## Project Description

### Overview
[Grant Ships](https://twitter.com/grantships) is an ‘evolutionary grants game’ where the responsibilities and permissions typically held by a centralized grants program are divided across a handful of clearly defined roles: Facilitators, Grant Ships and Recipients.

Each actor filling a role has a particular set of actions available to them, and the sum of these actions represents a comprehensive grants program. Each actor is granted permission to perform in a role when they are given the appropriate Hats Protocol hat (NFT).

The long-term vision is to use this mechanism to establish a self-sustaining, community-guided grant allocation system that can function seamlessly without central planning and without vulnerability to capture.

### Game Flow

When the game begins, participants apply to become Grant Ship operators. Approved operators each become the manager of their own pool using GrantShipStrategy. This strategy is a modified version of the DirectGrantsStrategy tweaked to use Hats for revokable role permissions and to allow interaction with the GameManager metastrategy.

Each funding round, the Grant Ships (grant-giving subDAOs) compete to best deploy capital from a common funding pool. Facilitators oversee the process by performing safety checks on grant recipient addresses and optionally issuing yellow or red flags to ships to signal violations of rules, community norms or bad faith activity.

At the end of each funding round, facilitators can initiate a new round with new relative funding levels for each Grant Ship, ideally based on their performance in the previous round.

### Future

By incorporating game mechanics, we’ve made involvement both engaging and straightforward. The next step is to build an interactive dash board that visualizes the activities of each Ship.

#### We are attempting to answer these questions:
* How easy can we make it for qualified candidates to recieve grant funds?
* How can we eliminate 'spreadsheet hell' from grants administration by utilizing Allo's metadata standard to make record-keeping a passive side effect of giving grants.
* How do you make it easy to give and receive funding without increasing risk of capture and bad actors?
* How can a community curate and evolve skillfulness at grant allocation without simply centralizing allocation powers among a few powerful actors?
* How can we use competition and accountability to create increasingly high-impact grants programs?

### Allo Protocol

We use Allo protocol and two custom Allo strategies to:
1) Define and enforce the actions available to each roles
2) Track participants using the Allo registry
3) Divide the act of funding into a multi-step process that includes allocation, distribution and documentation.

### Hats Protocol
We incorporate Hats protocol to represent the roles as hats NFTs, so roles can be assigned to and revoked by the holder of the 'top hat' (e.g. a grants council or community DAO contract). This reduces capture risk by allowing the replacement of actors from any role as needed.

### **Allo Metastrategy**

We created two new strategies that work together to create the game structure: GameManagerStrategy and GrantShipStrategy.

**GameManagerStrategy (Metastrategy)**

* Holds the common funding pool
* Creates and initializes the Grant Ship pools (GrantShipStrategy)
* Allocates and distributes funds from the common funding pool into pools for each Grant Ship
* Enforces round start and stop times, and allows initiation of new game rounds.

**GrantShipStrategy (Strategy)**
* Allows potential grant Recipients to apply
* Allows Recipients or Grant Ship Operators to supply milestones for distributions
* Allows Recipients to signal that a milestone is complete
* Allows Grant Ship Operators to distribute funds for a completed milestone
* Allows Game Facilitators to issue a Yellow or Red Flag to a Grant Ship
* Locks down Grant Ship Operator permissions when a Red Flag is active
* Allows funds to be withdrawn back into GameManager pool if needed

### **Participant Roles**

> This section describes actions available to each role.

Participants within Grant Ships w/Allo are divided into 4 main roles: Game Facilitators, Game Admins, Grant Ships and Grant Recipients.

**Game Facilitator**
* [Approving](https://github.com/DAOmasons/allo-v2/blob/e14509a289831961216b91fc1a40a478f316c12b/contracts/strategies/_poc/grant-ships/GrantShipStrategy.sol#L665) fund allocations (after due diligence, such as KYC and deny list accounting), allowing Grant Ships to distribute at their discretion.
* [Activating or Deactivating](https://github.com/DAOmasons/allo-v2/blob/e14509a289831961216b91fc1a40a478f316c12b/contracts/strategies/_poc/grant-ships/GrantShipStrategy.sol#L554C14-L554C27) the Grant Ship funding pools
* [Withdrawing](https://github.com/DAOmasons/allo-v2/blob/e14509a289831961216b91fc1a40a478f316c12b/contracts/strategies/_poc/grant-ships/GrantShipStrategy.sol#L562C14-L562C22) funds from deactivated Grant Ship Funding pools
* [Flagging](https://github.com/DAOmasons/allo-v2/blob/e14509a289831961216b91fc1a40a478f316c12b/contracts/strategies/_poc/grant-ships/GrantShipStrategy.sol#L478C14-L478C23) Grant Ships that are not operating in good faith, (e.g. Ships who have failed to make allocations, that make repeated attempts to fund bad actors etc)
* [Resolving](https://github.com/DAOmasons/allo-v2/blob/e14509a289831961216b91fc1a40a478f316c12b/contracts/strategies/_poc/grant-ships/GrantShipStrategy.sol#L503) Grant Ship flags that no longer apply

