SEED Latam - Delegate Communication Thread

Sharing my thoughts on the citizen house and public goods

Finally the Citizen House has been announced for its first iteration. As we know, since its inception it has been thought to focus on the idea of funding public goods, as a way to potentially contribute to the future of the internet and free software, where Optimism and Ethereum are immersed.

As a second iteration of RPGF, the amount allocated by the foundation has been 10m OP ($9m today), and it will be focused on Optimism and its new release OP Stack, although it would be desirable if it’s also accompanied by Public Goods built for Ethereum base layer. Anyways, it’s also understandable that starting with public goods that help Optimism itself and not beyond is easier to align incentives and take note of lessons learned before being ambitious and later broading scope.

LATAM and public goods for Ethereum

In this part of the so-called “third world”, the Internet has always remained relatively distant or under the radar of a good part of Western and Eastern capitalism, mainly in finance. Coupled with our political and economic particulars, it explains why free software initiatives have been relevant, and most notably, Ethereum.

The role of Latin America for the Ethereum ecosystem has been important, as it happens in other regions. Despite the average low income, the masterminds have been at the start, in the formation of by example OpenZeppelin, MakerDAO, Hardhat, Flashbots, Decentraland and many other projects, not to make a long list. Different generations of builders have been contributing to the ecosystem and the different Ethereum communities in this region have accompanied and nurtured to impact Ethereum for good, including DeFi LATAM, with a remarkable degree of sophistication, recognized by Vitalik.

Funding in Latin America is not easy to find, but fortunately the region has had access to these new mechanisms to build public goods such as having its own category in the Gitcoin Grants rounds, and Quadratic Funding in recent times such as:

  • Ethereum TGU Grants (12444 USD)
  • EthLatam BA (25000 USD)
  • EthColombia (292300 USD)

More than sixty projects have benefited, including open source contributions, communities and projects that try to solve problems in Latin America. In the process, many members of the ecosystem here have gained enormous experience on how to understand the proposed objectives, the selection process, voting, and how to improve it for future rounds. Our community members have been voters, applicants and even developers of some of these.

There are several members of the Ethereum ecosystem in our region that I think could also contribute to the process in a significant way with direct experience in said rounds (in the same order) such as crisgarner.eth, @CryptoChica and juandav.eth; but also others like Mariano Conti, @Gonna.eth and @NicoProducto. My suggestion is that if any badge holder (elected by OF or by snapshot) wishes to nominate a person with a focus on this geographic location, my suggestion is on these persons.

The values of this delegation and a wish list

I must thank @kaereste for nominating this delegation (and @lefterisjp for keeping an eye out that we had a nomination), very excited by this. Elected or not, I will be looking closely at all infrastructure proposals with some priority as it is the key before building novel things on top of any form of Optimism.

Again, the objectives of this RPGF are clear: to help Optimism and its OP Stack in their degree of sophistication as a competitive framework that developers prefer to use over others. Some interesting things to see are communication between OP chains, consensus mechanisms for them, new L2 clients of Optimism and focused on being the most optimized possible, infrastructure to enable other data availability schemes, VMs and innovative fraud proof systems, and of course, true education initiatives without value extraction to attract more developers and users to Optimism. Additionally, if any initiative is also matchable for the development of the Ethereum base layer in some way, it would be considered as a plus and not to be ignored.

Lastly, although it’s not detailed yet, we expect Citizen House to have their own chat channels open prior to the launch of RPGF 2, including allowing them to iterate the process if there’s anything worth tweaking prior to the round. Excited for what’s to come!

Happy Citizen House!

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About Badgeholder Nomination Voting

A total of 19 delegates were nominated to be part of Citizen House for this second iteration of RPGF. Regarding the voting decision, I have decided this time to receive an opinion from our main contributors about who could be the 10 most suitable for this round. It’s definitely not an easy task because all the nominees have demonstrated commitment to Optimism ecosystem and governance, and experience in public goods.

