Push Grants Program v2.0
Authors:
- Jaf
- Co-authored with Miss Walter
Intro:
Earlier this year we started our Push Grants Program (PGP) with the goal of funding contributors to BUIDL their projects and help with the adoption and expansion of the Push Protocol ecosystem.
This first iteration of the Push Grants Program (”PGP v1.0”) was funded with a budget of $1,000,000 USD (883,955 $PUSH at the moment of the funding) equivalent of $PUSH tokens from the community treasury. Since then, the program has funded 4 grantees including Push content producers, a Bounties marketplace, a Social Hiring platform, and even a Pixel 2D multiplayer online game. And as a result of Push Protocol presence in Hackathons and events this year we have been observing an increased interest of our community and hackers in pursuing PGPs.
These past two quarters running this experiment gave us the opportunity to learn and suggest improvements to our program, and we’d like to share some improvements below.
What went well?
- Support the Hackers. Participating in so many hackathons this year gave us the opportunity to meet many talented individuals and groups with superb ideas, to which integrating Push made a lot of sense. And furthermore many of these hackers work on some of the most reputable projects in the space, and they are taking all the learnings after they integrate Push to their own projects.
- Variety in the Grants. Being an Infrastructure protocol it’s easy to focus on development grants. However, we also met content producers with their own audiences and even provided multi-language knowledge sharing about Push in their own communities. More recently there has been more interest from educational platforms to include Push as a part of their cohorts.
- Playing with DAOs. There are many DAOs aiming to provide their members with all the help possible to build their projects. Collaborating with these DAOs has given the exposure of our Grants Program to many developers.
Where do we need to improve?
- The PGP process as defined originally started with the forum, where every PGP needed to be posted following a template until enough traction was gained to go to the polling phase, and finally to voting in the Snapshot. Making the entire process sluggish in some cases.
- Push was offering companionship to Grantees not only in financial form but also by putting our social channels at their service to share about their projects with our community. Inviting Grantees to join us in our bi-weekly Friday Push calls, Office hours, and even highlighting them in our monthly and weekly newsletters. However, we want to do it even better. Meaning supporting projects with marketing, intros, and more. We’ll improve our support for grantees to succeed.
Enter Push Grants Program v2.0 (”PGP v2.0”)
In an effort to make our Push Grants Program process more useful, faster, and engaging for everyone that decides to participate in it; we are suggesting the following changes in the process:
- Every Proposal starts by submitting an application through the Grants Proposal Form (which will be made public if this proposal passes) and ensuring all information is complete and accurate. This information will be publicly available on the Push Grants public portal.
- Next step is each proposal being reviewed by the Push Grants Committee. This is a group of Push members from different areas who will get together to analyze each proposal to ensure it meets the criteria, and communicate with the proposer in case adjustments needs to be made or move the proposal forward to the next stage.
- Depending on the size of the grant there are different approaches to take:
- Push Rapid Grants (For grants not greater than $2,000 USD): This is a faster process that involves reviewing the grant, and after internal deliberation supporting the grant or asking for adjustments. The turnaround time ranges from 1 week to 2 weeks.
- Push Grants (For grants not greater than $20,000 USD): still, a fast process where after the initial review the candidates will be scheduled for an interview with the Push Grants Committee to answer questions, receive suggestions, and talk about milestone tracking.
- Push Community Grants (For grants greater than $20,000 USD): a slightly slower process for larger grants where after the initial review and subsequent interview, candidates are asked to post their proposal in the forum for temperature check (following the predefined guidelines from PGP v1.0 and skipping the polling phase as this step will not be necessary anymore), and if it all goes well then go to formal voting in the snapshot.
We believe implementing this new process will improve the speed at which Push Grants Proposals get executed, and create a healthy feedback loop for Push and Grantees.
Other considerations with this new process
- Milestones verification. A very important lesson learned during this first iteration is how to implement accountability with grantees through milestone verification. All milestone goals and achievements will be clearly documented in the public portal and be used as a mechanism to confirm that the grant is on the right track. Of course, projects are living creatures, and its understandable that changes might happen, however good documentation and milestones definition should provide validation for grants.
- ThePush Committee. We propose the initial committee for this 2nd iteration to be formed initially by Push team members from different areas (Development, Growth, DAO, and Marketing). It will be a committee of 6 members: 1 lead and 5 reviewers. With the lead ensuring the program runs well and optimizations are taken care of as opportunities arise.
Conclusion
As mentioned above its in our best interest to support the Push Grants recipients to the best of our capabilities, providing them better companionship in terms of marketing, intros to other projects, development consultation, and suggesting improvements for their grants to have better chances of being approved and reaching a higher impact and exposure with our community and others.
This PGIP (Push Governance Improvement Proposal) aims to be fast tracked according to PIP- 08 Fast-tracking of PIP’s that get Immediate traction into Snapshot.
If feedback is positive and this proposal is ratified, the new Push Grants Program structure will become effective immediately, and new proposals and/or proposals in early stages in the forum.
Push Grants Program v2.0 serves an even bigger purpose as it also places Push Protocol in a strategic point to start exploring more DAO2DAO collaboration opportunities, and have direct access to the most important developer groups to implement Push Protocol features.
Let’s keep PUSHing.