DataGrants: Permissionless Suggestion Box Kick-Off & Status

DAO Programs & Initiatives
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Program Lead: Evan Powell, from the OpenData Community
Time Frame: Now until March 2024
Grant Amount: 110,000 ARB to grant winners (first part of 150,000 ARB ODC program from Plurality Labs)

After some delays in getting the details of approvals completed, this program received its first transaction eight days ago, on January 19th. We launched outreach on January 26th. As outlined previously, the DataGrants program will allocate up to 110k ARB via the Permissionless Suggestion Box; we will also host an Anti-Fraud hackathon in March.

Our areas of focus are:

  • Networks of Influence and Grants analysis

Our objectives are at least threefold:

  1. Source useful analysis that improves learnings from the ongoing growth of the DAO
  2. Increase participation from data scientists in our DAO
  3. Experiment with the scaffolding of a micro Grants program

Please follow along and suggest work you’d like to see done examining grants and networks of influence including Sybils in the project repository here:

https://github.com/OpenDataforWeb3/DataGrantsforARB/tree/main

As a reminder, the basic structure of this program is as follows:
PSB ODC
The program is based on Github to lower friction for our target personas, which are data analysts and scientists.

Updates:

  • Council membership - initial list confirmed
  • Created draft of Hats & Snapshot for council member votes
  • Updated ReadMe and other materials for longer duration program
  • Added example Issue
  • Created a bounty board for issues once reviewed
  • Launched outreach on January 26th:

What to expect in the next two weeks:

  • First issues will be gathered
  • First review of issues

Feel free to get in touch directly or via this Forum with questions and suggestions. Our Discord channel where brainstorming & questions and so forth occur is here:
https://discord.gg/J3XmY9tSK4

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Loved to see this. Got some questions:

  1. Is the application window already open? The readme says January but nothing more specific.
  2. The process: Add an issue to the repo listed on github → they are judged and if applicable moved to dework and bounty attached → completed work added to github (via pull request?) → reviewed/judged by ODC → if fulfil criteria bounty paid out
  3. Are there limits to how many issues someone can open?
  4. Does the person who opened the issue (aka submitted the idea) have to complete the project?
  5. Can a person complete several bounties?
  6. Can companies/teams apply to complete one/several bounties?
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Thank you @kbc - very helpful questions IMO.

  1. YES the application window is open.
  2. YES. That is the process. The completed work can be documented in response to the bounty via Github or other mechanism.
  3. No, there are no limits. The thinking is there will be a natural limit but let’s see!
  4. No - this is a crucial point. There is no requirement that someone with an idea who opens an issue should also try to address that issue.
  5. YES - yes please. Go go go!
  6. YES - teams can also work together.

Thanks again!

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What is the allocation criteria for issues ? Is it for judges to decide or its a fixed allocation per issue worked on ?
Also what’s timeline like start and finish ?

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Hey @Fresto1 this is an experiment and as such - we want to have as much flexibility as necessary but not too much. Along those lines, we have set expectations that the bounties will be in the $1k - $5k range.The last awarding of bounties will occur in mid-March so you can think of this as rewarding up to 6 weeks of focused effort.

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Ok gotcha … so the proposed idea should be built out by march ? did I get it right ? and is there an upfront to start work if approved

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Data Grants Program - Update - 2nd week

As a reminder, our goal is to crowd-source useful analysis and related projects focused on grants analysis and networks of influence. In so doing we intend to test out various mechanisms while delivering insights useful for governance and grant funding.

Our goal has been to get to 20 fundable issues by the end of February at the latest. A little over 1 week in we have only 6 candidates. We are just starting outreach so I remain confident that we can achieve that goal.

This week our council will be voting on which of the 6 or more issues are worthy of having a bounty attached to them AND they will be voting on what the size of that bounty should be.

Our council has been established on Hats and a related Snapshot.

Hats: Tree #7 on Arbitrum One | Hats Protocol

Snapshot: Snapshot

If YOU have an idea of something you’d like someone to take a look at AND if you might want to do some analysis to make more transparent the operation of the Arbitrum DAO - please take a look, maybe add a comment to an issue or open one yourself.

https://github.com/OpenDataforWeb3/DataGrantsforARB
Together we can - and will - further develop our collective muscle of seeing deeper into the behaviors of our DAO. This will improve the allocation of capital and also result in there being more tools in our ecosystem to help us make efficient decisions about governance, grant funding, planning, and more.

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Wohoo, this is really exciting!!!

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Data Grants Program - Update - 3rd week

We are hitting our stride.

As a reminder, our goal is to crowd-source useful analysis and related projects focused on grants analysis and networks of influence. In so doing we intend to test out various mechanisms while delivering insights useful for governance and grant funding.

Last week I mentioned that we had a goal of getting to 20 issues by the end of February - and that we only had 6 at the time, having just launched.

I also mentioned that the council was planning to vote the end of last week on which issues would have bounties attached to them.

Well - we have already hit the goal in terms of the number of issues. We so far got to 22 total issues, of which 17-18 (one of them is being split into two) appear to be very high-quality issues.

In receiving these issues we actually risked being a victim of our success. Without some editing and grouping, we thought that the issues and bounties could have been confusing to data grants practitioners.

For this reason we decided to group the issues into two types:

  • data gathering issues > bounties
  • data analysis issues → bounties

After all, analysis relies upon data.

With that in mind, we are splitting the approximately 6 weeks we have left in the program.

Data gathering bounty submissions will be due March 3rd. Data analysis bounty submissions will be due March 24th.

Incidentally - I am tracking this and other lessons learned, including details on how to configure Github, Dework, Hats, and Discord, and other thoughts in a document that will be a part of our final report:

Here is the really good news. Once the council finishes voting in the next 48 hours - we will have some bounties that I’m convinced will result in some important steps forward in data gathering and analysis.