As a result, the following people who we have voted for and who we believe can truly contribute to this next iteration are: Linda Xie, Bobbay (vía Stablenode), Lefteris, OPUser, Polynya, Scott Moore, Dhannte, Minimal Gravitas, Kris Kraczor and Jack Anorak.

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As promised, we have decided to distribute a total of 2,000 OP tokens to our participants in governance calls throughout the year, being our first community airdrop. This was never intended until the announcement of the retractive rewards for Season 1 and 2. As a result, it allowed us to do a very simple fair distribution among those who listened and discussed our decision making for Optimism.

The rules were: have claimed at least 2 POAPs from our governance calls (out of a total of 8 editions).

A total of 35 eligible, under the following distribution and by number of addresses:

  • 8 POAPs = 120 OP (2)
  • 7 POAPs = 95 OP (3)
  • 6 POAPs = 85 OP (2)
  • 5 POAPs = 75 OP (3)
  • 4 POAPs = 60 OP (1)
  • 3 POAPs = 50 OP (6)
  • 2 POAPs = 40 OP (18)

*This excludes all 13 contributors between DeFi LATAM and Optimism Español.

These distributions and others can be followed watching my ENS, being also our delegation address (joxes.eth or joxes.defilatam.eth).

Optimistic Holidays!

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ICYMI – we’re postulating to Grants Council for Season 3 in Growth Experiment Sub Committee. An interesting thing, we’re proposing participate as a group, with Joxes (me) as leader and responsible to the vacant, but working as a group composed by 4 contributors.

Read our entire proposal here: Grant Council Reviewer Nominations - #7 by DeFi_LATAM_Joxes

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And, yes! Happy new year 2023! :tada:

The last year we have publishing all our activities, and this year we’re keep doing the same and making things better. So, this Monday 01/16 we had our 9th Governance Call in DeFi LATAM in collaboration with Optimism Español to discuss the proposals of this special #9b voting cycle.

As a reminder, we continue to improve internally the way our contributors and rest of our community reach consensus on decision making within the Optimism Collective.

Participants: +40 attendees. Duration 1hs 40min. As always, many thanks to our contributor Pacha for the design of these POAP series.

Our voting procedure and rational

Our evaluation was shared among the contributors and then taken to the community to reach a consensus among the enthusiasts of the OP ecosystem.

Protocol Delegation Elections

We have decided to vote for the following 8 protocols as most voted:

  • ENS
  • BeethovenX & Balancer
  • Connext
  • Paraswap
  • Li. Fi
  • QiDao Protocol
  • Revert
  • 2Pi Network

These are a mix of protocols of which the community in some way reflects a preference regarding usability, appreciation or recognized builders behind it.

Grants Council Elections - Growth Experiments

After a great debate about some considerations, mainly because our application to this council sub-committee, we have decided to vote 5 of most properly candidates:

  • @fig: his contributions to the ecosystem and expertise were well valued as The Optimist Score, as well as his trajectory.

  • @Bobbay_StableLab: their good level of participation and experience as a group (StableNode) and working with other protocols/DAOs. Bobbay has reproduced this for Optimism governance.

  • @GFXlabs: in the same line, this group has been in DeFi with a large experience in DAOs and helping to build and grow protocols.

  • @katie: good commitment and highly recognized in the space for her contributions. Expertise is also well known.

  • Joxes | DeFi LATAM: we’re generally against voting for ourselves (even before code of coduct was established), leaving the rest of governance to faithfully express their preferences for us, as by example in committee and badger holders elections. In this case OP foundation allowed the applicant delegates to vote for themselves as long as we chose 4 others and the community agreed to take this step. It should be noted that some of our contributors didn’t fully agree with this.

