Thank ARB x Cartographer Syndicate - Program Overview

Grants Discussions
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About Cartographer Syndicate

The Cartographer Syndicate, part of MetaGov’s Grant Innovation Lab, is a collective dedicated to advancing the Web3 grants ecosystem through innovative curation, aggregation, and funding approaches within the Arbitrum community. Through this grant from Thank ARB, we intend to:

  1. Develop the Onchain Grant Aggregator on Arbitrum with Gitcoin, Karma, and OpenSource Observer.
  2. Aggregate news and current events related to Web3 Grants via Crypto Grant Wire
  3. Experiment with novel funding mechanisms and incentivize contributions.

Through these efforts, the Cartographer Syndicate aims to become a central hub for the Web3 grants community, providing the infrastructure, resources, and incentives needed to unlock Web3 Grants’ full potential and demonstrating Arbitrum DAO’s leadership in this rapidly evolving space.

Program Objectives

Build a Comprehensive Web3 Grant Program Registry

  • Partnering with Karma to build and maintain an easily accessible on-chain registry for all grant programs within the Web3 ecosystem
  • Exploration of building systems of transparency and accountability across grant programs
  • Integrating data analytics and visualization tools within the registry
  • Building a system aggregating news and current events across the Web3 grants landscape

A Grant Program for Grant Programs

  • Create a “grant program for grant programs,” allowing experimentation and utilizing novel funding mechanisms.
  • Managing the implementation of direct grants, contributor incentives, and novel funding mechanisms

Incentivize Community Contributions

  • Identifying new projects, updating existing project information, and ensuring accuracy
  • Building, maintaining, and improving the Web3 Grant Registry platform
  • Aggregating and curating news and events across the Web3 grants landscape

Incentives and Funding Mechanisms

The Cartographer Syndicate is committed to experimenting with and implementing novel funding mechanisms to provide the benefits of funding and position the Arbitrum Community at the forefront of innovation in the Web3 grants ecosystem.

Direct Grants

We will allocate funds towards direct grants to establish a solid foundation for the Onchain Grant Aggregator. These grants will be scoped as RFPs and earmarked for the following aspects of the registry’s development:

  • Reputation Systems: Integrating a system that ensures transparency and accountability for grant programs. This will involve developing program profiles and rubrics.
  • Analytics and Insights: Integrating data analytics and visualization tools within the registry. These features will include interactive dashboards to help users explore and derive insights from grant data, identify patterns, and discover relevant insights.
  • News Aggregation and Curation: Improving upon Crypto Grant Wire by building an automated and open system for aggregating news and current events across the Web3 grants landscape.
  • Grant Program Research & Analysis: Conduct research and analysis on grant programs within the Web3 ecosystem to inform the design and implementation of the Reputation Frameworks and help the Arbitrum DAO learn from this analysis and emulate or improve upon useful examples.

The RFPs will be released to the public, allowing interested parties to submit proposals. The Cartographer Syndicate will evaluate the proposals based on predefined criteria, such as technical feasibility, impact potential, and alignment with objectives.

Direct Contributor Incentives

In addition to the narrow scope RFPs, the Cartographer Syndicate will develop an incentive program to reward contributors who directly contribute to the registry’s growth and improvement. These incentives will recognize and reward the following activities:

  • Identifying new projects, updating existing project information, and ensuring accuracy
  • Integrating new data sources to enhance the registry’s depth and richness
  • Expanding and improving the registry’s funding data schema
  • Contributing to platform development
  • Aggregating and curating news and events across the Web3 grants landscape
  • Ensuring opportunities are readily available for Arbitrum DAO community members

As part of this initiative, the syndicate will experiment with different incentive mechanisms running on top of the Arbitrum network for payouts and release information on their findings and use of the bounty platforms.

Novel Funding Mechanisms

The Cartographer Syndicate will host a Quadratic Funding (QF) Round in July/August 2024 to attract members and support web3 grants research, tooling, and thought leadership growth.

The round will focus on individuals and teams who have previously contributed to these areas or those with forward-looking ideas that align with the Syndicate’s mission. Key aspects of the round include:

  • Eligibility criteria encompassing web3 grants contributions, community engagement, expertise, vision, and impact.
  • 100K ARB matching pool with a 10% matching cap.
  • Applications submitted via the Gitcoin Grants Stack, with feedback provided to all applicants
  • Successful applicants are welcomed into the Cartographer Syndicate as members, gaining access to a network of like-minded individuals and teams building towards a better future for web3 grants.

Through this QF Round, the Cartographer Syndicate aims to foster innovation, support diverse ideas, and drive the growth of the web3 grants ecosystem while maintaining the highest standards of transparency, fairness, and community engagement.

As a follow-up to the QF Round, the syndicate intends to explore testing the concept of conviction voting.

