[WITHDRAWN] - Helping Delegates and Badgeholders Create More Value through Collective Sharing

Mission Grants šŸ¹
1

S5 Intent:

Intent 4: Improve Governance Accessibility

Proposing Delegate:

Oxytocin (ParaSwap)

Proposal Tier:

Eagle Tier

Baseline grant amount:

190,000 OP in total

  • Up to 150,000 OP distributed to mission contributors
  • Up to 40,000 OP distributed to service provider, covering tech, integrations, and support

Should this Delegate Mission be fulfilled by one or multiple applicants:

One

Submit by:

To be set by Grants Council

Selection by:

To be set by Grants Council

Start date:

TBD

Completion date:

July 31st, 2024

How will this Delegate Mission Request help accomplish the above Intent?

Delegates and badgeholders are responsible for making decisions about how best to allocate OP in support of the future of our ecosystem. Yet we donā€™t have adequate resources to help us understand the value and impact of different proposals, and best vote on allocations.

This mission request is to incentivize our greater Optimism community to build infrastructure and content that helps us better perform our roles. By incentivizing our community to help us, and validating / rewarding when they do, we will do better work, create more value, and improve our governance.

Hereā€™s how it works:

  1. Delegates and badgeholders will clarify our most important support needs.
  2. Mission Contributors will be incentivized to contribute projects that address those needs
  3. Projects will be validated upon value creation and rewarded for their contributions.

Please explain alignment with the relevant Intent:

The Collective wants to prioritize accessibility to create governance structures that welcome a broad range of Optimists to participate, including new delegates and badgeholders. Accessibility, specifically, means making it feasible for smart, dedicated people to efficiently, and effectively do our jobs.

The biggest blocker to better governance is not desire. People want to help. It is making it easy for top people to help. This mission will clear barriers for existing and new talent to support, and to provide better support. Example of support needs might include:

  • Due diligence connected to mission proposals, rPGF, and more
  • Follow up data on how previous funding has created impact
  • Forming working groups to improve coordination and communication

What is required to execute this Delegate Mission Request?

We need feedback from delegates and badgeholders about the biggest needs and opportunities for content creation. We will get this via an engagement survey + follow up conversations.

We need technology and support to share, validate contributions, rewards, and attest on-chain, as well as a page to summarize and aggregate the content.

Please list responsibilities and/or expected deliverables:

  • Delegate and badgeholder feedback
  • Display of various sets of contribution activities to the Optimism community
  • Enabling people and teams to commit to contribution activities
  • Automating validations at various stages of value creation
  • Rewarding contributors with OP and attesting to all contributions on-chain
  • Onboarding delegates and badgeholders to support infrastructure and content

How should the Token House measure progress towards this Mission?

  • Before/after delegate and badgeholder ratings on ease of performing governance responsibilities
  • Number of projects committed to and completed to support badgeholders and delegates

How should badgeholders measure impact upon completion of this Mission?

  • Improvement in governance accessibility index
  • Improvement in NPS of all delegates and badgeholders

Have you engaged a Grant-as-a-service provider for this Mission Request?

Yes. We have engaged ThriveCoin - they supported the Ambassador deployment in Season 4, which far exceeded critical milestones. They also support ApeCoin, Arbitrum, and other communities at scale.

Has anyone other than the Proposing Delegate contributed to this Mission Request?

Yes. Daniel Jacobs (thrivegiraffe) and Senad Dilji (senad.eth) contributed. They introduced and brainstormed this idea with me and other delegates. It reflects a clear need, and I feel comfortable they can execute on it after their successes with Ambassadors in Mission 4.

4 Likes
2

Hi @Oxytocin, thanks for this proposal!

Itā€™s difficult for me to understand what the specific, start-to-finish initiative is and what the concrete deliverables are. Mission Requests are not meant to support ongoing services or broad scopes of work.For example, the three examples listed below would require three separate Mission Requests:

  • Due diligence connected to mission proposals, rPGF, and more
  • Follow up data on how previous funding has created impact
  • Forming working groups to improve coordination and communication

*Additional note that the Collective very intentionally supports work via Missions and not working groups, as this model as failed at most other DAOs.

Looking at some of the suggestions here, it sounds like this could be de-scoped and refined to support research on the types of contributions the community finds valuable, suggestions as to how to validate those contributions with attestations, and then possibly a short implementation pilot.

The Tier to fulfill this request seems quite high.

3 Likes
4

Thank you for submitting your proposal.

I strongly agree with Lavande here, and this comes from someone who used to complain about the lack of knowledge, documentation, processes, and a well-defined framework for delegates and the collective to share information via a feedback loop. However, this does not exist anymore; a major workload is being handled through the grant council, community calls, demo-day, and the gov-channel is active with quality conversations happening there. This season brings other commissions online (anti-capture, CoC, and others), which will solve other existing challenges.

Correct me if I am wrong, but if the intent was designed to solve a problem, it must have a goal, which seems to be missing here, or at least itā€™s not clear to me.