Grants Council Elections - Builders

Regarding Builders, the community followed up with a good debate to choose the best 3 candidates, resulting in voting for:

  • @Gonna.eth: several community members acknowledge Gonna.eth (Dhannte) and their work on EthernautDAO, we believe that he is ideal for this work.
  • @kaereste: seems as a natural fit for this work also, well recognized in the community for his work on L2beat.
  • @jackanorak and @OPUser: there was a technical tie for 3rd place. We see in Jack as likely to strongly contribute in this council based on expertise in protocols and analytics, demonstrated here in governance. In the other hand, we worked with OPUser in DeFi C committee and continues to maintain a longstanding dedication to governance, vision, and product. Without a clear consensus, we voted for both.

Final thoughts

Season 3 will be quite different than previous iterations of Optimism governance. Council will occupy efforts that will no longer be the direct responsibility of the full set of OP delegates as was the case last year.With the new approach for grants, let’s see how the new council and foundation can improve the system of delivery of funds to reduce the waste of resources and increase the impact with short periods of time to guarantee the growth of the Optimism ecosystem.

Optimistic optimism!

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Hello all!

This March 17th we held our 10th Governance Call in Discord to discuss about the RPGF2, the process and voting approach in community.

Participants: +30 attendees (32 :medal_military:collected; special thanks again to Pacha for the design).

Duration: 1hs 53min.

Recap

In this occasion we meet to discuss everything about the RPGF 2 and from the participation of SEEDLatam through joxes.eth as bagdeholder. To do this, we cover the following topics:

  • What is RPGF
  • Current scope of RPGF 2
  • Experience of the onboarding and process as bagdeholder
  • How is the voting process
  • Reviewing some projects
  • How to vote in the SEEDLatam poll

We were fortunate to have team members with Spanish-speaking members such as Proof of Integrity, web3beach, ETH México, Bankless DAO & Academy, WakeUp Labs, etc. We reviewed their applications, what they are doing and questions were answered. Very positive discussion.

We launched our snapshot page to experiment with community decision-making. Our snapshot page here.

In this occasion, we decided to grant the decision to allocate 20% of the voting power as bagdeholder for RPGF 2 in the hands of the community. You can check all the details in our voting rationale below. Please read.

We hope that our experience is useful for the collective and we look forward to see the results and what we learned in this round with the rest of the bagdeholders.

Happy Retro!

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Hello OP users!

This April 4th we held our 11th Governance Call in Discord to discuss about proposals in this cycle 11, related to Bedrock and FractalVisions suspension proposals.

Participants: +50 attendees (49 :medal_military:collected; special thanks again to Pacha for the design).

Duration: 1hs 26min.

Voting procedure

As usual, we conducted a 1 person 1 vote procedure with the participants of the governance call. The discussion about it in both proposals was fruitful and there was a lot of debate, mainly in the suspension of FractalVisions. Consensus is reached with the option preferred by the majority.

Results and rationale

Below our decisions and rational. Please read our post published in each related thread.

  • Upgrade Proposal: Bedrock v2 - YES
  • Delegate Suspension: Fractal Visions - YES

Bedrock is coming!

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Hi all! :red_circle:

Season 4 is coming up and we have spent time reviewing the possible governance changes and giving our first impressions from the internal team of this SEED LATAM delegation.

Summary and inspiring words

About the Collective Intents

About Token House Missions


:date: We’re going to make our next governance call this coming Monday, May 1 at 9pm UTC in our SEED LATAM discord. If you understand/can speak spanish and want to participate in the discussion about everything that is coming up for Season 4, we are open to discuss and share ideas together. Open invitation to all. More about the details and formal announcement of this governance call soon.

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Thx Fren, ill try to get to the call :smiley:

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Is there an Istanbul or Turkish community?

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hey @thinking may be @arabianhorses could help you.

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Hello OP users!

This May 1st we held our 12th Governance Call in Discord in collaboration with Optimism Español to discuss about proposals in this cycle 12, all of these related to the upcoming season 4.

Participants: +50 attendees (48 :medal_military:collected; special thanks again to Pacha for the design).

Duration: 1hs 34min.

