Community Grants Committee

People may do that much total work, but I don’t think committee work will often be more than 5 hours a week. I think it’s important that the hours logged for grants are used specifically for grants.

If someone spends time on other things, they can apply for a grant to get paid for that too.

I agree that it’s a possibility to open up more positions with fewer hours each, but at some point the scheduling and communication becomes large, and the committee becomes inefficient.
You don’t want too many cooks in the kitchen.

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I was referring to keeping the hours the same, lowering the $/hr and increasing # of members. Does not have to be a major cut or be implemented at all. Just putting the thought out there to consider that option!

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Describe your involvement in the PoolTogether ecosystem

I’ve been following the project since the V1 launch, and have been active in the Discord since last year. I also participate in most community/dev calls each week and am aware of the broad stroke goals of the community (including further integrations/partnerships, perpetual growth, and further tooling/features on top of PT). Further, I try to share PT’s updates and progress in the broader Ethereum community, as I try to do with all the exciting projects that I follow (the more the ecosystem can learn, the more we learn how the ecosystem connects, and can connect in the future).

What skills/experience do you bring to the committee?

I’ve been following the Ethereum space for years, and watched DeFi grow from the early ideas into the DeFi ecosystem we enjoy today. I want to bring my experience of the broader ecosystem into helping the PT grants committee grow into one that is as respectable as something like the Uniswap grants committee. I also can provide my experience evaluating projects and teams (through whitepapers, proposals, or otherwise) to helping a PT grants committee acheive its goal of improving the Ethereum and PT ecosystems.

Can you commit ~10 hours a week as a reviewer or ~30 hours a week as a lead?

I can commit 10-30 hours/week.

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I spent some time today reading the proposals for the other grant committees after which we are modeling.

It seems the idea there is that the lead does all the work and the reviewers just keep the lead in check and sign transactions.

If we want to do it that way, 10h per week for reviewers is way too much.

I think it’s also an option to model it differently, where reviewers are more active and the lead mostly facilitates communication and organization, delegating part of the work to the reviewers.

In this case 30h per week for the lead is too much (since the workload is reduced by delegating).

So in summary, I think we should decide on which of these models we want to follow and either reduce the reviewer hour cap or the lead hour cap.

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I was under the assumption that a large part of the reviewers time spent would be coordinating with these grant teams, reviewing applications, communicating with the community for ideas & general PT housekeeping.

I know if I was selected I’d spend even more time on supporting the PT protocol even outside of the grants program.

Makes sense to structure it with lower hours for now. Can always scale up if it becomes necessary!

I think it’s very important to define the scope.
I imagined the paid hours to only include work done specifically related to grants. This would include coordinating with the grants teams, but not general housekeeping.

I don’t think work outside of the grants program should be eligible. That would be something that people could apply for a grant for.

The committee is only for reviewing, following up on and supporting grants.

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Thanks for bringing this up. Let me try to give a little insight on our thought process and how we decided on the hour allocations of committee members. We used Uniswap, Compound, and AAVE grants committees as reference (mainly AAVE with the hour allocations).

AAVE has 75 total hours allocated to their entire grants committee every week: 40 hours for the lead, 5 hours per reviewer. This is where we decided to have the Community Lead capped at 30 hours a week and each Reviewer at 10 hours. This would be a total of 70 hours per week, 5 hours less than AAVE. But this also doesn’t take into consideration the Technical Lead’s hours, since that was under defined when creating this post. If it is decided that the Technical Lead can take some hours away from the Community lead or Reviewers I think that is fine, as long as we stay under 75 hours a week.

Would it be difficult to separate out the hours that were spent on grants specifically vs contributing to the community? The work outside of grants specifically will still be valuable. There will need to be some degree of leniency on that in my opinion.

Secondly, I propose increasing the number of reviewers and decrease the hours to five. We have less spots on our committee than others do. Uniswap has 6, and AAVE Has 8.

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I’m not too familiar with the grant side of things so sorry if I am asking questions that might have been addressed already.

How frequently do submissions occur for Uniswap / Compound / Aave? How long have the programmes been ongoing and how many grants have been distributed by each community? Have they always allocated all the grant capital each quarter? It just rolls to the next quarter if not used?