This is not related to your proposal specifically, but at this stage of governance, the goal should be scaling, which wonā€™t happen just by asking for feedback from a few delegates; we need hypotheses and PoCs backed by academic research.

5

Hi OPUser, great feedback. I believe Lavande and I are generally aligned as well. Iā€™ve connected with Oxytocin and made change suggestions based on your feedback and Lavandeā€™s. Thank you. Additionally, I have a few clarification responses to your thoughts.

The goal of the mission request is to provide delegates and badgeholders with diligence and support infrastructure that can help efficiency and effectiveness with moving through hundreds and hundreds of applications.

I would love to kindly push you on this. Optimism is absolutely taking important strides to solve this problem. But it still exists (because itā€™s a really hard problem to solve).

In the last rPGF, as an example, badgeholders had to review over 600 applications. They had access to only basic diligence around the applications. Examples of important information they didnā€™t have: How accurate were the proposals (e.g. fact checking)? What was the impact created for the broader web3 ecosystem? What is a framework for standardizing considerations of impact?

Without the tools or content to quickly understand this information and more, delegates and badgeholders have had to either do an impossible amount of research themselves or make suboptimal decisions with asymmetrical information. This mission is proposing to make more efficient (and scale) the process of getting the tools and content to badgeholders and delegates that are needed to make better decisions.

I agree. I am not the submitting delegate for the proposal, but I did support the conceptualizing (and can help to improve and clarify based on your and lavandeā€™s important feedback). FWIW my own contributions to the thinking around this proposal have scale as one of the biggest considerations.

Hereā€™s the work weā€™ve done with Optimism addressing an adjacent problem for Ambassadors. Weā€™ve also supported ApeCoin, Arbitrum, and others at scale addressing adjacent problems. We started with PoCs and academic research, but at this point we also have supportive data from large-scale deployments.

Thanks again for your feedback, and for helping to improve this proposal!

1 Like
6

Iā€™ve got a bit of feedback generally on what appear to be underlying assumptions here but at minimum this seems underspecified.

How is any of this expected to improve outcomes?

Delegate and badgeholder feedback

Already being collected internally to Foundation and reverberating basically everywhere

Display of various sets of contribution activities to the Optimism community

What does this mean

Enabling people and teams to commit to contribution activities

Or this

Automating validations at various stages of value creation

Or this

Rewarding contributors with OP and attesting to all contributions on-chain

So pay badgeholders? community? team?

Onboarding delegates and badgeholders to support infrastructure and content

This appears to be in support of the other deliverables.

And, finally:

  1. Delegates and badgeholders will clarify our most important support needs.
  2. Mission Contributors will be incentivized to contribute projects that address those needs
  3. Projects will be validated upon value creation and rewarded for their contributions.

Isnā€™t this literally just recreating RPGF?

7

Hi Jack, thanks for the feedback. I am just a supporter / contributor, but happy to answer your questions. I know there is a revision coming based on early feedback; it should integrate your feedback too. It seems most of the issues are around specificity and clearer definitions, which is very fair.

No. Not at all. The concept was simply to provide diligence (and potentially other) support for badgeholders and delegates to support better decision-making and less work/stress connected to the enormous review needs for rPGF and Missions.

It is very similar to the Mission 4 proposal that we did - and that you supported - with OP Ambassadors, led by Reformed Normie. That Mission far exceeded its critical milestones. This is just a different use-case.

Iā€™ll share the definitions you requested in the same order, but numbered:

  1. Incentivize talented Optimism contributors to support to badgeholders and delegates aligned with their needs and the clarifications / feedback of the foundation.
  2. Validate that talented contributions supported badgeholders and delegates as needed (this is a technical process that can be either human or automated).
  3. Reward badgeholders and delegates as needed (just as was done in the aforementioned Season 4 mission).

No. Itā€™s saying: reward contributions that people make to do diligence that lightens the load and improves decision making for badgeholders and delegates.

Perfect. Then this piece should likely be eliminated from the next draft of the proposal; that will help simplify and clarify things even more. Thank you.

8

Youā€™re the co-author and presumptive applicant for this mission. Think itā€™s more appropriate to call it what it is.

This is what makes this a problematic mission request. This is a mission request that is tailor-made for Thrivecoin to fulfill, made all the more apparent by the fact that only one project is allowed to fulfill it. We do need more data to be brought to RPGF, but we have so many different outlets for it at this point that passing a mission like this would in my view be irresponsible.

One outlet, of course, is RPGF, which mirrors the exact structure that youā€™re proposing above. People offer meaningful contributions to benefit governance, and once the impact of these contributions is measured, they are rewarded. I for one do not want to replace badgeholders with a private enterprise such as your own, one that is paying itself 40k OP for the effort.

But Iā€™m glad you made explicit that this is a carbon copy of the other mission. Would love to see a more detailed report of the outcome of that program and what Thrivecoin contributed to it. I supported it not because the proposal was compelling but because I trusted that @Jrocki and @vonnie610 knew what they were doing. I think at minimum it would be necessary to go through that with a microscope before handing Thrivecoin a contract such as this one.

