The first ENS DAO Small Grants round went live yesterday. Proposal submissions are now open on https://www.ensgrants.xyz/.
The current round, Public Goods Round 1, will award 1E to the top five voted projects.
Background
This project started as a thread in the Public Goods category, and the working groups have requested funding for Q3/Q4 in their draft budgets to support additional rounds over the next sixth months.
The goal is to provide a simple, open process for the ENS DAO to fund Ecosystem and Public Goods projects. If this works well, the meta-gov working group would like to support building out additional features, while the Public Goods and Ecosystem would fund rounds for their respective working groups.
Huge thanks to @carlosdp for getting this off the ground.
Submission Timeline
Submissions Open - July, 19th Submissions Close & Voting Starts - July, 26th Voting Ends - July, 31st
A brief guide on how to submit a proposal has been published on the DAO’s Newsletter. If you’re looking for additional help crafting a proposal, you can read it here.
This looks fantastic! Great work @carlosdp for getting this up and running so quickly!
Something for Public Goods stewards (@theanthonyware, @AvsA and @ceresstation) to keep in mind with Public Goods small grants: if anyone can submit a proposal, there will inevitably be proposals submitted that are not public goods, either according to the standard economics definition or a definition specific to the ENS DAO/web3. This appears to be happening already.
The obvious issue is having people voting on proposals who lack a basic understanding of what public goods are, and what they should look for when identifying and choosing to fund a public goods project.
On the one hand you may have projects that are not public goods and on the other hand you likely have people voting to fund public goods when they don’t know what public goods are. This is unlikely to lead to the most desirable outcomes.
With public goods in particular, if submissions aren’t going to be screened, there needs to be more education for delegates on what public goods are and what public goods should be funded by the ENS DAO.
This won’t be such an issue with ecosystem or metagov small grants, but is definitely something that we should probably attempt to address with Public Goods small grants.
Education for understanding and clarity on public goods is definitely one of the goals of Public Group Working for this new term as it relates to small grants and, more important, on a larger scale and going forward.
Thank you for the additional information/thread. Speaking of education, I have some follow up questions, and would be happy to disseminate this information to the community:
As Round 1 Submissions close and the voting period starts, is the community encouraged to engaging in campaigns (quasi-lobbying activities) to gain support and votes from delegates with significant voting power for their proposals?
Under any DAO rules are delegates restricted from voting for proposals that financially benefit their own delegates? Is that considered a conflict of interest or quid pro quo? I worry delegates could use their voting power to acquire even more voting power by agreeing to support proposals only if the community supporting said proposals agree to delegate their collective votes to the delegate.
Finally, what type of voting system is being utilized? Are delegates voting for just 1 proposal, or the top 5 proposals, or are they ranking the top 5 similar to the method used in the Steward elections?
I’ll answer this one first, since it’s a straightforward answer based on the implementation.
Voting will use @serenae 's “delegate vote with override” Snapshot strategy. What this means is that delegates are voting for 1 proposal, and all their votes go to that proposal, and the top 5 are based on ranking of how many votes (denominated in $ENS) are given to each. However, with this Snapshot strategy, anyone who has delegated their votes to someone else can choose to vote for a proposal, independent of any their delegate voted for, and their votes will be temporarily re-allocated for this voting round.
This means that you can still vote, even if you have delegated your votes, and you’ll essentially “take back” your votes for this voting round. If you don’t vote yourself, then your votes go with your delegate as normal!
My personal opinion on this: I think this is fair game. Lobbying for you proposal shows you care more about it, and I don’t see a reason (or a method) to restrict that!
There’s no rule around this and there’s no way to enforce it anyways. I don’t think this is a real concern here given how small the amounts involved are, though.
Just wanted to clarify one thing: On Snapshot, there is the strategy (determines how many votes each person gets) and the voting system (how those votes determine the actual outcome).
Like any other strategy, my ERC-20 Votes with Override strategy can be used in conjunction with any voting system you want! So in the future you could use it with Multiple Choice, Quadratic, etc., if you wanted to.
This is outstanding work - thank you so much @carlosdp for your hard work.
One suggestion for voting for future rounds is to consider maybe using runoff voting. When there’s a lot of proposals, people can be discouraged from reviewing them all and participating at all - or they may just look at a few at random before selecting a winner. An alternative is to show people randomly picked pairs of proposals in a splitscreen, and ask them to vote on which is better. They can repeat this until they run out of matchups, or they get bored. At the end, the set of rankings can be used to compute a total order.
This works well for a number of reasons, including that it allows users to participate without having to read every proposal first, and it allows them to express more detailed preferences than a single vote, without complicating the voting system unduly.
A thought about strategy for which matchups to show: You can actually implement this as a partial sorting algorithm, with the user as the comparison operator - probably after shuffling the list randomly first. That way if the user makes it all the way to the end you have a guaranteed total order over the top n, and if they don’t you have win/loss ratios to help compare them.