Snapshot voting:
[Snapshot](https://Snapshot of Council)

GitHub issues list, with coding for Data Gathering vs. Data Analysis issues:
https://github.com/OpenDataforWeb3/DataGrantsforARB/issues

Thank you to everyone following along and providing feedback and suggestions. The next steps are for builders to build and get ready to submit their solutions in a few weeks. The council will then select from those submissions up to 3 submissions per bounty to reward.

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A quick update this week. Highlights include:

  • Votes on which bounties to fund - and how to allocate our funding across them - have been completed
  • Results from these were used to add the amount of the bounties to Dework
    https://app.dework.xyz/datagrants-thankar/datagrantsforarb-35248/overview
  • We know we have some builders working on both the Data Gathering section and the Data Analysis section; we need to ramp up further attention to attract more builders

Data Gathering submissions are due March 3rd.
Data Analysis submissions are due March 24th.

To learn more, ask questions, meet collaborators, and more - please drop into the channel we are using within the OpenData Community Discord.
https://discord.gg/D2MeM2SzQS

Last but not least, the OpenData Community focus on this Permissionless Suggestion Box Data Grants program helped to catalyze the work to port a Grants Portal to support Arbitrum Grants. You can see progress on this work here:
https://github.com/davidgasquez/arbitrum-data-portal

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Absolutely great program, I have created multiple issues on the github repository Issues · OpenDataforWeb3/DataGrantsforARB · GitHub.

Some feedback
I am not sure if there were enough submissions because I am just not sure how to monitor the bounties.

Probably there could be even a separate bounty to improve the process for the program such as a dashboard.

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Another quick update - we have completed all of the submissions and are compiling votes for the second batch of submissions.

Having led similar programs over the years, mostly supporting Gitcoin-related ecosystems, I’ll share that as we end this program with an enormous amount of activity, engaged data scientists, and new approaches to analysis and to gathering data demonstrated - the next step starts.

And that next step is out of our hands. Now it will be the responsibility of the ThankARB and Arbitrum Community to decide whether they will embrace crowd-sourcing of insights or not.

If they do - they will have an ever more transparent and well-understood ecosystem. They will enable more and more community participants to analyze at a greater depth their own ecosystem. This will in turn increase the costs of fraud and manipulation and make it somewhat less likely that the results we see in crypto, such as the decisions made and the markets themselves, are being dominated by sophisticated attackers and whales.

To be honest, I don’t see a thirst in crypto for data analysis of the sort we did here, protecting the transparency and legitimacy of decision-making. And very few organizations understand community and open source. They are more likely to strip mine the community, taking benefits in the form of team members and novel approaches and projects while returning little if anything to support the community. If you believe that only a transparent community can protect the commons - and yet that community you are building is itself being taken for granted by the communities it sets out to protect - it can be dispiriting.

Anyway - prove me wrong Arbitrum! Embrace open data science, support the community builders and the open approaches to data science, and so protect the very commons upon which you depend!

Also please double-click on the submissions. Share them with your DAOs, champion the builders, and experiment with them yourself.

Here is an updated sheet with all of the submissions. The data analysis ones are now being voted up on by the volunteer council. You can follow along via the snapshot links shared in the spreadsheet.

[March 28 updated Bounties for Permissionless Suggestion Box ODC Data Grants - Google Sheets](Data Grants result spreadsheet)

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As one of the data analysts working on this, I enjoyed digging into the data. I’d love to see greater transparency in methods and reusability of analysis (across time, ecosystems and DAOs).

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As your delegate representative, I commend your efforts in exploring Arbitrum DAO mergers. Let’s welcome more participants to ensure robust decision-making and propel Arbitrum’s growth. Together, let’s shape a prosperous future for our community.

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Hi @epowell101 and others at PluralityLabs and ArbitrumDAO (as I’m unsure who from those two organization is involved I’m not just gonna randomly tag people). If someone knows who the right people to tag are, please do so.

I’d love some more transparency around the payments. When we filled out KYC we were told that it would take 2 weeks after KYC is completed to get paid. The different bounty hunters completed KYC by March 29th. We are way beyond the 2 week deadline. We are also now beyond the other promised payout date of 30th April for phase 1, and even passed the date for payout for phase 2 (May 7th).

I’ve worked for public organization in the past and I’m used to a certain level of inefficiency. I’ve chased payments and send direct emails before. I also experienced that transparent and open communication is the way forward. For this project, the lack of transparency is staggering. We are left hoping that our work will be compensated once, without a clear idea when this will be.

If Arbitrum would be a centralized organization, then all this doesn’t matter that much. However, Arbitrum is part of web3 and is pushing the boundaries of decentralization. Community engagement is central to its success. And right now, this lack of transparency around payment process and dates show that community members aren’t taken seriously.

I’m not the type of person who keeps banging on an existing problem. I rather look forward and develop solutions. So where can we go from here?

  1. Regular updates on this post on status of payment would be the most obvious step forward.
  2. Ideally, the involved parties openly discuss what caused the delayed, and are willing to answer questions from others with the goal to improve the process so that future community members aren’t left hanging dry.

The saddest part about this is that a project I enjoyed contributing to leaves me with a bitter after taste.

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From my understanding the part where the funds are stored is actually centralized, unfortunately.

I have spent around half a year waiting for funds, personally, because the person that was responsible for the funds distribution took a “holiday” leave in another blockchain org. I got absolutely no explanation or anything of value in their response.

Thats the part where we could collaborate and come up with a more viable solution. But from my understanding, again, the problem arises due to the lack of incentives and amount of given resources.

I could even argue that the decision making process is obfuscated on purpose. That’s the part where we should ask Gary Gensler why it takes him so long to accomplish anything for crypto industry.