I have mixed feelings…
–First and foremost, it’s sad that this was not voted on, at least part of it, by the Collective ( by the Citizen House). @lavande and co are designing one of the best and most exciting DAO experiments ever, now bicameral.
What’s the point of putting so much energy and care into decentralized Gov, if it’s for the Foundation to impose (practically) all the details of the RPGF for the coming year ? The foundation ‘announces’ the scope, the foundation ‘announces’ the budget (for round 4 and 5)…
I feel like these unilateral announcements are taking us back in time, as if the Collective needed to add extra training wheels (and not, on the contrary, gradually removing them …) I personally believe we now have the tools and the community to do it differently.
–After round 3, there were loud voices saying that education, onboarding, conferences, evangelism, was all but grifting, scammy, etc… These voices have been listened to. Those contributions seems to be explicitly excluded from retro funding.
It will be very interesting to see how Superchain specific educators (the very impactful ones like @Th3Optimist ), conference organizers, ambassadors, will evolve with this.
Will they solicit grants as the foundation hopes (with a one-year lock-in period)? Will they turn to other means of funding (Sponsorship, ads, paywall,
etc…) ?
Beyond the sustainability of existing projects (which, let’s recognize, have been well funded in previous rounds), it’s especially the disappearance of this incentive to attract the next talented educators that saddens me a bit.
I think this category of contributions deserved at least ONE experiment during a specific dedicated Round, even a mini-round, to attempt to do better than in RPGF3.
– I’m also a bit disappointed that this very big RPGF announcement was not matched by a sign of opening and inclusion by announcing, for example, new criteria for citizenship.
This would have brought a bit of decentralization flavor and balanced this top-down announcement.
– But to end on a positive note, the post details the new types of impact evaluation mechanisms (metrics Vs Impact jury) which really constitutes a big plus, I am very curious about the practical implementation.
And very honestly, I remain optimistic about receiving my citizenship one day and being able to participate in this RPGF process.