tl;dr
As part of Gitcoin’s upcoming beta of their decentralized grant round. Metagov is preparing to run a Governance Research focused round. We’re looking for groups or individuals to contribute to the matching pool.
Description
The focus of this grant round will be governance research. More specifically, the focus of this round is to support more researchers and practitioners exploring decentralized governance related problems. This includes topics such as governance in web3, digital governance, AI governance - any research project pertaining to decentralized governance is welcome.
To get a sense of the specific area with governance that this round is meant to explore, please refer to the DAO Science Project (overview, in-depth Google Doc).
Some people or projects already interested in getting their work funded as part of this grant round include:
- Tara Merk - TBC Research Project
- Reuben Youngblom - TBC Research Project
- New Metagov Project - State of Web3 Grants Report
Goal of the Round
Two goals of this Governance Research grant round are to:
- Bring in governance researchers who are currently not looking at web3 problems closer to web3.
- Onboard governance researchers onto Gitcoin’s decentralized grants protocol as a way of getting them to interact with the space more.
While we are open to support research in any domain of digital governance, a particular focus for this grant round will be DAO/web3 governance.
Eligibility
In order to be eligible to submit a project, researchers must be currently working on or preparing to launch a governance related research project. They need to have a clearly defined question to explore and/or data to gather/analyze pertaining to governance research. Relevant domains of governance will be any digital and decentralized governance: web3, AI, etc.
To get a sense of the specific area with governance that this round is meant to explore, please refer to the DAO Science Project (overview).
Timeline
- April 11-April 23 - applications will be open for researchers to apply to be included in the grant round starting April 25, 2023
- April 25-May 9 - round is live, donations come in and matched via quadratic funding
This is coming together last minute and so we are looking for responses by April 11th if possible.
Funding
Funding asks
$25k - featured partner for the round, clearly advertised sponsored research question, can be ecosystem specific
$10k - partner for the round, get to define a general research question
$5k or less - marketing inclusion
We currently have a soft commit for support from DAODA) and are looking for additional support at the $5k, if not $10k+, level.
Why fund
Governance is a domain that applies to everyone and is an area where there are rarely objective right answers. The goal with governance research is not to find the one governance approach / rule sets / set of tools to rule them all. Instead, we need to strive to create a network of knowledge to help as many players gain learnings as quickly as possible.
Especially in a bear market, it is crucial for players in the space to come together to coordinate and collaborate in order to both help the space advance while supporting each other during a period of tighter funding. We need more coordination on governance research and the results from and applications of the research
Let me know if I can share any other info / answer any questions. Thanks for considering our grant proposal!