Post Updated August 2022.

Other onboarding resources:

Hi frens,

This document is an overview of the Gitcoin ecosystem and what we are coordinating & building towards. It’s jam-packed with information and links to make it easier for contributors, stewards, delgators and community members to get up to speed and learn about our mission. The document is updated on a monthly basis as the DAO evolves and was last updated by @Fred in August 2022.

For weekly updates make sure to check out the Gitcoin Digest!

TLDR

The Purpose of Gitcoin is to empower communities to fund their shared needs.

So far we’ve facilitated over $64mm of funding for public goods & are currently facilitating about $6mm/quarter. And we are just getting started!

The Essential Intents of Gitcoin

1. Protocol Adoption

Build a widely adopted, modular Grants protocol that creates a flourishing ecosystem of funding mechanisms.
Build a widely adopted, modular Pluralism Passport protocol that creates a flourishing ecosystem of network effects around Decentralized Society.

2. Financial Sustainability

Have a comprehensive, diversified strategy for financial stability of the DAO in order to effectively achieve our mission.

3. DAO Organization

Create and promote clear and engaging rituals, communication channels, and messaging that build emergent shared context among GitcoinDAO’s contributors, stewards, and supporters.

4. Grants Program Success

Enable a successful grants protocol launch by dogfooding it internally and supporting ecosystems in adopting it.
Continue to support the Ethereum ecosystem and public goods in web3 and beyond through Gitcoin-led rounds.

We believe that;

Open Source Software is a digital public good that creates $400bn/year in value,
but the creators of OSS don’t have great ways to monetize their work on digital infrastructure.
Our goal is to correct this asymmetry.

We are missionaries.

We believe that it’s all coordination 110. Public goods failures are coordination failures, and we see an opportunity to solve coordination failures with blockchains - a new supertool for solving coordination failures 48.

We know our edge.

Blockchains are our super power. They give us a novel, immutable, global, programmable, transparent substrate for coordination to build upon.

Our weapon of choice is novel mechanism designs deployed to decentralized blockchains.

We have momentum

We are creating $6mm/quarter in funding for public goods and OSS devs.

Vitalik Buterin once said 25 “Gitcoin Grants is establishing itself as a significant pillar of the Ethereum ecosystem that more and more projects are relying on for some or all of their support.”

We are still emerging.

We are still discovering new & innovative ways to solve coordination problems in a DAO-era world. We systematically discover or invent these mechanisms, and if we’re lucky + good, we scale them.

We are the EVM whispers, the DAO cartographers, the internet citizens, and the chaos magicians of the internet of money. We are the homesteaders of the metaverse. We are the schelling point for the hopeful 57.

We build for human thriving.

Our vision is to establish an empowering, open and collaborative space where individuals and communities can access resources in proportion to their value creation independent of their geographic location, education, background or offline identity.

By creating collaborative, decentralized funding mechanisms, Gitcoin has become the natural choice for seeding and supporting digital public goods. Gitcoin enables building for the public, by the public by helping individuals and communities start, fund, and scale open source projects.

We convene the people

We have been hosting virtual & physical events at the heart of Regenerative web3. Checkout our quarterly Schelling Point 47 events, or our weekly DAO Vibes (hosted on Discord), or “Public Goods are Good” twitter spaces.

By convening the people, we hope to build an Impact Network 12 of people focusing on using Web3 for positive impact. We call those projects ImpactDAOS, and by studying ImpactDAOs 8 we can build a webscale infrastructure for regeneration 7.

How we achieve our mission.

Gitcoin is a mission, a community, and a product suite.

If our mission is our focal point, our community is our lifeblood. Our a product - a double sided marketplace that connects digital creatives to the people who want to fund their work. And visa versa.

So far we’ve created $64mm worth of funding 56 for public goods and OSS devs. Specifically, the way we do that is:

Giving members opportunities to earn 184.
Giving members opportunities to learn 87.
Giving members opportunities to connect with one another & prospective career opportunities 53.

How do we do that?

Product-wise, we are building coordination tools for a DAO based world. We do that with

Bounties 101 - Gig-based work for web3 projects.
Hackathons 43 - Build with the coolest web3 projects.
Grants 74 - Crowdfunding for Open Source.

Community-wise, we do that by being mission-first, producing results, by creating vibes + cultivating a positively-self-referential internal culture.

More on how we achieve our mission here 27.

The DAO that governs Gitcoin

We believe that the consent of the governed is the only legitimate basis for government.

This is why Gitcoin is governed by the community. (In order to make sure that Gitcoin is serving its community + founding mission first & foremost)

In May 2021, GTC was released 89. GTC is a governance token with no economic value that governs Gitcoin.

What is Gitcoin?

