I think this could be a useful program.
First, let’s discuss the differences between firestarters in our first and second milestone and questbook grant programs.
Questbook programs - A domain is selected by questbook admin (could be any process), an election is held, then that domain allocator is delegated authority to give up to $20k grants on their own ($50k with additional approvals).
Firestarters M1A - I happened to have extremely high-context on the needs of the DAO. If I saw that some effort was suffering from the cold start problem or had insight to unique needs, we would fund it. I would go and find the people I thought best for these needs, sometimes through a process, sometimes through intuition/experience/relationships. These grants led to STIP, STEP, ADPC, along with data procurement such as Open Block Labs for the first STIP.
(Remember that Firestarters was only 1/12 programs that we ran in M1A. Out of the 250 grants funded and 17,000 token holders rewarded in M1A - I only made decisions on about 15 grants! It is also legitimate in my view to test how a trusted person with high-context in relation to other mechanisms. When we say not every decision has to be decentralized - this was a test of that. The DAO was in a very early stage and needed some funding to get things moving.)
Firestarters M1B - “Disruption Joe doesn’t scale” - This is the main problem with how the program was conducted during M1A. The way our team decided to experiment in M1B was to have a group of badged reviewers all review every application from an RFP call. This produced a different set of results which lacked the longer term vision and context of an individual deep in the weeds.
The M1B model for Firestarters hasn’t been funding high profile projects with with vision to become more. It took more safe bets on things with clear milestones and kpis vs innovation with expectations around good communication and drafting proposals as milestones.
This change to Firestarters along with Questbook not having a mechanism to add new domains created the gap which this proposal seeks to solve.
We don’t know that our Milestone 2 proposal will pass, but if it did, one of our programs would likely be another version of firestarters where instead of decentralizing by consensus, we decentralize by granting higher authority to more in context participants.
I don’t want to say that this shouldn’t be approved because we have an upcoming plan to solve the issue which may or may not be passed.
I do encourage collaboration, which it looks like they are intending by using Questbook software. I’d suggest that if this passes, they plan on integrating to some of our “ecosystem allocator” processes. In fact, this could be a good test for how our “ecosystem allocator” program can continuously add and retire new programs in a continuous way.
Our current’ program is going great, but we are continually learning. Remember, this is halfway through the second iteration of the first ever pluralist grants program. Our Milestone 2 will need to address the gap we have left creating the need for this proposal, along with a few other key learnings:
- New programs to pop up and be added to our decentralized accountability assessments and share other infrastructure to reduce redundant costs
- A pool of funding be available where more programs that address specific needs can be spun up quickly with just a snapshot vote.
- Multiple “allocation” programs can spring up to own specific pillars of our strategy
- PATHWAYS for builders are made possible by having the funds and consistency for builders to see that was can indeed provide support from -1 to 100, not just 0 to 1.
I hope this helps for decision making. While there is a real need and there is nothing wrong with another grant program popping up - grant programs not tied to an ecosystem allocation system isn’t something I can recommend as the best way forward. I do however trust that RNdao would be happy to collaborate - so either way this goes is safe to try for the DAO.