Timelines

The program will be executed in three phases over three months (June-August 2024):

Phase 1: Foundations (June 2024)

  • Launch Direct Grant RFPs
  • Open Direct Contributor Incentives
  • Establish governance and communication structures for the Cartographer Syndicate.
  • Drive recruitment and awareness of the program within the Arbitrum ecosystem and beyond

Phase 2: Launch Incentives (July 2024)

  • Evaluate and award Direct Grant RFPs
  • Monitor and support Direct Grant recipients
  • Promote and manage Direct Contributor Incentives
  • Launch the Quadratic Funding (QF) Round
  • Evaluate QF applications and provide feedback

Phase 3: Create Impact (August 2024)

  • Integrate and launch work completed by Direct Grant recipients
  • Release insights from Grant Program Research & Analysis RFP
  • Finalize QF Round results and welcome successful applicants as members
  • Evaluate the impact of Direct Contributor Incentives and make adjustments
  • Explore conviction voting as a follow-up to the QF Round
  • Collect community feedback to inform future initiatives

Follow Us

We’ll be tracking all our progress and learnings publicly on this site: Cartographer Syndicate x Thank ARB Notion Page

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Can you explain the difference between this initiative and existing grant programs at Arbitrum?
After all, there are already several grant programs, so what is the advantage of this one, why is a new platform needed?

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Sure, I’m happy to provide some context:

Regarding the platform, a few sites are tracking grant programs today (I have created a few myself). These sites are mostly simple lists that provide little to no context for each program’s opportunities, activities, etc.

We believe there is potential to improve upon the concept by bringing it onchain and unlocking aspects of autonomy, news aggregation, and reputation. Here’s how we think the registry will improve upon its current state:

Onchain: Unlike traditional grant discovery sites, our registry is built entirely onchain with Gitcoin’s Allo Protocol. This will allow seamless integration with other Web3 tools and services, enabling a more comprehensive and interconnected ecosystem. By being onchain, the registry ensures that data remains transparent, immutable, and accessible.

Autonomous: Our platform empowers programs to claim and manage their registry profiles independently. This approach promotes autonomy, flexibility, and resilience, allowing grant programs to establish their identity, provide real-time updates, and organically grow awareness, regardless of the platform(s) they use to manage their program’s operational aspects. With the ability to customize and differentiate their profiles, grant programs can showcase their unique value proposition, attract aligned applicants, and streamline the profile management process, saving time and resources.

Data/Analytics: Our registry will incorporate data analytics capabilities to provide valuable insights. Grant program managers and applicants can leverage these tools to monitor progress, identify trends, and communicate results effectively, while applicants can discover relevant funding opportunities.

News & Current Events: Powered by :satellite:Crypto Grant Wire, the news aggregator, will feature updates, announcements, and thought leadership pieces to help keep users in the loop on emerging trends, new funding opportunities, and insightful perspectives.

Reputation: Our platform is not just a registry of grant programs but a system that enhances program reputation visibility. By leveraging on-chain data and enabling other services to connect and contribute to reputation metrics, we hope to create a view of each program’s effectiveness, reliability, and impact over time. This information empowers builders to make informed decisions when searching for grant opportunities, ensuring they allocate their time and resources to the most promising and reputable programs.

For the Cartographer Syndicate: Many sites aggregating this information today are inaccurate and only as good as the sole curator who keeps the information current. To ensure that our registry remains accurate and comprehensive, we created the Cartographer Syndicate that will:

  • Curate and verify grant program listings to ensure the information provided is reliable, up-to-date, and trustworthy.
  • Expand the registry’s coverage by identifying and adding new grant opportunities across the Web3 landscape.
  • Actively share updates via Crypto Grant Wire on the latest developments in the Web3 grants landscape, keeping the community informed and engaged.
  • Experiment with novel funding mechanisms and incentivize contributions.

Let me know if this helps with your question or if any other clarity I can provide. Thanks for your interest in our work!

Sov

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Love the front-facing Notion for transparency. Also works well as a resource bank.

Nice job here.

AC

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Posting here and update on our progress and next steps for Week 27.

Moving forward myself or @rithikha will be posting updates here weekly on our progress and next steps to ensure transparency in our work back to the Arbitrum Community.

Progress: The Cartographer Syndicate has made significant strides in the past couple of weeks, completing several key milestones ahead of schedule. We’ve successfully launched all planned RFPs, initiated direct contributor incentives, and finalized criteria for the Quadratic Funding (QF) rounds. Tasks completed include establishing schedules for RFPs and contributor incentives, commencing application drives, and initiating outreach to qualified builder teams.

We’re on track to all of our milestones; you can find them at the link below:

Challenges: Our primary challenge has been limited reach and visibility due to our intentional approach to recruiting and maintaining a high-context community. We’ve addressed this by collaborating within our team to increase word-of-mouth reach. We’re also developing a nomination system for organic network growth, balancing the need for increased visibility with our commitment to quality engagement. The Syndicate is now 40 members and growing and we will be releasing announcements later this week with key partners on our work and collaborations.

Learnings: This week provided valuable insights into RFP development. By collaborating with experts, we’ve released our RFPs and contributor incentives. We’ve also defined our QF Round Eligibility Criteria and started to define what we believe Conviction Voting will look like with Gardens.

