I have voted “For [No IRL Event]” on this proposal. As a general concept, I think this is a pretty low cost, low risk proposal that aims to enhance the DAO and how it functions. The team seems to be built with people of quality backgrounds relevant to the task, and the proposal has already taken into consideration a lot of delegate feedback which makes me feel confident they will use this pilot opportunity well.
Overlap concerns seem to be the largest thing brought up by other delegates. I can see why, as we have funded a lot of similar projects, however I don’t think in this case it’s that big of a deal. For starters, given this is a pilot program the ask is small and as such the risk is small. I also think Lino has put in a lot of discussions & explanation on this issue that makes sense and ease some of the concerns. But perhaps most importantly, the overlap is on something that isn’t even really ‘solved’ (i.e., I think if this was a study into say a Multi Sig Service it would make less sense since that’s already being worked out). So I don’t think it hurts to continue to explore these types of ventures.
As for the IRL event, I see the value in it in general but do not think it makes sense to do it at this stage of the project. However, would support funding IRL events as the AVI moves forward if the findings are that they are useful. A suggestion would be to see if there are ways to integrate into already existing crypto events to possibly save costs, versus the overhead of hosting your own projects.
Edit: I have not had any material change in opinion on this since Snapshot. In order to save forum space, I have edited this post to confirm I will be voting “For” this on Tally for the reasons stated above.