Prezenti follow-on funding request, progressing to governance

Governance
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Hi folks,

We will shortly be moving our funding request to formal governance after all your valuable feedback on our post Prezenti Q1 2023 Update and attending the February 2023 governance call.

The pull request to the main governance repository is still under review (https://github.com/prezenti/governance/blob/main/CGPs/cgp-0072.md), and the contents copied below may be subject to minor tweaks before the PR is merged. After the PR is accepted, the canonical proposal can be viewed under cgp-0072.md from the CGP folder here: https://github.com/celo-org/governance/tree/main/CGPs

Questions, clarification, always welcome. Presented in the governance call was the following:

Overview

CGP - Prezenti (Celo Community Fund) stewardship follow-on funding for 2023

After a successful governance proposal to initially fund the Prezenti grants program in 2022, we request follow-on funding from the Celo Community Fund to continue disbursing to projects in the Celo ecosystem for 2023.

Rationale

Prezenti spent a considerable amount of effort streamlining our administrative processes for grant disbursement and have already spent all of the 800,000 CELO initial approved for this stewardship. Since officially opening our application form, in only three months we processed and reviewed 51 projects of which 18 were successful. Details of the accepted projects and spending reports are available in detail both on our website at https://prezenti.xyz and recent forum post : Prezenti Q1 2023 Update

Prezenti is now closed for any new applications (since January 2023). While most accepted grantees have not completed all of their work milestones and not received their full funding, we isolated all grant amounts (in cUSD) in our multi-sig at contract signing for each project in expectation of 100% completion to avoid any CELO:cUSD exchange rate fluctuations. We have also earmarked and set aside estimated future compensation for the three stewards for the the duration of our current stable of 18 approved grants. We are fully funded for our current grants.

Since closing for new applications, we’ve continued to have a lot of interest and questions about when Prezenti will be able to disburse grant funding again. Prezenti believe we have conducted our first tranche of Celo Community Fund funding fairly, in line with our original governance proposal, and the values of Celo as a movement. Additionally there is good alignment with Prezenti’s role and a wider effort in the Celo community to progressively decentralize the ecosystem in general.

We wish to leverage both the community goodwill to date and the effort spent operationalizing Prezenti and request another 1,600,000 CELO to continue funding grants.

Useful Links

Topic Link
Introductory forum post prosing funding for Prezenti in 2022 Reopening of the Celo Community Fund
CGP: Reopening of the Celo Community Fund (CGP-54) https://github.com/celo-org/governance/blob/main/CGPs/cgp-0054.md
Stake.id governance dashboard Celo Governance by Staking Fund
Celo forum thread outling spending and transparency reporting for 2022 Prezenti Q1 2023 Update
Website for the Prezenti entity, transparency, and application process https://prezenti.xyz
Report on 2022 grant recipients Prezenti Grants - Recipients and Updates
Legal Documents https://docs.prezenti.xyz/

Technical

Prezenti Multi-Sig 1

Target of the governance approval is our existing 2/3 multi-sig: 0xda2069f47D252121c2288301D6EF50B87220A693

Signer Signing Address
Aaron Boyd 0x9Ea6dcaaD917ebc9ed15c35b85FF2d486CB2F242
Maya Richardson-Brown 0x208D1CCc4877366216F3c0aBc22F3008ed12A926
Wade Abel 0x64ca92619d8263518Cc14B1B698312f36e249095

Prezenti Multi-Sig 2

Secondary multi-sig used for disbursement to grant projects (2/3 signatures): 0x2DE97fafc45bC2aB0A08a1d78069674A18810DCf

Signer Signing Address
Aaron Boyd 0xd07B6140a682D367A38eA4B2f3b3460acEecDdb1
Maya Richardson-Brown 0xAC15963065Cd50b25B9eA0eA579f286942A2Af14
Wade Abel 0x8caB03C38c8be5d76404D647a5C45aE53A027341

Internal address for swaps

Supplentary EOA for on-chain swaps between CELO and cUSD: 0x8E3C938C5f84F5eCb8355Dc58C0916Ad2610Dbae. Never used for standing balances, only utility. This address is controlled by Wade Abel (@ThePassiveTrust) using a personal hardware wallet.