Syndicate member @ZER8 will also be using Convex Voting to rank projects within the Thank ARB M1B program. This approach allows us to experiment safely, consistently rank impact categories, and evaluate team performance without distributing funding. It adds an extra layer of credible neutrality and protection, potentially serving as a valuable filter for future milestones

These learnings have led to adjustments in our project plan, including integrating feedback from qualified builders and partners into the RFPs and adding parallel conviction voting to our QF round plans.

Next Steps: For this week, our primary goals are:

  1. Prep for the launch of the QF round by mid-July
  2. Drive final applications for RFPs closing on 7/5
  3. Support current RFP applicants with resources
  4. Frame initial tasks for contributor incentive participants
  5. Test Gardens platform and finalize conviction voting specifics
  6. Publish eligibility criteria for conviction voting

Priority tasks include finalizing and launching the QF round, conducting outreach for last-minute RFP applications, developing initial tasks for contributor incentive participants, testing and finalizing conviction voting implementation on Gardens, and creating governance documentation.

We’re actively pursuing qualified builders for RFPs (Milestone 2.1), defining our admissions process and member structure (Milestone 2.2), and releasing project plans for all major objectives (Milestone 2.3). These tasks are in progress with a July 5, 2024 deadline.

We focus on increasing visibility and attracting more qualified participants across all initiatives while maintaining our high-context community standards. All progress and objectives are viewable in real-time on our Notion site, with custom views for each RFP and objective.

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Extremely excited to test the new mechanism and also to see Conviction voting in action!
The motto should be…“Buy one allocation mechanism, get one free” :rofl:

I have a feeling that the Syndicate will soon become one of the most valuable players in the web3 grants wordl, seeing almost all the top grants talent in one telegram group is exciting Congrats!!!

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Welcome to the Cartographer Syndicate’s Week 28 update. In our commitment to transparency, we’ve made our project plans publicly accessible, including our weekly progress. You can track our project updates in real-time at:

Project Progress:

RFP 1 Reputation Systems - Trustful (by Blockful): @danimim @zeugh and the team at Trustful is developing an on-chain reputation using Ethereum Attestation Service (EAS) for grant program evaluation. Their approach allows grantees to evaluate grant programs through attestations and badges, opening up new forms of grant program accountability. The team’s background includes multiple hackathon wins and significant contributions to DAOs like ENS. They plan to implement a nomination system for organic network growth as part of their proposal. More details on their work is below:

RFP 2 Data & Analytics—Ecosystem Vision: @duckdegen and his team will create a grant information ecosystem with customized data collection and interactive dashboards. They will customize forms for data collection, integrate with OSO systems, and create visualizations of funding trends and project success rates. Their approach will include BigQuery integration and YAML files for efficient data processing to build a scalable solution for the Web3 Grant Registry.

RFP 3 News Aggregation System - @daveytea and the team at x23.ai: Building on their existing product aggregating data from numerous governance forums, x23 will develop Crypto Grant Wire 2.0 for grant discovery and analysis. They will create a dedicated Grant feed with advanced categorization and prioritization using ML, NLP, and generative AI for real-time information condensing, intelligent ranking, and precise data filtering. We’re looking forward to the instant search feature the team will implement. You can check out the work they have already done at their site below:

RFP 4 Grant Program Analysis— @ZER8 & @mashal: The duo will analyze Web3 grant programs, including Arbitrum Foundation and Thank ARB Milestone 1, to develop a maturity framework for grant programs. They plan to interview key ecosystem stakeholders and leverage their extensive experience in grant management and ecosystem building in their analysis. The insights from this analysis will be incorporated into the registry as part of the reputation system (RFP 1) being developed with Trustful.

In addition to the RFPs, other work is progressing:

Convex Voting Experiments: Syndicate Community member @ZER8 is experimenting with convex voting to rank impact in grant programs. This approach uses convex functions to emphasize diminishing returns and prioritize grants that show significant potential for impact even with smaller funding amounts. The experiment will be applied to ReFi in Arbitrum, Oasis Onchain, and Giv-Eth programs within Thank Arb Milestone 1B. What’s particularly noteworthy is the potential to use this as a prediction mechanism, allowing us to evaluate team performance and rank impact categories without distributing funding, adding an extra layer of credible neutrality to the grant evaluation process.

Direct Contributor Incentives: We launched a contributor program with four tracks to maintain and expand our grant registry:

  • Registry Management: Engaging contributors to meticulously review and update the registry on KarmaGap, ensuring data accuracy and completeness.
  • Logging Bugs/Improvements: Leveraging our community’s collective intelligence to identify areas for enhancement, from simple fixes to complex improvements like API integrations.
  • Grant Ecosystems Check: Utilizing the expertise of grant program managers to ensure our data is comprehensive and up-to-date, particularly focusing on specific ecosystem information.
  • Experimental Contributions: This is an open-ended track that encourages innovative ideas that could revolutionize how we manage and utilize the registry.

Challenges:

Our main challenge remains to curate a high-context community without relying on broad social media outreach. We’re focusing on direct invites and personal connections to maintain quality and focus in our group while still getting the word out and leaving the door open to new ideas and people.

