# GitcoinDAO Ecosystem Mapping

The goal of this document is to provide a preliminary mapping of the gitcoin DAO ecosystem addressing the gitcoinDAOs purpose, and in particular the interplays between the various stakeholders and the range of functions that must be carried out in order for that purpose to be reliably fulfilled. Note that this mapping exercise represents my perspective as a stakeholder of the Gitcoin ecosystem, and as an expert in digital infrastructure with a focus on [networked resource allocation](https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations/1515/).

As a reader, I invite you to participate in the mapping exercise as a (continuously) ongoing process. The processes of orienting and re-orienting ourselves, both as individuals and as an organization, is necessary to foster a polycentric organizational structure, while facing an evolving collection of challenges and opportunities.

Please use this as a tool to help coordinate in:
- governing the gitcoin organization
- maintaining the gitcoin platform
- operating the gitcoin grants program, including matching rounds
- balancing the needs of a multistakeholder participatory ecosystem
- responding to emergent challenges (addressing vulnerabilies, both acute or systemic)

## The Purpose of Gitcoin DAO

*The Purpose of the Gitcoin DAO is to build, maintain and operate a platform through which its community members can coordinate to fund (as well as build, maintain and operate) Ethereum public goods.*

Governing GitcoinDAO consists of ensuring that this purpose is consistly and reliably achieved in the face of an ever changing landscape. This **purpose** is our north star, but to navigate, we must first understand the shape of our ship.

This is incredibly challenging -- there is nothing magical about a DAO that steers the ship for us. We need to know the ship and to know the ship is to know ourselves. You might say

*We're sailing a ship made of each other
And if that sounds strange that’s because it is*

which is a shameless reference to

*We live in a house made of each other
And if that sounds strange that’s because it is*
-Excerpt from [Tiny Glowing Screens Pt 2](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1SWZ7qWEjUs&t=121s), George Watsky
American Poet, Author & Musician

## Ecosystem Stakeholders

In this section, we will explore the different relationships people have with the Gitcoin Ecosystem. A community member may have any combination of these relationships, so there a wide range of stakeholder groups with different experiences.

### Stakeholder Categories
- **Community Member**
- anyone who is part of any of the groups below
- **Platform User**
- anyone who interacts with the Gitcoin platform
- **Token Holder**
- anyone who holds GTC tokens
- note that *token holder* is proxy for all other forms of stakeholdership due to the voting model
- **Steward**
- Representative for delegating users/contributors
- note that voting weight is based on delegated GTC (*see token holder*)
- **Paid Contributor**
- anyone who works on the development, maintainance or operations of the gitcoin platform who is compensated financially (comensurate with the time, effort and expertise applied)
- **Volunteer Contributor**
- anyone who works on the development, maintenance or operations of the gitcoin platform who is compensated through perks, reputation, etc (or financially but *not* commensurate with the time, effort and expertise applied)

### Stakeholder Relationships
Although many of GitcoinDAO's community members don't fall cleanly into only one of these buckets, it is very helpful to understand how power is distributed within the organization. As an informed participant in Gitcoin governance, it is critical to understand this structure in order to exercise one's voice in the Forums, in order to decide which stewards represent their interests, and much more.


> The above diagram shows the interconnections between various stakeholder groups in the GitcoinDAO ecosystem.

It is important to remember that a DAO isn't the absence of an organizational structure. A DAO is an [emerging class of institution](https://medium.com/commonsstack/exploring-daos-as-a-new-kind-of-institution-8103e6b156d4); it is made up of people, resources, social norms, and code, forming a [holistic gestalt](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gestalt) -- a living thing.

## Ecosystem Functions

Carrying forward the notion of the DAO as a living thing, it does not suffice to simply be -- GitcoinDAO has a purpose. In order to achieve that purpose, its functions must be fulfilled. For the purpose of this mapping, the focus is mission-critical (or purpose-critical) functions - those functions without which the DAO would fail in accomplishing its goal.

