The OpenCivics Genesis Round is officially over. We’re incredibly grateful to the generous donors and incredible projects who participated and applied. Together, we’ve donated over $33,000 USD to 15 projects that are creating massive impact in the domain of decentralized civics. As you saw in our previous post, the projects in our Genesis Round were incredibly diverse, addressing ecological, social, technological, and democratic aspects of civic innovation.
Round Analytics
We’re honored to have been among the top three Community Rounds in terms of crowdfunded donations, with a total of $8,707 USD contributed from 353 unique donors.
Click here to view the automatically generated Gitcoin Report Card for the round.
For further analysis of the grant round results, check out our wiki.
Learnings
Collaboration Between Grantees
One of the highlights of the round was our Grantee Showcase. During an hour long conversation between grantees, we witnessed new collaborations emerge between project leads as the conversation wove together the different areas of impact that each grantee’s project is working towards, ranging from water policy and regenerative action to local civic technology and community organizing. This was a tremendous milestone for the Consortium as it demonstrated what becomes possible when a group of innovators come into deeper relationship with the tools and frameworks needed to work together and scale their impact. We’re excited to see where these collaborations evolve in the new year as we begin to roll out our first collaborative initiatives and open session calls later this month and early next year.
One of the hypotheses that OpenCivics is testing in the Gitcoin and Quadratic Funding ecosystems is the notion that funding for projects has an amplified impact when projects utilize those funds to work together on achieving shared goals. We required participants in the grants round to be members of the Consortium to test this hypothesis and the early results are incredibly promising. Our grantees will be sharing their milestones and collaborative goals in the coming weeks, and we’re excited to share that documentation with you so that we can collectively track their progress and the impact of grant funds.
User Experience
As many others in the Gitcoin and web3 communities have noted, the primary challenge in the decentralized technology portion of our work is increasing access and participation through innovations in user experience (UX). We need wallets that encrypt keys on-device without needing to write them down. We need to make it irrelevant which blockchain you’re using and move bridging or switching between blockchains into the background of the UX.
Many of our friends, allies, and colleagues reported challenges in securing and bridging crypto currency onto the Public Goods Network (no one’s fault in particular, simply a design challenge for any cross-chain process) and more still reported challenges in securing a sufficient Gitcoin Passport score to ensure full matching of donations. As web3 natives ourselves, we recognize the double edge sword of this type of innovation.
Web3 is powerful because it enables non-custodial and peer-to-peer technologies which comes with inherent tradeoffs in terms of learning curves and usability, but we believe that Gitcoin and web3 more broadly can continue to innovate the user experience while retaining the underlying benefits that decentralized technologies provide.
Round Operation Insights
As round operators, we were impressed by just how easy Gitcoin’s Allo Protocol has made it to operate a grant round. Despite some technical glitches (most ended up being user error but took up time to discover where the issue was occurring), the technical implementation of the round was relatively seamless.
We learned that we definitely want to turn on rolling applications for future rounds to be able to accommodate last minute submissions and to help work with grantees to address technical hurdles that may delay them from completing the process.
We’ll also be conducting multiple live calls for grantees and donors in the next round to provide live, hands-on support for non-web3 natives navigating the application process and making donations.
We were also recurrently baffled by the native UTC timezone on the grant manager interface which caused us to open and close the round out of alignment with the deadlines for the other main GG19 rounds which we will be sure not to do in future rounds.
What’s Next for Grant Program
Based on this round’s success, it’s likely that OpenCivics will conduct another Grant Round to coincide with Gitcoin Grants 20 (#GG20) in about three months. We look forward to working with the DeCiv Fund and other partners to provide an expanded matching pool for our next round, allowing us to support more projects with larger sums of grant funding. Our fellow Round Operators (@reneedaos, @clinamenic) have been incredibly supportive to OpenCivics and will be offering mentorship and support to grantees between rounds to maximize the likelihood of their success.
As grantees begin to receive their matching funds, they’ll also begin to share updates on their milestones and goals between now and our next grant round. We’ll keep you updated so that you can see the impact your donations are having in the world.
Future Grant Rounds
We’re already starting to get inspired about the many potentials OpenCivics could explore in the domain of Quadratic Funding. Gitcoin’s Allo Protocol has made it incredibly easy to pool funds and accept donations for projects, all within their smart contract interface that works on almost every popular blockchain.
For now, we’re mainly focused on celebrating the win of our Genesis Round and will likely iterate only modestly for the next round, but these potential future rounds illustrate the potential growth and evolution of quadratic funding as a strategy for democratic philanthropy.
Conclusion
The OpenCivics Grants Program is an expression of our commitment to supporting projects within the network to thrive and create an impact together. To date, OpenCivics Stewards have been gifting their time to the development of the Consortium, choosing to focus on directing funds to projects within the Consortium instead of raising funds for administration costs and salaries. As we move out of the bootstrapping phase of network launch, we’ll begin to focus on legal formation and fundraising for the key facilitation and stewardship services that our 501c3 foundation will be providing to the network. We’re also beginning to organize our collaborative initiatives, focusing first on Collaborative Initiative (Collaborative Protocols) which will be developing the best practices for decentralized multi-stakeholder collaboration.
Having successfully launched the Consortium with nearly 100 new members in the last month and having completed our first successful grants round, OpenCivics is poised to enter the new year with our sights on the following key focuses:
nurturing consortium membership and participation
facilitating multi-stakeholder collaborations on key initiatives
fundraising for operations, collaborative initiatives, and future grant rounds
exploring the possibility of hosting an “Upgrading Democracy” summit in Q2 of 2024
Thank you for being part of this journey. Who knows, maybe you’ll be one of our grantees in the next round! We look forward to building with our members and expanding the impact of our work in the world through collaboration and trust.
In Us We Trust,
OpenCivics Stewards