Welcome to a quick update from Plurality Labs. We have a tremendous amount of work under way and wanted to hit some highlights as we look to the future.
Table of Contents
- Communications update
- How individual grants decisions were made:
- Delivering a Best in Class framework:
- Deliverable tracking, Milestone 1:
- Financial update:
- Looking forward:
Communications update:
Communications still leads as our largest opportunity area. We have increased the volume and diversity of our twitter / x spaces hosted with the foundation and we have moved to hosting DAO calls every week, but our delegates want more. To continue improving communications we launched a Plurality Lab Grants Hub, hired additional communications help, and we committed to more regular, and detailed updates.
More information will be coming on these changes soon, but lets look at the Grants Hub:
This site was launched as a “quick and dirty” program communications site. It is intended to provide a single source of truth for any program, and many projects which are funded through the DAO and Plurality Labs.
From the Homepage, you get a birds eye view of the Plurality Labs programs. Here you can see each program, the status of the program, as well as the amount allocated to the program and the spending to date. Note some projects are still in progress and spending is not complete yet. You can also link directly to the program owner if you would like more information.
On the program details page - we try to give you the next level of information as well as insights on the mechanics of the program. It is here you can find the descriptions, milestones, why it was funeded, the decision mechanisms it uses as well as experiments and intended outcomes.
As we add more content to the site, we will go into deeper detail in subsequent updates:
Finally, within program details you can projects which have been funded through each of the specific programs. As existing programs come to a close, more project details will be added.
How individual grants decisions were made:
In Milestone 1, Plurality Labs worked to identify the right priorities and build the processes to decentralize funding based (mostly) on those priorities. What we learned was that we need to be more transparent about how grant funding decisions were made.
For background, after working through programs selections, Plurality Labs gave individual programs and program managers the autonomy to decide how to fund their grant recipients (in relation to the priorities defined in GovMonth). As we look across grant programs, we found programs could fit loosely into the following grant decision categories: expert decision, expert panel, community quadratic funding, & new or novel mechanisms. The illustration below is not intended for academic debate, but to illustrate how Plurality Labs has attempted to use several different allocation mechanisms.
Plurality labs did act as the program manager for the Firestarter and GovBoost programs. It should be noted that Plurality Labs intended to manage the Firestarter programs to provide a mechanism for rapidly funding emerging DAO needs (ex: Treasury & Sustainability Working Group, Procurement Framework & Security Service, Finance & Transparency Report), but not the GovBoost program. This program was only picked up by Plurality Labs as we lost our intended program manager and we did not want to stop the work underway (STIP data monitoring, Open Source Observer, Hats for TreasureDAO).
Delivering a Best in Class framework:
In Milestone 1, Plurality Lab committed to delivering a best in class grants framework. One interpretation of a “grants framework” is providing a system or collection of documented processes that could be handed over to a greenfield team, and then that team could run those processes to success. That interpretation is exactly not what Plurality Labs did. We invented the capabilities and processes required to run a plurality of grant programs, but we have not documented this work in a way that could be handed over to another team. It is our intention in Milestone 2 to build out the successful experiments in a way that the DAO can take over and expand, but that was not in the scope for milestone 1.
Deliverable tracking, Milestone 1:
As we improve our communications, we want to share our view of performance as it relates to Milestone 1 deliverables. This dynamic tracker is intended to track progress against Milestone 1. To note, the chart includes several “tbd’s” but should be complete shortly.
Financial update:
As milestone 1 draws to a close in February, the team is pushing to complete existing programs and projects. There will be several initiatives that will carry past the end of February and more details on those programs will be illustrated in later updates. Additionally, within the context of the GovBoost program, R3Gen Finance has been contracted to provide detailed DAO and grant spending, that report is expected in January. Until then, the Plurality labs includes a quick overview of current spending.
This chart indicates grant allocation to actual grant spending. As most programs come to close or complete in February, we can expect the velocity of spending to continue in to February closing the gap between spending an allocation.
This spreadsheet below indicates spending at a program level. It also illustrates increased the velocity of grant spending over time. This is where you can see that it took to November to work out the program contracts and KYC/KYB compliance processes.
And the program detail behind the two Plurality Lab managed programs:
Looking forward:
The January report will include:
- The updated assessment of Milestone 1 deliverables
- Spotlight on decentralizing program and project reviews
- Financial report - spending to date by program
- A summary of January communications updates