Voting procedure

We had the opportunity to welcome @Pumbi as a new member of the Optimism Español team, who helped us with a review about the upcoming Season 4. As usual, Joxes as a delegate expressed his views regarding this new scope for governance, and we conducted a 1 person 1 vote procedure with the participants of the governance call.

Results and rationale

Our initial opinions were published in the last post. Please read our post published in each related thread. This was retified by the community members, so the decision made has been:

  • Intent #1 Budget Proposal: Yes
  • Intent #2 Budget Proposal: Yes
  • Intent #3 Budget Proposal: Yes
  • Intent #4 Budget Proposal: Yes
  • Protocol Delegation Program Renewal: Yes

For season 4, we have also ratified our participation as a group, with @Joxes as the leader and our three contributors from season 1 and 2: @AxlVaz @Netrim and @Jadmat.


Yes! Bedrock is coming! :red_circle: :tada:

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Hello, Joxes. This is a test. New profile here! Trying not to get our account suspended :slight_smile:
We will soon publish a recap of this first year of participation in Optimism Governance.

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Last week we celebrated the first anniversary of Delegate Joxes’ platform in Optimism’s governance!

A year ago, Joxes brought this platform to life and assumed its leadership with the support of the community. During this time, we have been dedicated to contributing to the growth of Optimism in Latin America, and we are proud of the achievements made.

https://twitter.com/SEEDLatam/status/1660785678462902274/photo/1

Our journey has been filled with valuable lessons and rewarding experiences.

Let’s take a moment to recollect:

It all started with the launch of Optimism’s governance and our introduction in the delegate commitment.

From the start, on the platform, we aimed to improve governance organization through efficient processes, clear workflows, and effective communication.

First season

We dedicated our efforts to enhancing governance, working on process dating and strengthening communication among members. Our proposals and discussions in the governance threads reflect our commitment and dedication in this regard.

The first governance call took place on July 6th. It was an exciting moment where we had the opportunity to connect with other community members and share our ideas and perspectives on the future of Optimism.

Second season

We joined the Tooling & Infrastructure and DeFi C committees, where we reviewed funding proposals for projects aimed at fueling the Optimism ecosystem. Throughout the months of September, October, and November, we worked diligently on these tasks with the goal of supporting the growth and development of the platform.

We achieved a significant milestone in December by receiving 16,695 OP tokens as recognition for our work in Optimism’s governance!

We distributed these tokens among our collaborators and the community. It was a retroactive airdrop to reward those who attended the calls. This milestone not only showcases the transparency but also the importance we place on active participation and collaboration.

https://twitter.com/SEEDLatam/status/1605973257219211264/photo/1

Moreover, Joxes was chosen by the governance as a badgeholder in the RPGF2, also nominating another distinguished member of the Latin American community, CryptoChica. This opportunity enabled us to actively engage in the allocation of 10 million OP tokens, thereby making a valuable contribution to the growth and fortification of Optimism.

The platform was created with the purpose of engaging in Optimism’s governance and giving voice to Latin America.

n response to the need for a close delegate who represents the interests of the region, we took on this commitment responsibly, guided by our core values of decentralization, transparency, and always prioritizing the users. Our main goal is to ensure the development of Optimism and contribute to the open-source ecosystem and public goods.

We are aware of the importance of participating in governance and embrace that role with a committed and active community. This hard work is reflected in:

  • 12 governance calls
  • 100% participation in formal proposals
  • 18,945 received OP tokens
  • 925 delegating addresses

Our delegate, Joxes, leads a team of three dedicated collaborators: Axlvaz, Netrim , and Jadmat. They work tirelessly to amplify the voice of the Latin American community within Optimism’s governance.

As we gaze into the future, we have ambitious goals for 2023. We aim to further strengthen Optimism’s governance, promote active community participation, and foster Ethereum adoption in the Latin American region.

Living the experience of participating in Optimism’s governance for a whole year gave us the background to embark on two more new governances. Thanks to each and every member of the forum!

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Hello all community members!