Steward’s Role

The stewards of Prezenti will not change. The current stewards are:

  • Aaron Boyd
  • Maya Richardson-Brown
  • Wade Abel

Their role is to:

  • Conduct community outreach to get projects built on Celo.
  • Assess applicants and their projects based on their mission, technical ability, merit, and integrity.
  • Support applicants throughout the application process.
  • Collaborate to decide if a project’s grant is successful.
  • Support applicants throughout the grant cycle as required, and as able.
  • Commit to increased transparency and dialogue with the community.

Grant applicants will complete the application form at https://prezenti.xyz and the stewards will vet the projects to the best of their abilities either by themselves or, if needed, getting feedback from appropriate subject matter experts.

The stewards will publish public information about approved applications and declined applications can expect to receive private feedback and details will not be published.

If an applicant feels that they were unfairly denied funding from the CCF’s budget, then the conflict resolution process would be for them to submit a spend proposal via CGP for all CELO owners to vote on.

Focus Areas for Grants

In our original proposal we listed four categories of projects the stewardship was interested in seeing more of in the community. Those areas were:

  • Community tools
  • Research
  • Education
  • Other

While this list gave a starting point for applicants, in the end we saw a much wider scope of applications. The stewards ultimately evaluated each project on its’ merits regardless of it’s fit into any category.

Here’s the style of evaluation criteria the stewards will be considering:

  • Does the team understand the problem space?
  • Is the team capable of delivery?
  • Does the project proposal support or promote the values of Celo?
  • Is the overall project proposal clear?
  • Are the milestones defined by the applicant specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound?
  • Is the amount of funding requested reasonable?

When an application is unsuccessful we aim to give some limited feedback addressing some of the concerns above.

Steward Compensation

  • Our compensation for the first round of Prezenti’s funding was $134/hr per steward, and we are not proposing any changes for 2023.
  • Stewards are working part-time on Prezenti and expect to work approximately 5 hours each, per week.
  • Prezenti may utilise some minor expenses for relevant in-person events in the Celo ecosystem (for example, @aaronmboyd was a panelist at the Celo Salon during EthCC in Paris)

Risks & Feedback

  • One question that was raised in our forum update for Q1 2023 was whether the current Celo Community Fund is well capitalized enough to support further grant disbursements for Prezenti or others. The remaining pool in the Celo Community Fund is difficult to model, and Wade has kindly created a status page at https://www.celocommunityfund.xyz/. This page includes both approved and draft proposals, and with this in mind we are well capitalized enough for this request (even with all of the regional DAOs coming through the governance pipeline)
  • Another piece of feedback from the forum was that there is little available to know whether any given grant recipient has actually improved the ecosystem or not. For this we are committed to not only fiscal transparency for our own disbursements, but continuing to promote and raise the profile of those projects in the Celo forum and on social media.

Legal & Partners

  • Prezenti Inc. is registered in Ontario, Canada (Ontario Corporation Number: 1000315055)
  • Successful applicants have a signed agreement between the Prezenti entity digitally signed with PandaDoc
  • We are continuing to explore how to delegate some of our internal accounting and grant disbursement via Questbook
  • All successful applicants must pass a KYC check with our identity provider TrustID

Proposed Changes

  • Updates in Celo Signal: We will add Celo signal to our communications channels to increase reach. This will include notable grantee achievements, additional grants and other information. As suggested by Eric - Celo Foundation - Governance call 26
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Reserved by OP for additional information

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Thanks for the the clarity.

I really like https://www.celocommunityfund.xyz/. Gives some much needed optics on the cake.

I’m in full support and look forward to seeing Prezenti’s next chapter come to fruition.

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Hi @Thylacine and Prezenti team. First, congrats for the work done so far. I appreciate the fact the community has a “go to” place for funding their needs, and that your are swiftly deploying such capital while streamlining your process.

Two comments:

  1. Considering the current scenario (macro plus Celo reserves), isn’t 1,6M Celo a little too steep?
  2. Do you have a rationale for the disbursement per region and/or ways to sync with local communities to assess projects to receive such grants outside North America/Europe?

Note: I know that at least one project in LatAm got a grant on your former batch. Just wondering how the concentration of grants per region is happening atm. LatAm has 10% of global crypto transaction and favorable laws - so an interesting place to focus capital deploy.