For the sake of limiting scope (and because it is a function I am most familiar with) the focus here is the Gitcoin Grants rounds:

*Source: [Deterring Adversarial Behavior at Scale in Gitcoin Grants: A Framework for Community-Based Algorithmic Policy Making](https://medium.com/block-science/deterring-adversarial-behavior-at-scale-in-gitcoin-grants-a8a5cd7899ff)*

### Functional Map

The Functional Map focuses on the various operational functions which must occur in order for the GitcoinDAO to achieve its purpose on an ongoing basis:


### Matching Stakeholders to Functions

These stakeholder groups are defined in terms of modes of interaction, and many people are likely to fit multiple categories:

- **Gitcoin Platform User**
- people submiting grants to be funded
- people donating to grants
- people posting bounties
- people solving bounties
- people interacting with social features (posts, kudos, etc)

- **GTC Holders**
- anyone with a balance of Gitcoin tokens (GTC)
- whether exercised or not, this is the necessary criteria to have voting rights (optional delegation) at this time
- **Stewards**
- anyone who has been elevated to the "role" of steward within the gitcoin DAO (see [this introductory Forum post](https://gov.gitcoin.co/t/introducing-stewards-governance/41))
- more details are needed on how the rotating cast of stewards are maintained over time
- selection committee?
- anyone with sufficient delegated GTC?
- how do we ensure the various stakeholder groups (not just GTC holders) are adequately represented?
- Discussions are ongoing in the [Meta Governance thread](https://gov.gitcoin.co/c/governance-meta/6) of the forum

- **Contributors providing the Gitcoin Platform Governance related work**
- Handles operational governance work including voting
- Ensures stewards and stakeholders are informed about issues facing Gitcoin DAO
- Ensures stewards represent a diverse set of stakeholders and tracking distribution and delegated GTC
- Implements and supports the iteration and development of processes from the Meta Governance working group

- **Contributors providing the Gitcoin Platform with Meta Governance related work**
- Handles institutional analysis and development work
- Ongoing refinement of proposal and other processes including steward selection, how voting power is counted to ensure inclusive stakeholder representation
- Ensures bilateral communication between Stewards and other working groups, supporting steward attention management

- **Contributors providing the Gitcoin Platform Operations Work**
- develop and maintain the core platform logic
- software development
- resource provisioning and DevOps
- quality control processes (e.g. enforce the terms and conditions by removing grants from the platform that do not meet community standards, or marking grants as ineligible for matching)
- orchestrate across other stakeholder groups to ensure end users have a good experience
- user experience / product development
- community management / communications
- handling complaints and/or challenges (e.g. "I was excluded from matching incorrectly")
- **Contributors reaching out to and retaining match funders**
- develop relationships with match funding organizations
- create consistent expecations about about the size and distribution of the match pools for the funders, and fundees.
- represent the gitcoinDAO as a match funder, including making proposals to the DAO to run match programs
- **Contributors doing treasury management for the DAO**
- multisig key holders who enact financial decisions made by the DAO
- treasury management proposal writers who apply their expertise to define and advocate for specific treasury management actions (or broad strategies) to be voted on by the DAO

- **Contributors Providing Gitcoin with Community & Communications Management work**
- Manages and coordinates across communications platforms and admin and access accordingly
- Routes contributors to working groups
- Ensures critical information flows

- **Contributors Providing Gitcoin with Data Science work**
- identify and defend against novel economic attacks (e.g. emergent collusion strategies)
- build, maintain and operate sybil detection pipeline
- data collection, cleaning and staging
- feature engineering
- model and metaparameter selection
- loss function selection
- maintaining human labeled training sets
- cross validation
- maintain process, documentation, code, data, microservices, and any other infrastructure required in order to reliably fulfill this function
- balance transparency with privacy (e.g. keep personally identifying information (PII) private while providing transparency about the process and any trade off decisions)
- provide advice (and data) to platform operations in support of real time interventions
- provide advice (and data) to stewards in support of real time interventions
- Read more about the [Fraud Detection & Defense Workstream in this thread](https://gov.gitcoin.co/t/workstream-anti-fraud-workstream-assemble/158)

*This section on Data Science work is particularly detailed because this is the part of the GitcoinDAO to which I am a currently a paid contributor. I've been working with Danilo Lessa Bernardineli, Jesse Tao, Jiajia H, Jessica Zartler, Jeff Emmett and others to bootstrap this functional unit. There is a lot more work to be done to establish a self-sufficient working group, but we've been thankful for members of the Token Engineering community who have stepped up to provide their data science expertise.*

## Progressive Decentralization

Any organization of the size and complexity of Gitcoin DAO requires some organizational structure. A purposeful decentralized organization must have organizational structure -- a formless blob of activity cannot fulfill its purpose over a long time horizon.