Learnings:

We’re observing the value of diverse perspectives within our growing community. Members from various backgrounds contribute uniquely to the project, shaping the nature of our work. What started as a Telegram Group with a few members has grown to something we couldn’t have dreamed of, and it’s amazing to see it take shape!

As the Syndicate community collaborates, ideas are emerging that, while outside our immediate scope, point to future possibilities for our evolution :slightly_smiling_face:

Next Steps:

  1. Launch the QF Round by 7/15
  2. Continue targeted recruitment
  3. Kickoff work on approved RFPs
  4. Continue to drive contributor incentives
  5. Grow the group to 60+ members (currently at 50)
  6. Finalize the conviction voting plan

Lastly, @mmurthy and @Sov recently recorded a GreenPill episode with Kevin Owocki, providing an in-depth look at the registry’s background and vision. Stay tuned for its release!

Onward and upward! We’ll keep updates coming here with more details as our work continues!

Sov

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Welcome to the Cartographer Syndicate’s Week 29 update.

As we progress to our program delivery phase, we see developments across multiple areas and focus on key performance indicators (KPIs) to demonstrate our progress to Arbitrum. Let’s dive in:

RFP Progress:

Our RFPs are now in full swing, and all teams are actively working on their projects. The call notes from each week’s kickoff are in the links below.

  1. Reputation Systems (RFP 1): The team has designed an on-chain reputation system using Ethereum Attestation Service (EAS) for grant program evaluation. They’ve developed a user-friendly interface featuring a timeline of reviews and a badge system with star ratings for different aspects of the grant experience. The system will integrate with Karma GAP, displaying aggregated review data in the grant program registry.
  2. Data Analytics Integration (RFP 2): Ecosystem Vision started by integrating historical data from various Arbitrum grant programs. It’s developing a comprehensive view of the ecosystem’s grant landscape, which will soon be visualized in a new tab on its platform.
  3. News Aggregation and Curation (RFP 3): x23.ai is making strides in evolving Crypto Grant Wire into a more automated and user-friendly platform, enhancing our ability to aggregate and curate relevant web3 grant news.

Funding and Community Initiatives:

We’ve applied for additional matching funds through Gitcoin Grants GG21 Community Rounds. I’m proud to announce that we took the top spot and will receive 50K in additional matching funds for the upcoming round. More details below:

Program Transparency Initiative:

Recent discussions with representatives from Stellar and Karma have sharpened our focus on verifiable grant funding data, cross-chain reputation, and standardized reporting. These conversations guide our efforts to create a unified data structure for grant reporting. Our hope for this initiative is to drive better transparency of programs through:

  • Verifiable grant funding data: Linking on-chain activity to grant submissions and projects for better transparency and verification.
  • Cross-chain reputation: Enabling grant programs to see a project’s history across different ecosystems to prevent grant farming and make better funding decisions.
  • Standardized reporting: Creating a common framework for grant programs to report their funding data consistently and comparably.

KPIs and Community Engagement:

From here, we’re emphasizing meeting our KPIs to demonstrate our progress to Arbitrum DAO. You can find information on the KPIs we are committed to achieving through this program at this link:

We’re also enhancing our community management efforts to maintain our high-context, high-value community while increasing engagement. Some ideas we’re exploring include:

  • Daily conversation starters
  • Encouraging community members to take ownership of certain initiatives

These efforts aim to make our group fun and productive, balancing signal and noise.

Challenges and Next Steps:

Our main challenge remains balancing these multiple initiatives while ensuring each receives the attention it deserves. Looking ahead, our focus will be on:

  • Supporting our RFP teams in their ongoing work
  • Finalizing our QF round preparations
  • Further developing our Program Transparency Initiative
  • Implementing our enhanced community management strategies
  • Consistently tracking and meeting our KPIs

We’re excited about our progress and look forward to sharing more updates as we build in public.

Stay tuned for more developments from the Cartographer Syndicate! LFG!

Sov

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Welcome to the Cartographer Syndicate’s Week 30 update. As we continue to build, we’re excited to share our progress across a few of the initiatives.

Project Progress:

Quadratic Funding (QF) Round: We’ve successfully launched our QF round in partnership with the Grants Innovation Lab and MetaGov. We’re anticipating applications from projects contributing to the Web3 grants ecosystem. Eligible contributions include enhancing the Web3 grants on-chain registry, improving grant discovery, streamlining application processes, and more. You can find more information and apply here:

RFP 1 (Reputation Systems): The team is developing a working model and architecture for reputation assignments in grant programs. They’ve defined key elements like grantee actions and contract types and established a set of badges, including “Clear Goals” and “Fair Rounds.” UI development is underway, with plans to integrate a new tab into the Karma GAP’s front end. Check out some of the work at this link:

RFP 2 (Data Analytics Integration): UI design is progressing with a Figma sketch under review. Initial deployments of ecosystem.vision are on a private domain. Data integration efforts are underway, including research and new questions for GG21 community rounds. The team is coordinating with RFP1 regarding badge and attestation data dependencies.