Aave grants round 1 had 30 grants applications in the first 3 months of the program. 23 were funded.
Source: Aave Ecosystem Grants, Round 2. TL;DR: We’re continuing the Aave… | by David Truong | Aave Blog | Medium
That program has been running for a year now. Compound grants started 13 months ago.
I don’t know if all the capital was allocated every quarter in the other programs, but the idea is that leftover funds are returned to the treasury. After every period governance decides whether they want to fund the program for another period. If it does get renewed, there will be funds needed from the treasury again. So the returned funds effectively roll over.

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Awesome proposal @McOso !! Thank you for writing all this up. Great discussion too. Here is my additional input. :slight_smile:

  • Overall, I favor the idea of having a single very clear and dedicated person who is leading the grants committee and having the reviewers be less important. It seems grants committees really need one person to push things forward and if left to a committee it will drag on. So I’d favor the community selecting the grants program lead and that person then really taking charge.

  • With the above in mind, I’d scale back the compensation for the reviewers. I wouldn’t do it hourly and make it more like a monthly stipend of 50 - 100 POOL. Something that defrays any gas costs, etc but simplifies things by not having to track time, etc. In terms of compensation for the lead reviewer. I think what was proposed was good.

  • Love the idea of having a tech lead from PT Inc, I think that would work really well.

  • It’s easy for us to let these conversations just keep going so I’d propose a goal of picking a lead this week and then trying to have some proposal before governance by the end of next week.

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It’s really great to see the community rally around a grants program. It could unlock some serious growth potential for the protocol.

As a PoolTogether technical expert, I’m happy to offer myself as an advisor to the grants committee. My only requirement is that I am not on the multisig: I will simply be an advisor.

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Wow, surprised how much activity is happening in their grant programme. Sounds like this is an important thing for pooltogether to get right.

The proposed structure seems a bit rigid to start off with. Don’t particularly like the idea of people logging hours. At this stage and with the early cohort of community members I don’t think we need checks in place for accountability. It seems a bit nitty gritty. I would be in favour of a fixed monthly amount for reviewers instead and agree with Leighton they should have a reduced role than proposed and let the lead run the show. I think the reviewers primary role should be just as a signer of the multi-sig and leave it to a qualified lead to review and make decisions with input from the technical reviewer from pooltogether.

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Hey all,
I would be interested in being a reviewer on the grants committee. I have been a pooltogether user for probably close to 2 years and have become active in the community in the last few months. I plan to be active for years to come.
I have been an active crypto user since 2017 and always try to experiment and learn more wherever I can.
I can commit up to 10 hours a week. I’ve really enjoyed being a part of this community and if there is room on the committee for me I will be happy to put the effort in. I know there are many great talents here in our community and look forward to seeing this come together.

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Thanks everyone for all your input and a great discussion! I feel like we are really getting somewhere.

I really like the idea of keeping it simple, especially since this will be the pilot program of the grants committee. In honor of that, I think @Leighton idea of a monthly stipend for reviewers makes sense.

I am also psyched @Brendan offered to be the PT Tech Lead!

The next order of business is choosing the Lead. I will create a new forum post for those who want to pitch themselves for the grants Lead position. here

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Would be happy to be a reviewer on the grants committee - I represent one of the earliest venture investors in Pooltogether and have worked in close conjunction with Leighton and Brendan as they’ve scaled PT from its inception to where it is.

Running a grants program also needs a longer-scale thinking around ideas that may seem to not have a concrete outcome on the long-term goals of PT - and this is something I’ve found myself doing with R&D teams at Consensys, the EF and in a previous life with the quantum communication complexity research group at Microsoft. Happy to share a longer form doc that we’ve had reviews from on the structure of the grants organization and how this could take shape also from a legal standpoint. I come from background in theoretical computer science and have served as an engineer in various capacities.

Would be keen to see this go through and ultimately shape the long-term sustainability of Pooltogether and its community.

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Would also be a reviewer and/or a signer of the multi sig.

I like the idea to have one representative of a VC that invested in PoolTogether early on in the grants committee.

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Grants proposal has been updated 5/1/21

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made a page for reviewers to apply for those roles.
@Praneeth @TheRealTuna @RegisIsland @decibels42 @AndyKaufman make sure u copy your posts over to there

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