Le’ts recap some of our lastest activities:

13th Governance Call

As usual in our Discord channel we held a new governance call to discus the voting cycle 12b. This was the last round for the upcoming season 4.

Participants: +40 attendees (38 :medal_military:collected; special thanks again to Pacha for the design).

Duration: 1hs 19min.

Results

  • Inflation Adjustment Proposal: For
  • Treasury Appropriation (Foundation Year 2 Budget Approval): Against
  • Council Reviewer Elections: Builders Grants: Gonna.eth, Krzysztof Urbanski (kaereste or krst), Oxytocin.
  • Council Reviewer Elections: Growth Experiments Grants: Katie Garcia, GFX, StableLab, Michael Vander Meiden, DAOStewards.

Ecosystem updates

In recent weeks, we have accompanied other organizations in the ecosystem in Latam to carry out different activities to bring the vision of Optimism and its technology together and that we want to share:


Bedrock! Bedrock! Bedrock!

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Hi governance and community members!

With season 4 and the launch of the missions, the SEED Latam delegation team is working on revising the mission proposals. For this we have joined forces once and we are counting on the help of @AxlVaz, @CryptoChica, @Jadmat and @Netrim to tackle our duties at the proposals in the forum.

Providing feedback and comments

The number of proposals and the expected impact for this first wave of missions is high, we will take the evaluation and compliance with the criteria of each proposal very seriously, leaving the pertinent comments and questions, and finely analyzing the requirements prior to any approval to move to vote. For it:

  • Complete review of the structure of the proposal - meet requirements
  • The funds requested and spending plan - should be reasonable
  • Reasonable metrics - scope with respect to what is desired by the mission scope

What to analyze first?

As delegates, we received several requests for a review of missions carried out by Latin American projects. In order to be fair in our procedures, we will review all the proposals carried out in this region and address them only and completely in public without preferences. We hope to use our degree of involvement in the Ethereum ecosystem in Latam to reconcile the best interest of Optimism and the benefit of the community in the region.

Immediately after that, we’ll address the rest of the proposals according to our expertise until the last day of tracking the approvals and then moving forward with the proposals approve a vote, of course.


Ready for adventure? optimistic forever

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Hi community!

In this new post we’re going to cover our lastest work in the governance, mainly regarding to the cycle-13.


1) 14th Governance Call

As usual in our Discord channel we held the lastest governance call (July 11) to discuss the voting cycle 13. This voting cycle was concerned to vote on mission proposals.

Participants: ~50 attendees (46:medal_military: collected)

Duration: 3hs 26min.

a) Preparation

For this cycle, we continue our work as a team analyzing the 31 proposals approved for voting. At the same time, we prepared a poll in our SEED Latam snapshot where the attendees of the governance calls could vote for preferred options, taking as a reference the explanation provided during the call.

Consensus rules:

  • Voting system: approval voting.
  • Elegible members: POAP holders.
  • Delegate vote for if: the proposal achieves at least 30% approval in participation.

b) Discussion

Each proposal had an average of 5.47 minutes (thanks Vetefe for the analysis) to explain and discuss its key points, advantages and disadvantages. Each of our collaborators in the delegation took ownership of the speech and let the community issue an opinion in some cases.

On this occasion, we had the presence of members of various Alliances, mostly based in Latin America, such as Criptoversidad, Solow, HER LATAM, Ethereum Mexico. They had the opportunity to present their proposal and answer questions for the community.

Additionally, we had the pleasure of having @brichis, a new OP delegate based in Latin America, who had a space to express her opinion and raise the discussion.

c) Results

Based on our Snapshot poll, the SEED Latam delegation voted for the following proposals:


2) Season 4: first retrospective

The introduction of the missions introduced a new mechanism for paid contributions by governance in a work fist and get paid manner. The introduction of the missions introduced a new mechanism for paid contributions by governance in a pay-for-work manner. For this, four different verticals were decided, called “intents” to address specific needs expressed by the Collective or completely proposed by third-party teams. Here we want to express a condensation of thoughts that arose during cycle 13 that is orthogonal to different proposals or in the processes in which this opportunity was carried out.