RFP 3 (News Aggregation and Curation): The team is developing a scalable method to extract grant-related discussion topics. An MVP has been launched, pulling content related to Grants or Funding from existing data sources. Check it out at this link:

RFP 4 (Grant Program Analysis): The team has reviewed practices from 13 programs and is analyzing AGD Forum insights. They’re working on defining an effective framework for grant programs, categorizing them into pilot, maturing, and mature programs.

Direct Contributor Incentives: We are close to completing all updates on the registry and have used the run-through of the system to identify and resolve bugs. You can see the bug board and suggested improvements from the team here:

Firestarters Award: We have been awarded funds via the Firestarters Program to help offset ongoing costs, specifically for data/analytics functions of the registry. We appreciate this greatly, and it will help ensure that the feeds from OpenSourceObserver stay up and running for the next year.

Convex Voting: We’re progressing on our convex voting initiative, coordinating with ThankARB Milestone 1B program managers and expert reviewers. We aim to decide which programs to test Convex Funding on by the end of the week. The intent is to use convex functions to prioritize high-impact grants, potentially optimizing resource allocation in future initiatives. The pilot will apply CFX to three out of five selected grant programs, with milestones including creating a ranking framework and tracking outcomes. More details here:

Milestones and KPIs:

We’ve completed all Milestone 1 and 2 objectives and are on track for Milestone 3. We’re now increasing our focus on tracking and meeting our defined KPIs. You can track our progress here for our Program Milestones along with RFPs here:

Challenges:

While community growth has been impressive, we see room for improvement in management and engagement. We’re working on strategies to enhance community interaction and will ask some members to step up and take on more responsibility for this function moving forward.

Next Steps:

  1. Drive in applications to the QF round
  2. Finalize convex voting pilot programs
  3. Explore and potentially award 1-2 new RFPs with excess budget from Contributor Incentives
  4. Develop strategies for improved community management
  5. Continue to track and meet our KPIs

Until next time!

Sov

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Welcome to the Cartographer Syndicate’s Week 31 update. We’re excited to share our progress across various initiatives as we continue to build.

Project Progress:

RFP 1 (Reputation Systems): Blockful has made significant progress on smart contract development and user interface design. For smart contracts, focus on two main components: the Resolver Contract for validating grant and review schemas and the more complex Scorer Contract for badge scaling and scoring. On the UI front, they’ve created initial designs for the Review Section, including components like CardReview, DynamicStarsReview, and NavbarReview. The team is working on integrating these new components with the existing Karma architecture.

RFP 2 (Data Analytics Integration): The ecosystem.vision is now deployed and partially connected to the required data infrastructure. The team has built the routing skeleton and is awaiting the final UI designs. They’ve defined the URL structure as SEO-friendly. An example of a grantee in the ThankArb program is available, though currently without actual data. The team is working on pulling data from their backend, OSO, and the GTC indexer and creating APIs to relay this data to the front end.

RFP 3 (News Aggregation and Curation): The x23.ai team has made substantial progress on their news aggregation system. They’ve implemented search functionality for the feed data, allowing for a refined search experience for Crypto Grant Wire. The team has deployed these updates to The Grantwire Feed | x23.ai. Their next steps include improving the categorization of grant data.

RFP 4 (Grant Program Analysis): The team is making progress on their analysis of grant programs. They are finalizing work on Milestone 1, which focuses on Best Practices and Program Effectiveness, with submission scheduled for Friday. As part of their research, they’ve interviewed 3 out of 6 targeted grant program experts, including Thrive, AGD, and Karma.

Direct Contributor Incentives: Multiple contributors are actively enhancing the registry. Their efforts are focused on two main areas: identifying new projects, updating existing project information, ensuring overall accuracy, and integrating new data sources to enhance the registry’s depth and richness. We anticipate these manual updates will be completed by the end of next week, significantly improving the quality and comprehensiveness of our registry data.

QF Round: Our QF Round has garnered significant interest, with 39 applications received. Of these, 15 have already been approved, demonstrating the high quality of submissions. The applicants represent diverse projects contributing to the Web3 grants ecosystem, including grant program analytics, innovative funding mechanisms, news aggregation, and tooling development. Notable applications include Pairwise for stakeholder signaling, RnDAO’s experimentation with novel funding mechanisms, and Open Source Observer’s work on impact measurement. We are reviewing the remaining applications and expect to complete all reviews and approvals this week.

Allo-matic Initiative: We’ve begun exploring a new concept called Allo-matic and are considering reallocating additional budgets. Allo-Matic aims to leverage LLMs to assist capital allocators in designing programs with custom mechanisms, incorporating learnings and execution plans.

Academic Recognition: Eugene, a member of the Syndicate, recently spoke at Carnegie Mellon University, where he mentioned our registry work. The presentation highlighted the importance of standardizing grant program data and improving transparency in the Web3 grants ecosystem. You can see more on this with the links below:

Milestones and KPIs:

This week, we’ve zoomed in to track our 5 main KPIs: As of this week. With the launch of our Gitcoin GG21 QF round we expect this number to hit and likely surpass our target of 30 grants. Milestone 3 objectives are currently in progress, and we’ve begun to track our progress on the project’s success KPI more granularly. Over the last week, we’ve grown from 69 to 76 members and surpassed our goal of engaging 10,000 community members through social media, with to date 22,673 impressions.