Gitcoin is an ImpactDAO/ProtocolDAO hybrid 81.
On a human layer, Gitcoin is an egregore 89 - a group of humans who coordinate to achieve our mission.
From a product perspective, we are building a suite of tools for DAO-era coordination of capital & culture 26.
From a governance perspective, we are governed by GTC.
We are progressively decentralizing Gitcoin 36 from a company to a DAO.

There are 3 important concepts to know to understand how to interact with Gitcoin;

Most of the action happens on Discord 85, Discourse 54, or on Twitter 59.
Stewards 60 are ultimately responsible for governing Gitcoin.
Workstreams 47 are the primary mechanism through which work is organized in the DAO.

Workstreams

Workstreams are the way work is organized at Gitcoin. Workstreams have their own budget, leadership structure, tools, and processes on a per-workstream basis. Anyone can propose a workstream by following the proposal process 17. The current active workstreams are:

Moonshot Collective 64 is the DAO rapid prototyping workstream
Public Goods 39 is focused on our mission of funding public goods.
Fraud Detection & Defense 13 is in charge of preventing fraud on Gitcoin Grants.
Memes, Merch, & Marketing 32 is the DAO marketing division.
DAO Operations 4 supports critical operation functions like accounting, hiring, and tooling
Gitcoin Product Collective 8 is the home of product development for Grants 2.0

If you want to learn more about Gitcoin, read this post here 89.

Gitcoin’s Quarterly Cadence

Gitcoin operates in a quarterly cadence. Quarterly Gitcoin Grants Rounds are our Metronome 6

Every quarter, the Gitcoin ecosystem revolves around a quarterly stacked event - a combination (1) Gitcoin Grants round, (2) Hackathon, (3) KERNEL block, and (4) Governance activity

During each quarter, we achieve our mission by deploying millions of $$$ of funding to the community. Typically a quarter looks like this:

Plan for quarterly stacked event.
Execute quarterly stacked event.
Learn from the quarterly stacked event.
Repeat

Our last quarterly event was GR14 (short for Grants Round 14), it started June 8th and ended June 23th. The next round will be GR15 and it starts Septemer 7th and goes until Septemer 22th.

Gitcoin is a vessel for humanity to get to the Quadratic Lands!

Gitcoin is a vessel that we would like to take us to the Quadratic Lands - a place where open source software (and other public goods) are well maintained + healthy.

In the quadratic lands, public goods are funded by quadratic funding + other web3 native funding mechanisms.

The quadratic lands is a north star, we are still discovering where exactly it is and how to get there

Help us find the quadratic lands by telling its story. Members of our community have created this song about the Quadratic Lands 19 or and this visionary video 42.

How to GIT involved.

As of September 2022, here is the way you can get involved in Gitcoin.

Read the weekly Gitcoin Digest updates (email sign-up 8).
Get engaged on Discord 85, Discourse 54 or on Twitter 59
Apply as a Contributor 84 and explore our workstreams
Use Gitcoin 11 to earn, learn, or fund. (use links above)
Follow the list 8 of GitcoinDAO contributors on Twitter
Attend our conference series Schelling Point 47
Explore further through the links below;

Testimonials

Gitcoin Grants is establishing itself as a significant pillar of the Ethereum ecosystem that more and more projects are relying on for some or all of their support. ~Vitalik Buterin 25

I LOVE IT…The community has been outstanding. I have made contact outside of slack w a couple of people. William Schwab was kind enough to ZOOM w me for an hour and tell me his story, letme pick his brain, and as he shared some valuable resources with me. - John Wilkinson

KERNEL is the greatest thing to ever happen to my crypto/business/personal life. I have made plenty of new friends, connected with people who believe in me and want to work together on other projects, and of course learned a lot from other seedlings, mentors and speakers. - Ethan Chiasson

Gitcoin gave me the first break into Ethereum and the crypto space. It helped me find bounties that I could work on and get paid in crypto. After my first ever bounty I got paid a lot and I felt euphoric. - Sebastian TF

I am amazed on a daily basis at the incredible projects and communities in this space. The Gitcoin team and quadratic funding is an invaluable catalyst to bring it all to fruition. Thank you! - Hishamaru Konkon

Gitcoin grants quadratic funding is not just for funds allocation, it’s also a great signaling tool! For the last few rounds, going to Grants | Gitcoin 12 has led me to discover a lot of really cool Ethereum projects I previously did not know about. - Vitalik Buterin

What Gitcoin is doing with public goods funding is absolutely incredible. Nothing but respect to the team and the larger community for the contributions made. - Frobo

Thanks to gitcoin it has helped us to discover our earliest talent and supercharged @KodaDot development. - Matej

People ask me all the time how I got into Solidity and NFT dev. The answer is gitcoin! Beginning of the year I just started doing bounties for a bunch of different projects (@synthetix_io @akashnet_ @SovrynBTC etc) and found the NFT ones were my fave. Such a good way to learn! - sarasioux.et

TLDR - What is Gitcoin? [Aug 2022]