Nouns

One Noun, every day, forever.

nouns.wtf

Its been almost a month since we launched Nouns Grants -- a few takeaways:

Application format

- The application form is performing well with >1 new application per day at current rate. Required video seems like a big boon; adding credibility and ease of digesting proposals. Surprisingly, outright spam has been very low and (subjectively) the quality of applicants high.

- So far so good. Lots of growth potential. However, two downstream bottlenecks adds uncertainty and make it awkward to heavily promote Nouns Grants. Lets take a look at each and how they can be solved:

1/4

building /camp (nouns.camp) and nounsgrants.com

So thats where we stand right now. I wanted to share this as we consider our options for the future. Thoughts and feedback welcome :)

4/4

Voting for grants

- The second bottleneck is getting Nouns to vote in favor and issue the grant. Judging by early signs, the current voting body seems mostly uninterested in issuing the charity-style grants that Nouns Grants is built to attract and incentivize. That is fine; it was always a risk that Nouns wouldn't agree on the vision of what to fund. But its still unfortunate and a setback for the project.

- How do we fix that? Well, we could tweak things with the application format, ask size etc, but small changes seem unlikely to meaningfully impact the vote outcomes. The most drastic but also most promising solution would be to 'swap out the backend' of Nouns and create a new treasury and a new voting body. In doing so, the problem would change from "how do we twist ourselves to please the current voters", to "how do we raise a new treasury from people who believe in the Nouns Grants direction". Definitely a big step to make, but probably the most realistic if we want to continue this experiment.

3/4

Please...no more centralization.😆
Nice to see you are addressing the issues though. 🔥

Promoting candidates

- The first major bottleneck is applications getting stuck at the 'promote candidate to proposal' step. In short, voters are not bringing (the best) candidates to a vote decision. Lots of potential reasons for this, including disinterest, lack of knowledge, poor tooling, gas fees etc.

- How can we fix this? We could make candidate promotion a primary objective and CTA on Camp to incentivize more people to do it. Or we could ask the dao for a bunch of Nouns to use for promotion and take a more centralized approach. The overall feeling is that this step is quite solvable, yet unlikely to make a difference unless we solve the second bottleneck --

2/4

Good update. Some notes:

I think some people don’t realize these props are going to end up onchain, and think this is more of a small grants body, is what I’m hearing in the background. Not sure if you’ve considered more clarity there. 

Also, after submission- some folks don’t know what to do or who to ask for status. I got this message recently:

Nouns, Lil Nouns, bitNouns ⌐◨-◨ Currently building nouns.world and @artistprogram_ 
 Linktr.ee/mikeg.studio ..

we have their emails and update on status regularly — been some confusion tho agree

is there room for one more in the fork boat?

Cofounder of @glitterprotocol | Member of /nouns

not really, more likely that we break out on our own

Any plan to support lil nouns via nouns grants? Seems like ppl there show a lot of interests.