You can track and find more information about KPI’s and current progress here.

Challenges and Next Steps:

Our main challenge remains balancing these multiple initiatives while ensuring each receives the attention it deserves. Looking ahead, our focus will be on:

  1. Supporting our RFP teams in their ongoing work
  2. Completing the manual updates for the registry
  3. Further exploring the potential of the Allo-Matic initiative
  4. Continuing to track and meet our KPIs
  5. Complete Reviews for QF Round and LAUNCH!

We’re excited about our progress and look forward to sharing more updates as we build in public. Stay tuned for more developments from the Cartographer Syndicate!

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Welcome to the Cartographer Syndicate’s Week 32 update. We’re coming into the homestretch!

Project Progress:

RFP 1 (Reputation Systems): Having wrapped up all work on architecture, Blockful has now shifted their focus to front-end development, which is now their primary focus and 90% complete. Key interfaces have been finalized, including Grant Program, Badge Scorer, Badge Registration, and Collective Scores. The CardReview structure with Badge SVG, description, and star ratio has been implemented, along with a NavbarReview component and style changes for enhanced user interaction. For smart contracts, three main components are in development using the Foundry framework: EAS Resolver, Scorer and Badge Registry, and Grant Program Registry.

RFP 2 (Data Analytics Integration): The team has completed designs for the homepage on Ecosystem.Vision (EV), as well as begun integration of Karma Gap APIs. Good progress has been made with styling frontend components for EV and work to refine the UI will continue this week. Work on the EV internal schema has also been solidified and the team is ready to begin aggregating data.

RFP 3 (News Aggregation and Curation): The x23.ai team has been working behind the scenes this week to build out the backend of the Custom Grantwire Feed. This work includes support for a variety of data sources, such as blog posts, page directories, etc, which are expected to be completed over the course of this week. The team has also mapped out a better approach to categorise content, with implementation as their next step.

RFP 4 (Grant Program Analysis): In addition to completing Milestone 1 - Best Practices and Program Effectiveness, the team has interviewed 3 grant program experts DisruptionJoe (Thrive), Bill (AGD), Makesh (Karma). They are also well along Milestone 2 and have created an alpha version of the Grant Maturity Index.

Direct Contributor Incentives: Our contributors have reviewed and updated 75% of the entries in the KarmaGap registry, significantly improving data accuracy. The Bugs/Improvements track has identified 12 new areas for enhancement, including 3 potential API integrations that could streamline our data flow. For the Grant Ecosystems Check, we’ve had 5 grant program managers provide detailed updates on their ecosystem’s latest developments. Finally, in our Experimental Contributions track, we’ve received 2 innovative proposals for revolutionizing registry management, which are currently under review by the core team.

QF Round: The GG21 QF Round has closed for applications and is now open for donations. After reviewing applications we’re happy to announce 53 projects in the Web3 Grants Ecosystem Advancement round. Donations are open for 9 more days until August 21st at 5pm PDT and the participating projects can be found here.

Convex Voting: The team has gained access to data from REFI, Giveth, and RWA programs, which were received in various formats and is now being standardized and integrated. Work is moving towards completing the final milestone involving applying the convex voting system to the Syndicates ThankARB programs and elsewhere. This will allow comparison of results with quadratic funding voters’ preferences for Giveth/syndicate, tracking for REFI, and comparing with program allocators for RWA. The goal is to evaluate the effectiveness of the convex ranking system across different grant programs.

Conviction Voting: We have recruited a Council Safe of 10 members that will manage the setup and maintenance of our conviction voting experiment on Gardens v2. Details and plans for this experiment are here. Next step for the Council Safe is to draft a Covenant that will serve as the social contract for the participants of the open community.

Milestones and KPIs:

Our biggest milestone this week is the opening of donations for the gitcoin round. With the selection of participating projects, we are now directly funding 58 deserving projects, surpassing our goal of 30 awarded grants. RFP projects have completed an average of 43% of their objectives, with much of this work spent wrapping up core planning and infrastructure development. Over the last week, we’ve grown from 76 to 85 members and have surpassed our goal of engaging 10,000 community members through social media, with 22,673 impressions to date.

Learnings, Challenges and Next Steps:

We’ve noticed increased collaboration among Syndicate members, some of whom have scheduled calls to better understand other projects’ milestones and developments and are exploring where overlap or opportunities to join forces may be. We’ve continued to grow, now at 85 members strong, and continue to explore ways to increase our reach in the wider web3 and grants ecosystem, especially in relation to the GG21 QF round, which is now open for donations.

We’re looking forward to seeing the various projects and threads the Syndicate has been exploring come together as we head into the final month of the thankARB program. Stay tuned!

