common issue for grant applicants is finding the right programme to apply to. E.g.
The issue is not just one of grant applicants having to invest time figuring out where to apply (an issue but not critical). There’s also a way bigger issue under the surface that seriously impacts the DAO (and also an issue in corporations we could improve upon!):
Let’s imagine for the sake of the explanation, a unit to account for how much value a proposal adds to the objective of a grant program
| Column 1 | Column 2 | Column 3 | Column 4 |
|---|---|---|---|
| Proposal A | Proposal B | ||
| Value to community building grants programme | 60 | 100 | |
| Value to new protocol grants programme | 60 | 0 | |
| Value to XYZ grant progogramme | 10 | 0 | |
| Total | 130 | 100 | |
As you can see, proposals that add value across categories (case A) are likely to lose when compared exclusively on their merit in one category at a time. Despite A being the most valuable proposal overall, B is more likely to get funded. This is the issue with analytical approaches (dividing things into sub-categories) vs systemic ones (more akin to adding tags and mapping connections).
What can we do about it?
As far as I can see, the solution for the issue requires embedding systemic thinking across multiple components of the organisation design, and thankfully Arbitrum is early enough that this is quite doable:
- Application process for grants: single form (I understand this is already the case), and multi-select as opposed to select-one from the grant programmes menu or even better, not selecting a grant programme but selecting all the strategic objectives to which something applies. Which then leads to a bit of noise but you add a triage system (akin to nurses in ER rooms checking it’s indeed an emergency and otherwise redirecting to GP. We can do this with an AI, e.g. one of RnDAO ventures called TogetherCrew already has similar functionality).
- Funding approved for proposals based on aggregating scores across programmes (each programme would assess based on their specific objectives, and then scores aggregated. Scheduling of calls to speak with participants will likely require some coordination and here as well we have a tool called MeetWithWallet to reduce scheduling admin and otherwise, we need a good algorithm for the tally but that’s also quite doable and I don’t foresee major problems).
- KPIs will need to be assessed comparing 1) the scores grant programmes gave to proposals, 2) funding used, and 3) per-objective improvement. This is not a major shift but does require us to use the right ontology for BI.
This might seem like quite a shift, but I can’t stress enough how big an impact this makes as an organisation (DAO or otherwise) scales. The nightmare of corporations is people with a great idea going from department to department and it being no one’s problem. Until people lose motivation and disengage. Meanwhile, the organisation stagnates with bureaucracy. We can do much better!
For now, I’m sharing this just as an idea to gather feedback. If it gets positive sentiment, I’m happy to flesh this out more and coordinate with others to flesh it out and advance it.
Note this also relates to what I’ve mentioned in the KPIs thread already here and here and in the Arbitrum Now one here. My hope is that we can embed this sort of next gen organisation design in the DAO and make it a leading example in Web3 and beyond.