Hey all,
Thanks to everyone who provided feedback on the proposal so far, both here and in private.
After reviewing all the different perspectives and discussing the proposal with several delegates, including some grantees of the previous Firestarter program and Disruption Joe, who ran the program, we are confident that there is significant interest in reviving the program and that the majority of stakeholders agree.
We strive to create an initiative that is effective, aligned within the AAE setup, and ideally also supported and recognized as valuable by a large number of stakeholders. For the Firestarters, we distilled the feedback we received and distilled the main points of concern into three overarching themes.
1. Why fund the proposal from the DAO, when the OpCo’s budget could finance it?
One of the main questions we were asked was why we chose to request funds from the DAO rather than using our own budget to fund the program. With the proposal the OAT passed back in June, doing so would fall within our scope. Our initial instinct was to request a different budget so as not to overstep our mandate, as we saw OAT’s proposal more as a solution to one-off cases, rather than a carte blanche to fund anything we deemed necessary.
At the same time, we want to protect OpCo’s runway. It’s still very early in our 2-year term, and ARB’s negative price movement since the proposal’s execution (approximately -45% at the time of writing this comment) means we must be extra mindful of how we allocate our resources. However, delegates were wary of allocating additional resources to OpCo for a program that OpCo already has the funds for.
2. The flexibility of the grants’ scope shouldn’t come at the expense of an overarching strategy.
Our intention in letting the scope of grants loosely defined was to have the flexibility to fund all sorts of ideas regardless of their domain, as long as our evaluation of their potential impact was positive. But there is a skinny line between having a flexible strategy and having no plan. In addition to delegates not being clear on our strategy, they noted that having a loosely defined program also makes it difficult for potential contributors to determine whether their ideas are within scope, which could deter potentially valuable contributions.
Delegates also had reservations about trusting the OpCo to create a strategy, as the entity doesn’t yet have a track record of being able to deliver results in such programs successfully. There were requests to take the DAO’s input into account when creating such a strategy and to rely on the expertise and experience of several contributors, rather than doing the entire thing ‘in-house’.
3. Even with a strategy in place and an intention to use Firestarters to address the DAO’s needs, it’s not clear what the DAO’s needs are.
While we have our own understanding of what the DAO’s needs look like, indeed, there isn’t a shared understanding or a unified vision of what the DAO’s needs are. This is an area where the SOS and the process around it would truly help, but alas, it hasn’t been figured out yet. Rushing to create a program without having an overarching vision for the DAO’s direction will probably lead us into the same challenges we’ve faced in the past: no clear strategy, lack of cohesion, and initiatives working in silos.
Addressing the feedback
Upon reflecting on the points above and the rest of the feedback we received, we decided to take the following steps:
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Put the current proposal on ‘pause’.
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Internalize and fund a Firestarters pilot from OpCo’s budget with a max of $50,000. That will help with a) having a small bucket of funds we can use to award small grants as we further develop the program without additional expense to the DAO, and b) act as a validation of OpCo’s ability to manage such a program.
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Develop the Firestarters strategy further and host dedicated calls to discuss delegate input and feedback post Devconnect. At the same time, we’ll focus on creating evaluation criteria for the pilot program that we’ll be running. Things like the application funnel, evaluation of grantees’ successes, and adequate reporting to the DAO are among the things we’ll be looking at evaluating.
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Revisit the proposal at a later date, after we’ve developed a more robust strategy in alignment with stakeholders, we’ve successfully validated the concept as well as our ability to manage the program, or we’ve fully allocated the $50,000 with some level of success, the interpretation of which will be determined while also developing the strategy with delegates.
We’ll keep this thread open and under the ‘Proposals’ category so folks can still continue sharing their feedback even if they can’t make it to a call, or in Buenos Aires, but we do not plan on moving the proposal to Snapshot anytime soon. We’ve updated the original proposal’s text to reflect that.
Please direct any questions or feedback for Firestarters to @Sinkas (Telegram)