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Thank you for the reports, @Sov. This project will be of great value to the entire ecosystem. I’m excited to implement the reputation system for the grants program. We are always concerned about aggregate reputation to members, but reputation for the parties that drive the ecosystem impact is something really important. Cartographers Syndicate helped me see this other side. What we are building is incredibly amazing!

I invite everyone to participate, and I extend my invitation to the Office Hours of Trustful, where we will discuss reputation and showcase the latest developments from RFP 1.

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This Syndicate is pushing the grants game in web3 to another level! :rocket:

As someone who is part of the Syndicate and working on projects I can 100% say that the way the Syndicate is organized and managed should be in the manuals of project management in web3 :smiley:

@Sov pm skills are competing with @shawn16400 from Thrive :eyes:

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Welcome to the Cartographer Syndicate’s Week 33 update. We’re coming into the homestretch!

Project Progress:

RFP 1 (Reputation Systems): The team has completed the architecture, most contracts, and front-end flow. The next steps include final implementations, remaining contracts, and gathering user feedback. They engaged with RFP 3 and connected with RFP 2 and RFP 4 teams. They’re now focusing on integrating these projects: displaying their reputation data in RFP 2, incorporating RFP 4’s maturity level in their future RFP, and potentially exchanging reputation data between RFP 3 and RFP 1. Post-deadline, they’re considering improving continually, shifting focus to grant reputation, and measuring transparency through information accessibility, clear selection criteria, decision-making disclosure, and financial openness.

RFP 2 (Data Analytics Integration): The team has integrated Karma Gap, adding grant program listings to the UI and integrating OSO and Gitcoin data while fine-tuning interfaces. A current challenge is Karma Gap’s lack of ThankArb exposure, which blocks end-to-end data integration testing.

RFP 3 (News Aggregation and Curation): The team has nearly completed backend support for new data sources and seeks test content. They’ve added filtering to the grant wire feed at app.x23.ai/feeds/grantwire, allowing users to filter by content type, tags/categories, and protocols. An open-source repo has been created for community data contributions, with an admin approval process. This approach aims to manage large-scale contributions while aligning with public goods principles, though it’s still in progress. Feedback on

RFP 4 (Grant Program Analysis): The second and third milestones have been completed, with the highlight this week being the creation of the grant maturity index, spearheaded by @mashalw. This tool represents a promising advancement in grant assessment methodology, and the team is currently rigorously testing and refining the index with various grant experts.

QF Round: Donations are open for the GG21 Web3 Grants Ecosystem Advancement round until 2024/08/2117:00 PDT. Our current stats for the 125,000 ARB Matching Pool:

  • $5,461.22 Total USD Crowdfunded

  • 57 Total Projects

  • 916 Total Donations

  • 277 Total Donors

Convex Voting: The team has started recruiting expert grant reviewers. @ZER8 created the RANKPOTs framework and strategy. This week, we are applying it on the projects from the Thankarb Ml1bm, namely the REFI and Giveth programs. Next week, we hope to finish RWA and Syndicate (if time allows).

We are using a three-tier system and will rely on input from three different reviewers who will independently rank the projects to ensure the credible neutrality of the results.

Conviction Voting: Last week, we recruited members to the Cartographer’s Syndicate Council Safe! This is the multisig that will create the Gardens v2 community, where our Conviction Voting Pool(s) will be run through. We accepted volunteers from the Telegram channel on a first-come, first-served basis. See the Council Safe members and program overview in our Notion doc.

Our next steps are to create a Covenant for the community that will serve as the enforceable social contract and choose a Tribunal Safe to arbitrate on proposal disputes.

Milestones and KPIs:

Our biggest milestone this week is opening donations for the gitcoin round. With the selection of participating projects, we are now directly funding 58 deserving projects, surpassing our goal of 30 awarded grants. RFP projects have completed an average of 43% of their objectives, with much of this work spent wrapping up core planning and infrastructure development. Over the last week, we’ve grown from 89 members and surpassed our goal of engaging 10,000 community members through social media, with 22,673 impressions.

Learnings, Challenges, and Next Steps:

This week’s main focus was boosting the GG21 and the many deserving projects accepted into the Web3 ecosystem advancement round. True to the name, this was challenging given our lack of centralized social media presence, and once again, we relied on the community to support each other and get the word out!

RFPs will wrap up over the next two weeks, and we’ll take stock of what we have learned.

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Welcome to the Cartographer Syndicate’s Week 36 update. The team has been busy building and running the QF Round for the last couple of weeks, so we will give an update on Weeks 35 and 36 as our last weekly update as part of the ThankARB Grant program.

Working with these teams has been a pleasure, and we appreciate the opportunity from Arbitrum / Thank ARB. Let’s dive in…

Project Progress:

RFP 1 (Reputation Systems): The team has completed their RFP, delivering a customized version of Trustful, a reputation aggregator designed for the Cartographers Syndicate community. Developed by Blockful, this system focuses on creating a robust reputation framework for grant programs. The final deliverables include the creation of seven reputation badges attesting to the quality of grant programs; a review system for each badge with ratings from 1 to 5; a recognition system ensuring only grant recipients can evaluate programs, preventing unwarranted negative feedback; and integration with the Karma GAP front-end for seamless user experience.

