification of VC funded projects. It’s my belief that no VC funded project is actually building a public good. It’s just clear common sense and obvious.
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Ask for VC funding in the project applicaiton – if you’re going to ask for grant funding, you must ask for VC funding. There’s no legitimate argument for not doing that.
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Don’t use 30,000,000 OP on the voting forms. Each badge holder is voting 30,000,000 OP and that is being “scaled up” into 30,000,000 “real” OP tokens is very confusing. Make it so each badgeholder is voting 1,000,000 votes or something. In other words, separate the two concents of votes and OP tokens. Using 30,000,000 for each and calling them the same thing is confusing.
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Only do rounds once per year. Make the rounds longer. One thing GitCoin did very wrong (in my opinion) is the quarterly frequency with their rounds. It became a full-time job to keep up with the rounds. This kills small projects who do not have the people to spend the time. It also TOTALLY kills the donors. It causes donor fatigue to always have to ask them for donations. Less rounds is better. Once per year is good. Quarterly suck.
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This is just an idea: create some sort of “sanctioned” project showcase put on my devoted people from inside the Optimism community. Once a week, feature two or three projects. Perhaps all year long. Make a podcast. Allow the projects 15 minutes discussion time with meaningful answers. Create content that can be linked to from the application. Select projects to include in the podcast by a rigerous process that ignores all things but open-sourcedness, public-goodness, impactfulness.