Renewal Grant Support Squad 2023H2

by 0xe6af22b8fd4a2fdfec9a0b18c6be9683882d70e6 (Yararasita)

Should the following $114,600 grant in the Core Unit category be approved?

Abstract

After a year working with the grants program, the Grants Support Squad has gathered insights from more than 150 grantees to make adjustments to the program, and launched a initiatives based on the requests of the community such as the Ask Me Anything Sessions, a Revocations Committee, Testing Tuesdays initiative, providing public roadmaps, publishing articles from grantees, with the main objective of providing all they need to make successful projects and promote their work.

With that in mind, our goals remain the same: Make the best grants program Decentraland DAO can have by supporting the grantees to make the best projects on their ability, to foster transparency from the grantees to the community, and take care of the DAO treasury.

Grant size

114,600 USD in DAI

Project duration

6 months

Beneficiary address

0x658497d7681e4Fb18C65AbD5Ce066A1e3082c1e5

Email address

gia.castello@decentraland.org

Description

Since June 2022 the Grant Support Squad has onboarded 100% of the grantees that entered the Grants Program at Decentraland. The team was able to understand their needs, identified in the last 6 month period 15 blockers and 55 requests (2 being solved by the team) and provided solutions to them. We wrote the grant's FAQs to the DAO documentation, added security recommendations, we contributed to 17 AskMeAnything sessions to connect the community with the Decentraland Foundation since Oct 2022. More recently, in March 2023 we have launched the Testing Tuesday Initiative, to give the grantees a space to demo their projects and get feedback from the community. So far we have hosted 11 sessions, and we’ve given POAPs to the community as a way to acknowledge their valuable contributions. We would like to continue updating the documentation and fostering spaces of collaboration between the Decentraland DAO and Decentraland Foundation, and provide support to the grantees in these or other initiatives that might arise based on their needs.

Another frequent request from our grantees has been promotion. We hired a copywriter (Luis Mienville) who so far had written 13 articles in the Decentraland Blog about the amazing work our grantees are doing. We also encouraged grantees to show their progress in our bi-weekly Townhalls. Since September, we have an average of 3 grantees showing their progress in each Town Hall, who create videos and socialize with the community their advancements. We would like to continue nurturing these spaces of promotion, which are crucial to showcase their work.

To take care of the community treasury, we have recommended to the DAO committee to revoke grants that were delayed, not delivering their grant projects, or unable to finish due to technical blockers, until they can deliver their commitment with the DAO. In our last grant, we had recovered $565.842, and since then, 3 grant vesting contracts were resumed as they resolved their blockers, recovering from legacy revoked grants $181.619, and $75.000 from the renewed grants program adding a total of $256.619 to the DAO treasury during this first year. We are creating a Revocation Committee to distribute this responsibility with selected members of the community.

Last but not least, we have collaborated with the DAO Facilitation Squad and the DAO Governance Squad to provide them with continuous feedback and partner with them to generate synergy among our efforts to build transparency in the community via promotion and the governance dApp respectively. We’ve also collaborated providing insights to the DAO Committee to restructure the grants program.

We’d love to continue improve our grants program not only with the grantees, but with the broader Decentraland systems, and applying ongoing changes to better serve Decentraland’s sustainable growth.

Here you can see our financial report (jan22-apr23)

Roadmap and milestones

We will continue working on

• Grantees onboarding
• Generate public roadmaps
• Frequent calls based on project size
• Collaborate with the Governance Squad, DAO Committee and Facilitation Squad.
• Organize & host grants section in TownHalls
• Provide technical support to grantees connecting them with stakeholders from the community and from the Decentraland Foundation.
• Provide space to share their work and gather feedback from the community with Testing Tuesdays
• Implement the strategic path of grants “exits” to nurture Decentraland (as verified partners, advisors, grant renewals, service providers)
• Collaborate with bidding and tendering process

During these 6 months, we've had learnings and would like to implement:

Provide Support to grantees

• Develop a Landing Page to ease the access of information about the Decentraland Grants Program and its initiatives.
• Sending Decentraland DAO branded kits of swag to welcome future grantees, and help brand awareness.

Foster transparency

• Implementation of Public Roadmaps to open up our follow up process as GSS with the rest of the community.
• We are documenting all our processes and want to create the open Operational Guide of the GSS

Take care of the DAO treasury

• Onboard the Revocations Committee selected by the community and support them until they are autonomous.
• Support Bidding and Tendering initiative, sharing our knowledge and resources with its stewards.

This proposal is summarized due to technical limitations. To view it complete and vote on it, visit the DCL DAO Governance dApp