A traditional corporate organizational structure is a [directed acyclic graph (DAG)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Directed_acyclic_graph), with power structures flowing from top to bottom in a hierarchy. In a DAO, the typical organizational structure is closer to a ["team of teams" model](https://beaugordon.medium.com/key-takeaways-from-team-of-teams-by-general-stanley-mcchrystal-eac0b37520b9). That is to say, there are functional units segmented by authority over, and responsibility for, their specific functions. These functions are interdependent, so the functional units must act as a team. However, each function is itself too complex for any one contributor, so the functional units are themselves teams which may be further subdivided into subfunctions, projects and other substructures required to achieve their functions.

Due to the large variation in size, scope, expertise intensiveness, etc in functional units, it is not realistic to force all functional units into the same organizational structure. That said, there are some expecations that these organizational substructures will include an openness to new participants and [subsidiarity](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subsidiarity) of the authority within the working groups.

In practical terms, Progressive Decentralization means shifting authority and responsibility to a federation of functional units which recieves its mandate and funding from the DAO.

### Emergent Working Groups as Functional Units

I will be the first to admit that most of what goes on in this map is pretty invisible to the stakeholders at large. It takes so much work to operate a platform like this that it is unrealistic to keep tabs on everything that is going on. Fortunately, one doesn't need to. Practically, a contributor will get involved in a specific project which is itself just a piece of one of these functional units.

Below I have included a description of functional units as working groups that collectively cover the goings-on in GitcoinDAO. This is not guaranteed to be complete or correct, as it is just one perspective on the emerging organizational structure of GitcoinDAO. However, I hope that by expressing it in this way, I can support in the facilitation of the ongoing process of progressive decentralization.

#### Platform Operations

Platform operations is the front line of GitcoinDAO; this working group ensure that the platform is running and behaving as expected. Much of this work is the same as what the Gitcoin team provided prior to the launch of GitcoinDAO and which they continue to provide as paid contributors.

As this is a critical function it must continue uninterrupted, but it is now possible for volunteer contributors to participate in subject vetting for appropriate capabilities. By transforming this into a working group within the DAO, over time the function will become less and less dependent on specific individuals historically associated with the platform, and more an evolving cast of paid and volunteer contributors who step up to keep the ship running.

This working group must be capable of providing and maintaining a high quality software platform and thus is expected to comprise a range of technical and management skills found in a tech company.

#### Fraud Detection and Defense

This working group is the backline of the Gitcoin DAO, primarily providing the functions of a research and data science team, including but not limited collecting data from Gitcoin and analyzing it to detect new attack patterns, building and maintaining machine learning pipelines to scale human reviewers capabilities, as well providing recommendations (with reports) regarding the final allocation of match funds at the end of a round.

The sybil detection work is currently being provided by paid contributor [BlockScience](https://block.science/), but is being built out to support onboarding of other contributors; members of the [Token Engineering](https://tokenengineeringcommunity.github.io/website/) community have contributed to the research aspect of this workstream on a range of topics from improving algorithms, to identifying social challenges implicit in using algorithms to include or exclude users according to observed data.

This workstream is an ongoing initiative which will require external communications (in collaboration with communication and community management); this workstream will have private data of users, as well as some private materials available only to group members. In order to manage the privacy and transparency trade off, it is critical this group maintain spaces and permissioned access levels specific to this working group. While access to these materials must be limited for reasons related to defense of the platform, membership in the working group is still open to qualified volunteers. Balancing participation/transparency/privacy/security on this front is a particular challenging, but it will be an ongoing focus on the group.