Best,
Mila

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This is indeed awesome.

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@Thylacine I really support this post and I witness the efforts @Wade have made to build the https://www.celocommunityfund.xyz/ status page, lot of PR and improvements has been made by him.

I also like the approach of the fund, the only suggestion I have is as @MilaRioja says maybe try to focused in allocate grants equitative all over the world and try to not concentrate in only some continets or countries.

Congrats for all the Prezenti team efforts. Really love the program. :pray:

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I support this. Prezenti team has been professional and effective in my view.

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Thanks for the kind words regarding the community fund info graphic @MilaRioja, @juancamp1987 and @Alesh. Very glad it is useful :slightly_smiling_face:

Thanks for the thoughtful comments @MilaRioja.

  1. Very valuable analysis and definitely something to keep in mind. From our perspective, too steep is not the right framing for a proposal like this. Mostly due to the extended reach. While it is a non-trivial fraction of the reserve(~22% of available funds, ~15% of the current funds) it will be distributed widely and towards varying initiatives. As for the macro, my personal opinion is that it should be less of a concern. The time is now to build, do the work and make the community stronger. Something to keep in mind also is that there will likely be a large sum of CELO that will come off of Mento’s balance sheet soon. From the sentiment in the community, it looks like this will be used by the community and foundation to help build out the ecosystem.

  2. We don’t factor in the region so much, each application is evaluated on its own merit and the impact related to Celo’s principles. If a grant is from a specific region that we are somewhat not as familiar with as we think we should be, we reach out to valuable members of the ecosystem to give us guidance. With the creation of the regional DAO’s we will be reaching out to them and making sure the crossover is appropriate. That being said from the grants that were accepted here are some stats that show across regions:

Region No of Grants
Africa 7
Asia 0
North America 1
Oceania 0
South America 4
Global 6

Hopefully, this helps with some perspective. We are super excited to see the LatAm DAO come to life and help the flourishing community grow across the region! Thank you for all the valuable work you do for Celo, your perspective is always welcome and valuable.

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Love all of the work that Prezenti is doing and very much appreciate the transparency and community engagement :raised_hands:t3:

  1. I noticed there is slight overlap with projects that have received grants from other Celo grant funds (i.e. Celo Community Fund1 and Celo Foundation Grants). I would love to understand the approach to past grant recipients.
  2. I love what Gitcoin has been doing with respect to quadratic funding and engaging the community more in grant decisions. Curious if you’ve thought about implementing a similar feature? Or have the community weigh in on different grant proposals.
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Hi Xochi, thanks for the questions.

Regarding applicants who have already received funding from other sources - we do ask this question on the application form and it does go into our decision making process.

Being funded previously is not disqualifying on it’s own (regardless of the source). We just don’t want to fund the exact same deliverable or product that others have or currently are providing support for. Where the applicant has answered that they have been funded, we’ve then followed up with further due diligence to inquire about that engagement, what it was for, what was delivered, any issues and so on.

Another example is that we did fund Impact Market for a self-contained piece of work to add some additional technical mechanisms to the PACT token and donation contracts, even though they are a funded and comparatively well-resourced business. We made this decision to accept their application because the scope of work was clear and bounded, and in continued recognition that Impact Market is the best example of “prosperity for everyone” on the protocol making significant on-the-ground change in people’s lives.

So while our preference is to fund projects that are new and are more in the bootstrapping phase, it is not a hard rule. If the community would prefer clearer rules about this, we could draft something up and perhaps a mini-constitution we adhere to for the disbursement of funds.

Regarding Gitcoin-style quadratic voting - we have actually talked a lot of turning out operational practises into a full grants-management software product. It looks like Gitcoin beat us to the punch however and released something like this very recently, which we are watching eagerly as it becomes publicly available. Part of the aim of Prezenti is also to streamline applications based on the steward’s due diligence and not have to go to governance for small pilot funding. Having the community vote on every dollar disbursed might roll back some of that speed to value, but it’s something we’ve brought up for sure.

Let me know if there’s anything else you would like to know about the application review process and we’d be happy to clarify.

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Thank you for your reply and breakdown. I like the transparency it brings to the community, and wonder if that could be a standard for all Celo-related grants. Wish you best of luck on the second round and appreciate your commit to the community.

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