**Grant Ships**
* [Distributing](https://github.com/DAOmasons/allo-v2/blob/e14509a289831961216b91fc1a40a478f316c12b/contracts/strategies/_poc/grant-ships/GrantShipStrategy.sol#L717) funds to Grant Recipients
* [Capturing](https://github.com/DAOmasons/allo-v2/blob/e14509a289831961216b91fc1a40a478f316c12b/contracts/strategies/_poc/grant-ships/GrantShipStrategy.sol#L590) Grant Recipient details and including them in the disclosure
* [Reviewing](https://github.com/DAOmasons/allo-v2/blob/e14509a289831961216b91fc1a40a478f316c12b/contracts/strategies/_poc/grant-ships/GrantShipStrategy.sol#L383C14-L383C33) Milestones declared by recipient
* [Rejecting](https://github.com/DAOmasons/allo-v2/blob/e14509a289831961216b91fc1a40a478f316c12b/contracts/strategies/_poc/grant-ships/GrantShipStrategy.sol#L455) invalid Milestones
* [Declaring](https://github.com/DAOmasons/allo-v2/blob/e14509a289831961216b91fc1a40a478f316c12b/contracts/strategies/_poc/grant-ships/GrantShipStrategy.sol#L349C3-L349C3) Milestones for recipients (or recipient can do it)

**Grant Recipients**
* [Registering](https://github.com/DAOmasons/allo-v2/blob/e14509a289831961216b91fc1a40a478f316c12b/contracts/strategies/_poc/grant-ships/GrantShipStrategy.sol#L590C61-L590C68) as a potential Grant Recipient for grants
* [Declaring](https://github.com/DAOmasons/allo-v2/blob/e14509a289831961216b91fc1a40a478f316c12b/contracts/strategies/_poc/grant-ships/GrantShipStrategy.sol#L349C3-L349C3) Milestones (or Grant Ship operator can do it)
* [Submitting](https://github.com/DAOmasons/allo-v2/blob/e14509a289831961216b91fc1a40a478f316c12b/contracts/strategies/_poc/grant-ships/GrantShipStrategy.sol#L412C14-L412C29) milestone completion
* [Posting](https://github.com/DAOmasons/allo-v2/blob/e14509a289831961216b91fc1a40a478f316c12b/contracts/strategies/_poc/grant-ships/GrantShipStrategy.sol#L330C4-L330C4) updates as needed

### Cool Features

* GrantShipStrategy is a modified version of Allo's Direct Grants Strategy with changes to integrate with Hats and to allow integration with the GameManagerStrategy metastrategy.

* Game Start and Game End events. Game Start happens after initial distribution to sub pools. Once you get to game end it locks all the Grant Ships.

* Hats. Hats provides revokable roles to provide capture resistance and lets a DAO or council assign and revoke game roles as needed.

* Facilitators can flag ships and lock them down, or warn users if they notice any sort of malfeasance."

* Every recipient, Grant Ship and facilitator will have a feed of UpdatePosted events.

* GameStart and GameEnd - at GameEnd we're going to stop the ships

### Team DAO Masons

[DAO Masons](https://twitter.com/daomasons) is a small service DAO with big ambitions to transform decentralized governance. Our goal is to create new mechanisms, strategies, protocols, and applications that will vastly improve the overall output and efficacy of DAOs.

#### Team:
* Chris - [Github](https://github.com/boilerrat) - [X](https://twitter.com/boilerrat)
Project Manager/Community Lead
* Jord - [Github](https://github.com/jordanlesich) - [X](https://twitter.com/jordanlesich)
Lead Engineer/Game Design
* Matt (UI369) - [Github](https://www.github.com/UI369) - [X](https://twitter.com/ui_369)
Product Manager/Game Design/Marketing

### TODO: Link to the publicly visible source code repository

https://github.com/DAOmasons/allo-v2/tree/grantShips

### TODO: Showcase

2-3 minute explainer youtube video that presents the application. The video should be aimed at grants program managers and showcases how your app will help them distribute their grant funding

How the project uses Allo

2. Link to the publicly visible source code repository

Include a link to the working demo and the open-source repository on Github

3. Showcase

2-3 minute explainer youtube video that presents the application. The video should be aimed at grants program managers and showcases how your app will help them distribute their grant funding

**Judging Criteria**

**Design and UX:** Is it visually appealing and easy to use?

**Originality:** Does it have unique and novel features or combine features of other products or services in a unique and novel way?

**Technical Accomplishment:** Is the code elegant, clean, and technically interesting? Is the project complete? Does the project interact with Allo Protocol under-the-hood?

**Potential Utility:** Does the project fill a need that grant program managers have? Does it have the potential to be used by grant program managers?

Qs: How many steps does someone have to take to get some money?
How do you do that without creating capture & bad actor risk?

By splitting up the roles, we improve the UX.

This is a metagrants framework - we're taking on recordkeeping for many different grants programs. Instead of shuffling it between different spreadsheets and offchain documents all the data is standardized and localized on Allo protocol and the Allo metadata standards.

The metadata is standardized so that the registry works?
A pointer to the protocol, and a pointer to the resource.