9

Jack, thanks for the feedback.

As I wrote, Iā€™m a supporter and contributor. I appreciate you perceiving me as a ā€œpresumptive applicantā€, but I will likely pass.

Nowhere does this mission request suggest that. It proposes the opposite: supporting delegates and badgeholders.

Given that you trust Jesse and Vee (who are wonderful), ask them what it was like to work with me for months. Jessie also did some great updates on the impact of our work.

Last clarification: I will continue to conceptually support Oxytocin if he and other delegates wish to move forward, but I am currently uninterested in any service provider role connected to this request.

10

How do you explain the statement at the end of the mission request? @Oxytocin which entity are you referring to below?

11

Oxytocin clarified, as Iā€™ve clarified, that I contributed to the request. Additionally, as was stated in the request: our team ā€œcan executeā€ on the request. But as I shared earlier: I am currently not interested in any service provider role connected to this request. This remains the case.

12

Okay @thrivegiraffe, do you commit not to apply for this as yourself, senad, Thank Optimism, Thrivecoin, or anything that could be reasonably construed as connected to you, as the executor of this mission request or, for end grants as any assembly of individual contributors contributing to such an initiative (i.e., Thrivecoin wouldnā€™t be independently gathering contributors to claim rewards here)?

If youā€™re not the people serving this, Iā€™m not really sure what sort of entity would be prepared to stand up such a process. In any case, as mentioned by @lavande, any committee in charge of this validation would amount to a separate working group, which isnā€™t in scope for mission requests.

Are there any other advocates for this mission request?

13

I am a part of one entity, ThriveCoin. This is one of the wildest interactions Iā€™ve had in web3. I supported this request to be helpful. If our team had served it, we almost certainly would have lost money on it (ask Jesse, Vee, Kryz, Subli, Oxytocin, others about what we bring to our work with Optimism).

We considered helping because we care about Optimism, we admire many people here, and we are fierce advocates for web3. But after this interaction, we will not take any role connected to this request beyond the conceptual support I provided. I need to make dinner for my kids, so Iā€™d like for us to be done. Thanks.

14

well if this single interaction where iā€™ve been pretty concrete with my concerns is enough for you to overcome months of productive work with such great people Iā€™d like to be shown where Iā€™ve been out of line

in any case the line youā€™re pushing is certainly a far cry from @senad.eth DMing me and several other delegates (which youā€™re now hurriedly deleting) a few hours ago saying you intended to apply for this grant

I was gonna say take me off your mailing list but looks like you already have

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It would have been much easier for you to acknowledge that this mission request, which you appear to have intended to apply for when it was written, was misspecified and say you didnā€™t realize that they were not to be tailor-made for specific projects as though theyā€™re grant applications. Wouldnā€™t have been a big deal, as a large number of mission requests have been like this, and thatā€™s something to address structurally down the line. But itā€™s frustrating to be tapdanced at like this.

think iā€™ve said all i need to say here

15

Hi everyone,

First, Iā€™d like to thank everyone for the discussion thatā€™s been going on so far. I apologise I have not been able to participate until now, but would like to thank the other contributors for answering some questions that have been made so far.

To give more context as to why I decided to sponsor this Request, I was looking at the prior success of content coordination and creation we saw with Ambassadors for the Thank Optimism proposal

The way I saw it, the previous seasonā€™s mission had a very strong success in helping Ambassadors figure out what to write about, who to interview, and much more, as well as help activate the community. The idea of this request was mostly to extend this ā€˜matchmakingā€™ between delegates (asking what they need made) and content creators, who could step in to fill those gaps and have them validated by the delegates themselves.

Even if ThriveCoin has confirmed that they do not wish to participate in the proposal and has withdrawn from future involvement, I still think such a mission could help reduce work redundancies many delegates go through, so if any other delegate/author would wish to participate on this mission, I am still up for a complete revamp of the proposal scope if needed. Alternatively, I am also more than happy to merge my ideas with a similar mission request. The closest I have found is @kaereste 's request , so feel free to reach out if you need help!

Finally, if no one has interest in the rescoping or merging of the request, Iā€™m more than happy to withdraw this proposal, letā€™s say by the end of next week?

1 Like
16

Hey @Oxytocin Iā€™m having a hard time understanding the purpose of this proposal, it sounds like itā€™s mostly aimed at collecting feedback which is something already being done on a massive and (quite effective) scale by the Foundation. The grant amount is also extremely high at 190,000. Iā€™m not going to be giving this one my approval but Iā€™m wishing you the best and itā€™s great that you offered to sponsor!

17

Hi Katie,
The current version of the proposal was made by the co-authors I sponsored, so I cannot comment on the justification for the grant amount.
Thank you for sharing your feedback, if I do not receive any major suggestions to alter the proposal I will withdraw it by end of week!

1 Like
18

As I havenā€™t received any reachout to remake the quest, Iā€™ve decided to withdraw it a bit earlier. Thank you everyone for the discussion.

1 Like