Curation

The curation mechanisms we initially explored are outlined in the section, "How does each Drop allocate the funds" - https://app.gitbook.com/o/-MgCsNxYTOCOLlKAc-Dh/s/-MgCsSO7MvUTUD2Zhcl6/~/changes/63/governance/how-does-each-drop-allocate-the-funds

For DAO Drops V1, we chose to make a lightweight step for an initial prototype, to be further improved. The main step that was intentionally a placeholder was the curation step. We used a centralized approach for V1, using dOrg team members to whittle the public nominations down to about 50 - the number we felt people could meaningfully read through without simply choosing their favorites. We used a curation rubrik to guide curation toward what we understood the request from the Ethereum Foundation to be.

We found this centralized curation approach to be lacking in several ways. Below are two decisions we landed on for how to improve it. The mechanisms we explored previously remain to be experimented with.

1) We developed a V2 of DAO Drops called PairDrop - PairDrop - that uses pairwise comparison and a limited set of pairs, to allow more nominees while at the same time increasing fairness in evaluation. More on PairDrop in a moment.

2) If we had been able to raise the amount of funds needed to run a second grants round ourselves, we planned to use the VC “scouts” mode for curation. It’s the initial approach we had spoken with members from the Ethereum Foundation about. In this approach, the grant operator team would reach out to networkers who are based at Ethereum coworking communities around the world. This would achieve geographic diversity, and to the extent we would be able to effectively solicit a diversity of types of projects, would surface lesser known projects in the Ethereum ecosystem.

While centralized in one sense, we felt the Scouts approach was the best thing for us to try next, to a) reduce the operational burden and expense of sifting through hundreds of nominations, and b) reduce the other vector of centralization, the curation/review board. Our long term plan for DAO Drops V1 was to dao-ify the curation process, incentivizing contributing voters and projects to collectively manage this stage in a way that continued to increase the surface area of types and locations of projects the Ethereum Foundation was able to fund.

During DAO Drops V1, many nominees and other folks we talked to about our methodology told us they wanted to run geographic location-specific grant rounds. This could be seen as a form of curation - distributing a primary grants pool into geography-specific DAOs or round operators to manage. We had interest in this from Bankless Africa and Ethereum CDMX (Mexico City) specifically. We also had requests for even more specific rounds, for example the Colorado State budget for clean energy development, and a topic-specific use-case to curate a registry of hemp seed strains that are best for various kinds of applications such as carbon sequestration, textile production, building materials, etc.