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https://opensea.io/collection/nouns
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krel
@krel
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
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krel
@krel
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
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krel
@krel
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
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krel
@krel
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
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raymondz
@rz
In your best words what's the direction that voters opposed to Nouns Grants are pushing for? I haven't been able to piece anything together from a quick scan of the Discord, is it just maintaining the treasury and smaller spends that are "at cost" for the DAO?
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krel
@krel
i think you could lean hard into pro-ethereum mission, or creating tech utopias, or maybe the supporting subcultures track, but i dont see anyone making strong pushes in either of these directions some of the current whales want to run dao experiments, which could be good but their vision is uninspiring and feels like thinking too small, maybe stuck in 2021 mindset i dont think most voters know what they want or have a coherent view of what would be good for nouns at scale
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raymondz
@rz
Hmm - curious what dao experiments they have in mind, agree that it's a tough space, feels like there are individual projects there that are definitely very cool and +sum for legitimacy I'd also be excited about a smaller, scaled down version of Nouns Grants that works towards a vision of Nouns as a publishing house
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