I) Intent 3: very impact-dependent, less about the actual product

Due to the nature of this scope of the intent and resulting proposals, we saw how difficult is to evaluate the final product and the effectiveness of the features in fulfilling their “functionalities”, being anchored to the wait for results by KPIs to check even the usefulness of the mission. It means that it is possible that the objectives are met but even so the funding has been misallocated.

II) Intent 3: too much for users, not enough for Builders

There is a saturation of proposals related to education in terms of expected audiences, which potentially overlap in the regular case (not many new users are benefited from these initiatives but they do have a wide reach among the existing community). Particular case of Latam, with 5 proposals, 4 of them with clear connections to each other, and therefore, a similar starting point before reaching a wider public.

On the other hand, there is a lack of initiatives to educate new developers as future builders of real applications in Optimism. This is a pity and an unwanted situation since it means a lack of investment in real use cases for Optimism, the only way to stay competitive and grow steadily in number of users and activity. Intent 2 still contributing in this aspect with the builder sub-committee, but introducing new developers from zero to hero still being great to have.

III) Intent 3 & 4: effectiveness density vs time, battling obsolescence

One of the most frequently asked aspects is the commitment to prolong the final product once the mission period has ended. While this condition applies to all intents, the evolving nature of governance and change in its design and ecosystem is even more noticeable in educational materials and content. On several occasions there is no evidenced commitment to address this fact (and it is natural that this is the case), but it should be taken into account to maximize the benefits of missions with more explicitly aligned collaborators in the long term and not just waiting for the next retroPGF.

IV) All intents: need for OP distribution doesn’t imply suboptimal allocations

From the last voting cycle with the ratification of the budget, the distribution of the OP token didn’t reach the one stipulated for the Foundation budget. We understand the importance in the circulation of the OP token to make it more liquid, distributed and usable by more users for governance purposes, however, among delegates we should take care of the treasure, no matter the amount, from any possible grant farming intention, lessons learned of the first and second seasons of Optimism in 2022.

V) Reflection: how to increase the efforts on uniqueness

Ultimately, governance coordination is looking for ways to encourage differentiation between proposals and building real products. Governance needs to provide a better incentive base to avoid incentive gaming between Missions and retroPGF: more review time, incentivized delegates to curation tasks from earlier stages.


3) Multichain delegation case

Due to recent events regarding Multichain, we are trying to open a discussion about what to do in cases like these as part of the protocol delegation program.


A special thanks to all our direct contributors @AxlVaz, @CryptoChica, @Jadmat, @Netrim and rest of our community for all the support.

More optimistic than ever!

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Thanks for this fantastic analysis and yup, here it’s something that we all noted, and a future advise to decentralize our own projects.
We continue being the same people in the same conferences, let’s take our country’s broader and coordination stronger.

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We have posted an analysis about the delegate participation, current workload and incentives, highlighting the need for better mechanisms to increase the number of participants and diversity of voices.

A shared effort by our team @AxlVaz, @CryptoChica, @Jadmat, Joxes and @Netrim.

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Hi OP community!

In this post we’re going to recap what we did this week around the cycle 14.


15th Governance Call

The past monday Discord channel we held a new governance call to discuss the voting cycle 14, specifically a proposal made by the Grants Council requesting a new budget for the Intent 2.

Participants: ~40 attendees (31 :medal_military: collected)

Duration: 1hr 29min.

Results and rationale

After a great summary provided by @Gonna.eth during the call, we had a complete picture about the current state of the Grants Council and motivations for the proposal. Finally we voted for.

Welcome to Base

The announcement of Base into the Superchain is a game changer and positive addition for the Optimism ecosystem. This deal and commitment assumed by Base to, among other things, participate in governance, is also an important point of consideration. Jesse Pollak has requested comments on how Base will participate in Governance; and we have responded as below:

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