#### Communication & Community Management

The communication and community working group is the lifeblood of the DAO, it ensures there are spaces available for all the necessary modes of interaction. This group keeps the github organization, discord servers, discourse server and more configured with the right roles and permissions for the other working groups. This working group moderates the various forums and helps route people to the appropriate working group to have their questions answered. Additionally, this working group must interact with the admistrative and communication leads in each of the other working groups to ensure critical information flows between groups which are otherwise focused on working on providing their primary function.

A particular challenge of this group is to identify the wide range of stakeholders (made up of combinations of roles) and to ensure their needs are heard and accounted for. The communication function can be thought of as collecting information from across stakeholder groups (including working groups), and publishing it outward to everyone (high level updates), as well as facilitating information flow directly between stakeholders (non-broadcast). The latter is higher fidelity and requires more context to understand -- in many cases it may still be public.

#### Match Funder Relations

Match funder relations is essentially a business development style group. In order for the Gitcoin grants program to continue to function as intended by the community there must be a continual stream externally sourced match funds.

Historically, this has been part of the function of the Gitcoin core team as it was a critical operation in the ongoing function of the platform. It is nonetheless quite distinct from the technical operations of the platform, albeit strongly dependent on the trust of those donors in the platforms technical reliability and the fairness of its allocation polices in addition to the relationship building. Part of managing these relationships is to mitigate the use of Gitcoin Grants match funding as a form of reputation washing.

This working group must understand the wants and needs of match donors to ensure the platform continues to provide for those wants and needs to keep the match funds flowing. Direct coordination with the platform operations will be required to execute round over round on distributions. Funders will also be particularly attuned to the public outputs of the fraud detection work stream as a source of confidence that their funds are being allocated as intended.

#### Treasury Management

This is a highly specialized function which most be able to respond in real-time to evolving conditions. It is prudent that a working group be provisioned to manage funds on behalf of the DAO with a strategic mandate from the stewards. The most practical way to do this would be to have an external service provider offer this as a paid contributor, while simultaneously beginning to collaborate with other community members wishing to participate in the work stream.

Regardless of who has the authority to manage funds on behalf of the DAO it is critical that the high level strategy -- priorities, timescales, and general approach to funds management be organized into a proposal and ratified by the stewards. The funds management function needs to have oversight from governance but still needs to operate day to day within its mandate.

Financial reporting to the broader DAO is required for transparency.

#### Governance

The governance working group is functionally made up of the Stewards as well as a variety of support, education and administrative resources (people, process and tools) aimed at ensuring that the stewards are well informed about the issues facing Gitcoin DAO.

As a group the Stewards should represent the diverse set of stakeholders in the Gitcoin Community. It is worthwhile to keep track of the distribution of Stewards - in particular the amounts of GTC delegate to those stewards - as a way to keep track of which groups of stakeholders are adequately being represented, and avoid risks of underrepresenting some segments of the community.

#### Meta Governance

It is prudent to decompose operational goverance (the work of the stewards) from metagovernance -- the institutional analysis and development work.

This working group will need to include ongoing efforts to refine the processes through which proposals are heard by the stewards, and ensure that bilateral communications between the Stewards and other working groups are maintained -- while the Stewards may pass votes, the follow through on most policies will fall to other working groups.

Metagovernance here refers to the work to further refine the institutional structure of GitcoinDAO. This will include further refining the policies around how stewards are selected, how voting power is counted, ensuring stakeholders are represented, determining how the attention of stewards is managed across a wide range of topics.

## Acknowledgements

I would like to thank everyone who contributed both directly and indirectly to this mapping exercise:

- Gitcoin Stewards: Matt Stephenson, Nathan Schneider, Kelsie Nabben
- Collaborators MetaGov.org: Ellie Rennie, Primavera Di Filippi, Joshua Tan (also Kelsie and Nathan)
- Collaborators BlockScience: Burrrata, Jeff Emmett, Jessica Zartler, Danilo Lessa Bernardineli, Jesse Tao, Jiajia H, Nick Hirannet (also Matt)

Additional, thanks to Jim Hazard of Common Accord and Eric Alston of CU Boulder who provided relevant discussions and reading material pursuant to this research.