Update: GitcoinDAO’s Adopted Purpose and Essential Intents

Last edit: 7/2/2022

TLDR

After discussing and incorporating community feedback 18, this post confirms GitcoinDAO’s adopted Purpose and Essential Intent statements as ratified by CSDO on Tuesday June 14, 2022. Thanks to everyone who took the share their thoughts on these artifacts.

After the community feedback period ended on June 3rd, I summarized the feedback received and met with several CSDO representatives to discuss what should be incorporated. S/o to @GTChase, @Viriya, @krrisis, and @seanmac for working through the feedback with me and supporting the editing process. Below you’ll find a summary of that feedback with justifications for and against editing language.

Our current Purpose & Essential Intents statements are summarized below:

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

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.

Community Feedback and Adopted Statements

Purpose

Community Feedback & Summary of Changes:
Feedback from the community contained the following major themes and questions:

1. Statement is too vague, broad, or uninspiring;
2. Should our values imbue the statement?
3. Should the DAO’s purpose center on supporting shared needs or creating impact?

CSDO adopted a simplified version of the DAO’s purpose statement that left in “shared needs”, but removed the reference to “build”. This statement is meant to guide the DAO’S direction over the course of the next 100 years, and though broad, there are plenty ways the DAO will evolve in that time. This statement gives the organization room to grow while acknowledging that our work enables communities to create impact for themselves. Finally, we think that by focusing on one active verb, the statement as a whole is clearer.

We think that the edit also addresses some contributor feedback that the purpose statement felt uninspiring, but recognize that some feedback is simply subjective. Either way, MMM is putting finishing touches on draft mission and vision statements that are the more appropriate artifacts to memorialize our aspirations as a DAO. Sean previewed some of that work here 22.

Essential Intent for Protocol Adoption

Community Feedback & Summary of Changes:
The one comment we received focused on making explicit who should use GitcoinDAOs Grants protocol. We decided to leave the language the same because the protocol work is intended to be credibly neutral. The ethics or values that we wish to signal to the broader web3 community are more accurately captured in the work of our Grants Program (see essential intents below).

Another statement emerged in the comment section that sought to acknowledge Gitcoin Passport as a Grants Protocol essential intent. That protocol development is currently underway and a statement confirming that is included below.

Essential Intent for Financial Sustainability

Community Feedback & Summary of Changes:
Feedback on this essential intent called for a more explicit description of our financial strategy and a specific call out for the statement to include a commitment to more ‘effective spending’. Here again, CSDO decided to not change the language. Effective or focused spending is part of a diversified strategy and one of several strategies the workstream leads will engage over the next 12-18 months to support the DAO treasury.

Essential Intent for DAO Organization

Community Feedback & Summary of Changes:
Based on the feedback received, this intent was updated to signal the emergent (or bottoms-up) nature of our internal context sharing and how we would like our internal communications, rituals and messaging to develop.

Other comments to this essential intent focused on whether:

1. Our community should focus on influencing the ecosystem or improving our internal context sharing, and
2. This essential intent was an end in itself or in service of the other intentions listed.

We opted out of making additional changes to the language since we believe the intent stands on its own as important internal work we should push forward over the next year.

Essential Intent for Grants Program Success

Community Feedback & Summary of Changes:
After reviewing the comments, these statements were left as-is. The only feedback received for the here was that CSDO should include the definition of public goods in one of the statements. CSDO decided against this since the discourse around what qualifies as a public good is often a distraction from the important work of educating and growing the ecosystem while running successful grants rounds. My hope is that demonstrating why funding public goods is important will have the same (if not greater) influence on the ecosystem.

Finally…

It’s really important to state here that this is a beginning, not an end. As GitcoinDAO grows, the essential work will change with it. With that said, we hope the statements provide all contributors a clear sense of the direction we’re all building toward.