The team made significant progress in the final week, completing three major milestones and finalizing integrations (demonstrated in a recent demo). They enhanced the front-end’s responsiveness, added new features for submitting reviews, and completed smart contract integration. The team deployed GrantRegistry and BadgeRegistry contracts to testnet, set up a Resolver contract to handle grant program reviews and calculate average scores, and implemented a TrustfulScorer contract to manage the badge-based scoring systems. This implementation builds on Trustful’s previous MVP used at ZuVillage Georgia, advancing its roadmap by incorporating a scoring component. The project’s future development aligns closely with the community’s priorities of resource allocation, grants, and impact assessment in the Web3 ecosystem, with the implementation of ZK being crucial in future iterations to protect grantees’ ability to provide honest evaluations without risk of repercussions.

A demo, links to contracts, and other information can be found below:

RFP 2 (Data Analytics Integration): The team has prepared integrations with the grant registry, OSO, and Gitcoin and initiated the incorporation of AI-powered grant search functionality. Final touches are underway to fully implement this AI functionality into the system, refine these integrations, and enhance the user interface in this last stretch.

RFP 3 (News Aggregation and Curation): Backend iteration for Crypto Grant Wire continues (MVP can be found here: The Grantwire Feed | x23.ai), and an open source repo for collecting community grant information has been created for others to contribute and freely use the data being pulled into the aggregator. You can access the GitHub repository here: GitHub - x23-ai/CommunityGrants: A place for aggregating community grant programs, news, and updates

RFP 4 (Grant Program Analysis): The team is finishing their final report, adding visuals, and defining how they will integrate their findings with RFP1. They have adapted the program effectiveness part to enable grant programs to utilize tooling and formulas to derive their program effectiveness rather than just analyzing. For the integration with other components of the Web3 Grant Registry, multiple options were explored, with badging emerging as the solution moving forward, though the exact format is not yet decided. The most simplistic way to add grant maturity to the reputation system developed by RFP1 is to have a program maturity badge. The final report is incoming and will include these updates and integrations.

QF Round:

The GG21 Web3 Grants Ecosystem Round has officially wrapped up. Funds are on their way to all grantees; meanwhile, here are our final stats for the round:

  • 125,000 ARB Matching Pool

  • 57 Projects

  • $10,782 Crowdfunded

  • 1,715 Donations

  • 543 Donors

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Convex Voting: The team added two bonus grant programs to the experiment’s analysis: GG21 ThankARB and GG21 Syndicate rounds. While this was an addition to the original proposal, it sped up the learning and iteration process during the pilot. The team is now on its third and final milestone to track and publish findings in a final report.

Conviction Voting: The first members have been recruited to the Cartographer’s Syndicate Gardens Safe! This is the multisig that will create the Gardens v2 community, where our Conviction Voting Pool(s) will be run through. We accepted volunteers from the Telegram channel on a first-come, first-served basis. See the Council Safe members and program overview in the Notion doc for more info. The team’s next steps are to create a Covenant for the community that will serve as the enforceable social contract and choose a Tribunal Safe to arbitrate on proposal disputes.

Milestones, KPIs, and Initial Program Learnings:

We’ve successfully hit 5 out of our 6 KPIs, with our last funding allocation total currently being finalized and final deliverables confirmed with RFP grantees. Here are the KPIs:

  • Number of Grants Awarded: We aim to award at least 30 grants to deserving individuals and projects, reflecting our support for valuable initiatives within the Web3 ecosystem. 62 Grants Awarded
  • Total Funding Distributed: We aim to distribute the entirety of the funding amount provided, ensuring full utilization of the allocated budget. 84.8% allocated with the remainder targeted to be disbursed next week.
  • Project Success Rate: We target a project success rate of at least 90%, measured by completing defined milestones and objectives. 92% Project Success Rate
  • Community Engagement: We aim to reach and engage with at least 10,000 community members through social media, forums, and newsletters : 34,845 impressions.
  • User Satisfaction Rate: We target a user satisfaction rate of 85% or higher among grantees and participants, measured through an end-of-program survey.
    85.2% User Satisfaction Rate
  • Number of New Data Integrations: We aim to integrate at least five new data sources into the Web3 Grant Registry. Completed

We’ve helped launch and/or supported 62 projects and contributors (32 more than we had initially aimed for), had a 92% project success rate despite a tight 2-month timeline for RFP grantees, reached 34,845 people via social media (more than triple our original goal), and integrated with over five new data sources for the Web3 grants Registry.

Responses from grantees in the program are still coming in; however, initial numbers score the program at:

  • Satisfaction with the opportunities for networking, collaboration, and partnerships provided by the Syndicate and ThankARB program: 94%
  • Effectiveness of the program supporting web3 grants innovation: 90%
  • Quality of communication and support from the PM team: 96%

We’re excited about the progress and milestones we’ve achieved over the summer and look forward to sharing more updates as we continue to build in public and consolidate our learnings.

Thank you to everyone supporting the Cartographer Syndicate; until next time :saluting_face:

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