Proposal for Financial Restitution For ArbitrumDAO Grant Winners

Hello @CastleCapital thank you for your feedback here, and understanding our situation went beyond one of normal price fluctations that can occur.

Regarding my request for compensation for myself as I am a grant winner and should be in line with the compensation of the others, I agree with that in connection to what I should have received, along with the other grant winners.

However, I would like to share again with additional context, details of how my unplanned community advocacy role and efforts drove this proposal and shared learning experience forward. Please review this first summary post, including one winners commentary:

“As the founder of daospace, I want to express my gratitude to @karakrysthal for her tireless efforts in addressing the issues faced by many grant recipients. Her persistence in pushing for resolution was instrumental in getting things moving with the Arbitrum team.”

My efforts were driven beyond being just a grant winner, but one that deeply cares about financial inclusion and is also in strong support of the potential for grant funding to be a meaningful channel for early stage projects to get off the ground. My work with my organization centers on DE&I for women in emerging tech and Web3. Right now, the data shows that 6% of VC funding goes to women in Web3, yet these alarming stats are greater than that in general tech (1-2%). While there isn’t data yet being collected on the % of grant funding going to women, from our rough estimation it is less than 10%. My organization is launching a 6 month working group for blockchains and protocols with grant programs, where we are facilitating DE&I education, and fostering collaboration and shared learning on grant program best practices.

I hope this provides more context for the work we are doing, with the hopes that grant program operators do work out their challenges and processes, and Arbitrum, for example, can be one that can lead by example from its learning and ability to adapt, even at its size and complexity.

I am going to push back on your request that I remove my personal compensation for my work and edit that out of the proposal. I have estimated at least 50 hours of my own unpaid effort over the last 6 months has gone into what you are seeing now on these forum posts, from behind-the-scenes work that includes:

  • Coordinating and managing communication in a separate Telegram group from the grant winners TG with now 15 parties that were a part of the grant program management, and/or grantees that wanted to share their voices directly to the program managers with their issues.
  • Holding and attending many calls with these parties, which led to Thrive Protocol hosting listening and feedback sessions with us
  • Many hours of efforts in collecting data from the grantees and those program managers in DM’s, and reviewing the Telegram group data
  • Organizing this data into these forum posts, and additional posts, tracking down of grantees, many more DMs, and then reviewing and fact checking all data points with Coingecko and helping winners navigate creating their status updates
  • Presenting this data on the DAO forum call, and responding and following up with commenters here

I am happy that you have found the information presented invaluable, which has happened due to the persistent focus of these efforts.

This provides as much context I am aware of that I can provide to my energy spent and intentions behind my efforts. Again while my financial compensation was not an initial goal in my advocacy work, as I was presenting it to this forum I then understood it was fair to be valued financially for this. I am also an early stage founder and work 80-90 hours/week on our project to get it off the ground, and this has been a significant addition to that workload.

Thank you.