Thanks for asking these questions @rleshner , please find the responses below:
Over the course of the original grants program, there was a shift towards “RFP” and deliverable based funding. This helped ensure that grants went towards outcomes, instead of being delivered up-front with varying (and in many cases, very little) progress. Beyond the contract (above), how will CGP 2.0 ensure that grant recipients deliver on their stated goals? Will there be presentations on community calls, progress reports, or incremental disbursements?
Spot on. To precisely address the same issue, we would be giving out Milestone-based payouts through the tool. The entire grant amount would not be disbursed immediately when an application gets approved. The payouts will be done per milestone. Please find the detailed product wiki for making milestone-based payments here.
Milestone-based payout product screens for the allocators:
The grant proposal has a structure where the applicant must share the milestones and the deliverables to receive the specific payouts.
Grant Application Sample:
Each approved applicant will be required to share their work & progress with the community on regular grants calls (Will be setup exclusively apart from the compound community dev calls if there are too many grant applications). They also use the grants channel on discord to share their work and take the feedback or support from the community.
- The original grants program returned approximately half of its allocated COMP back to the community as unused after six months. If a domain is unallocated after six months, will it’s unused portion be returned to the community?
That’s right, all the remaining funds from the grants program will be returned to the treasury at the end of the program. Also, if there is a domain that is seeing a lot of applications over the other, we might be shifting the funds between the domains accordingly on a case-to-case basis.
- As grants manager, how will the program be marketed? Will you be able to take over the compoundgrants Twitter account and website, etc?
If it is possible to do that, that would be great. Since there is an existing audience for the compound grants twitter page already, Would love to take it over and re-activate it. We planned to do twitter spaces with grant applicants and reviewers and also spread the word in the developer communities regularly. The chosen domain allocators have also mentioned how they would spread the word and source applications in their one-pagers. The Questbook tool also has 20K MAU who come to the tool to apply for the grants programs.
Ref:
https://www.similarweb.com/website/questbook.app/#traffic
- How will the time spent by the allocators and manager be tracked?
The allocators and the manager clock their hours and submit their weekly reports, which can be publicly viewed. This report has specific details like:
- Proposal reviewed | Hours clocked
- Activities performed to market the grants program | Hours clocked
- Miscellaneous | Hours clocked
In general, I would strongly suggest a smaller initial budget for each domain (e.g. $200k over 6 months) knowing that the community can easily increase funding for any domain on an as-needed basis, especially if it is showing results.
We understand the suggestion of $200K instead of $300K for the initial budget for each domain for 6 months Robert, and we agree to it. Will update the proposal and in case more funds are needed, we will request them accordingly.
Most of the concerns here are addressed in the Delegator Onboarding Documentation which will be shared once the program is live. Have shared the relevant parts above for now.