Hi @eladmin Elad, thanks for leaving your comments. I’ve written up answers for each of your Qs, and I look forward to further elaborating in the Governance Call later today.
Unified Proposal: Initially, we intended to submit three separate proposals in parallel; however, due to the interconnected relationship of the documents, this would add additional complexity. Due to the upcoming CEL2 transition and the fact nearly all Celo Community Treasury funded programs are paused waiting for this proposal to be voted on, we made the decision to package it as one proposal.
Celo Foundation positioning in the ecosystem: I’m not part of the Celo Foundation and can’t speak for them, but based on the cLabs proposal and Strategic Grant for MiniPay, it’s clear that additional resources and support are required from the Celo Community Treasury to accelerate development. While we aim to collaborate closely with the Celo Foundation and leverage its channels, taking over critical assets such as the Website is outside the scope for this initial half year.
Regional DAO input: All current regional DAOs (Africa, Korea, Latam, Europe) have provided input in the proposal creation process.
Celo Camp: Agreed, the Public Goods Steward initiative aims to increase coordination and CRM sharing between Celo Community Treasury-funded initiatives.
Clear role description for Governance Stewards: In the current process, the Stewards serve merely as facilitators. The Stewards don’t set the budgets and do not allocate the budgets to specific entities. All decision-making remains in the hands of Celo voters. The QF and RPGF processes are methods through which resources can be allocated to Celo Public Goods, and also, here, the Stewards will not be the main decision-makers in who receives funding.
While your three-layer approach can work, it would take significant time and resources to set this system up and operate it. A feature iteration of the Governance Guidelines could follow such logic, but more time has to be spent on this.
The Name: The term “Public Goods” is used more loosely in the Web3 space than its traditional counterpart. In this context, the term is used to describe any project or initiative that contributes to the well-being of a community/ecosystem. As such, any initiative that generates long-term value to Celo can be considered a Celo Public Good. From the perspective of building a digital regenerative economy, as Celo articulates in its vision, the Celo Public Goods can be seen as the capital assets we aim to nurture to improve the well-being of Celo.
From this perspective, it makes sense for the Celo Community Treasury to primarily fund Celo Public Goods; thus the naming is justified.
While Ecosystem could be used as a name, I want to make you aware that there is an existing Celo Ecosystem team operational in the Celo Foundation, and this name would create friction.
Improving the discussion process: Agreed that the current governance discussion process, especially the governance calls, can improve. We imagine the Governance Guardians will develop this as part of this proposal. To date, the CGP editors have made all their efforts voluntarily, limiting the time they could commit to it.
In the proposed setup, anybody can submit a proposal to the Celo Forum for discussion without any requirements. To submit the actual proposal for a vote, there are some requirements to reduce spam and proposals that do not follow the guidelines. However, in the proposed structure, any proposal that follows the guidelines can be submitted for a vote by a Guardian or any other stakeholder that matches the required criteria.
Whales unveiling: Agreed that moving to a solution that encourages adding an identity to a voting address would improve governance coordination, hence why we included Snapshot in our setup.
Snapshot quorum: We believe 2.5M, equal to only 0.25% of all CELO tokens, to be the minimum participation needed to ratify a vote. One could argue that the Mentors Collective proposal wasn’t considered important enough by stakeholders, as the subsequent proposal received 20M+ votes and the previous proposal received 11M+ votes.
Discussion duration: The 7 days is the bare minimum required for a proposal to be considered able to progress towards a vote. While the current proposal is one of the most significant proposals to date and indeed requires more time, we don’t want to set a minimum that is too long and will slow down governance. There are various proposals that require less discussion, such as adding a new Oracle party or making minor adjustments to the chain.
Action Plan: The latest numbers are clarified in the CGP and JSON. The 41M is from an old draft that only specified the transactions in the Payload. The exact amount is 81,633,000.
On the role of the Regenerative Finance Foundation: As became apparent in the past week, a legal entity is required for Steward operations and hosting some resources. The Regenerative Finance Foundation is an existing non-profit foundation established in 2021 to receive a Celo Grant and is located in Willemstad, Curacao. The Regenerative Finance Foundation has three board members, namely Luuk Weber (Chair), Renç Korzay, COO of Giza (treasurer), and Priscilla Lotman, founder of AVA2 and legal council (secretary). The Regenerative Finance Foundation will play a passive role and only facilitate the administration and distribution of the Celo Public Goods Stewards operations budget following the decision made by the group itself.
Coordinating this effort through the Celo Foundation would be challenging as it would likely create legal and operational friction.
Limited funding for new community ventures: This proposal does indeed cap the resources available for new community ventures. As became clear from the accounting dashboard, before this proposal, the Community Treasury would have a remaining runway of 18-24 months. The overall consensus among stakeholders was that we must grasp the Treasury spending and strategy. This proposal aims to start with a capped budget to set a benchmark, after which Celo Governance can decide to expand its budget in the future. However, there are multiple means for initiatives to receive funding, such as the Grants budget, Quadratic Funding, and Retrospective funding.
Benefit of separate communication: Celo Org is developed and managed by the Celo Foundation, and as such can’t be simply taken over by third parties without significant consideration. As it’s connected to the Celo Foundation, some elements can not be published because of legal or reputational concerns. The same goes for the Celo socials. By establishing communications in parallel yet working closely with the Foundation, we will increase the ability to communicate with existing and new Celo stakeholders.
Separation of Multi-sigs: Happy to separate the activities into two Multi-sigs. We’ve generated the 5 out of 9 multi-sigs with the addresses of the Stewards mentioned in this proposal here (Celo Public Goods H1 2024) and here (Celo Public Goods Stewards Operations). Will coordinate with Steward for them to verify their specific addresses publicly in the coming days.
Detailed Budget Breakdown: The Stewards and Guardians will align the specific breakdown of commitments and rewards internally. We’re actively scoping the detailed line items, and will provide full financial transparency throughout the following months. To give an indication, the current estimated hourly reward for Stewards is 50 cUSD + 100 CELO per hour, with a limit of 10 hours a month for passive stewards and 25 hours a month for an active steward. In addition, approximately 10,000 cUSD is set aside for accounting and legal fees.
) in the forum.
not to shill the fact that im a woman, but think I could also be a good fit for a public goods steward.
