[GCP-XXX] Gardens seedling GG24 Roadmap Funding

Short Summary Gardens is a community governance platform optimized for bottom-up decision-making. It uses an enforceable Covenant tied to modular conviction voting pools to securely and intelligently signal sentiment and allocate resources to communities and ecosystems as effectively as possible.

This proposal seeks $32,000 to enhance Gardens’ UI/UX and implement key improvements needed to transition Gardens from a niche product to one capable of mass adoption.

Amendment: In addition, Gardens will allocate to Gitcoin 5,000 ⚘GARDEN plus an ongoing 2.5% of future governance token issuance going forward.

Impacted Stakeholders & Expected Outcome GG24 Community Participants - Enhanced conviction voting experience with streamlined workflows and a friendlier UX Gardens Communities - Improved platform usability and mobile accessibility Allo Protocol Ecosystem - Increased TVF by scaling adoption of funding pools on Gardens Gitcoin Stewards - Professional-grade decision-making infrastructure for ecosystem growth and community coordination Expected Outcomes: 2x increase in Gardens usage, significant reduction in onboarding friction, and 5x increase in TVF through Allo by EOY 2025.

Who We Are We are a team of active builders and maintainers of the Gardens platform 15. Gardens is a key ecosystem partner of Gitcoin, having run 2 successful community rounds to date.

In GG22, our Gardens Community Round allocated $30k to communities and raised $14k in external funding - a 1.7x multiplier on Gitcoin’s $20k investment (retrospective 1).

GG23 significantly improved on these results, with $58k allocated and $40k external funding raised - a 3.05x multiplier on Gitcoin’s $21k investment (retrospective).

We hope to continue this trajectory in our GG24 Exit-to-Community round 5, and are expecting increased Gardens usage in other DDA + community rounds as part of Gitcoin 3.0’s multi-mechanism future 1.

Motivation Despite finding product-market fit with niche community builders in pop-up cities, regen communities, and ecosystem growth orgs, Gardens has flown under the radar due to user unfriendliness, complexity, and competitive landscape challenges. This funding directly addresses these shortcomings and brings Gardens from an experimental mechanism for advanced users to a platform ready for mass adoption.

This is our first funding proposal to the Gitcoin community. To date, Gardens has raised $120k for development of our v2 platform from other sources (see our fundraising spreadsheet 2), and has had great engagement in the past year from Gitcoin’s stewards and its broader ecosystem.

Specifications (read more on the forum)