What Would Ideal Community-Led Governance for Octant Look Like?

[james]

@mike.sylphdapps.eth

These projects are established but haven’t “made it” yet, so a funding round has a real chance to get them what they need to get to that level.

This is really interesting, and I think what @cerv1 stated with his short tail, and what you highlight in your blue area can co exist and is where I think the sweet spot is for Octant.

We are looking into having multiple funding models depending upon where a project is at in their development. Open ended continuous funding only being available to the projects that have an extremely high benchmark to clear. Perpetual funding with a lower threshold of credibility being the blue area that you highlight here Mike. I also think we can work with these communities like you highlight here:

@mike.sylphdapps.eth

These projects have established (albeit small) communities that could help spread the word about Octant. With enough of those projects in a funding round, we catalyze a large number of passionate people from disparate groups to share what Octant is doing in a way that funding the Protocol Guild or Gitcoin doesn’t.

with the mini grants rounds we are going to be doing, and I would love for the community to begin having a say over that decision making in 2024.

[thedevanshmehta]

@james

And something like this could be possible but we need to think about how that would work in practice. Because users need to take a decision (donate or claim) with current setup. Maybe we could add a “save” option as well?

I was thinking more along the lines of voice credits given against their donated amount, which can be spent at a future date for governance/mini-rounds they want to see. As opposed to competing with donations from locked glm, governance credits are a reward for choosing to donate rather than claiming rewards for yourself.

@james

Devansh, can I ask how this works in practice? Are individuals compensated retroactively? Wondering what has been an effective motivator for this model given there must be friction towards those taking action if they are unsure if they will be rewarded.

Yes I have seen 2 models applied in Arbitrum for driving campaigns.

In one, a proposal keeps ~$16000-20,000 for the person who drafted it (outcome based, retroactive funding contingent on successful passage of a proposal).

The other structure is the one I operate under at the Treasury and Sustainability WG, where I get paid ~$100 per hour and allocate 20 hours a week to driving the campaign for Arbitrum to diversify its treasury, utilize sequencer revenue, mitigate price impact from ARB liquidations and convert its grants into investments.

I personally far prefer the fixed pay structure - it allows me to draft neutral frameworks that I think are interesting for the DAO to consider, without giving me a vested financial interest in making sure it gets passed.

I would also argue that fixed pay allows for more creative work as its de-linked from a particular short term outcome

[james]

@thedevanshmehta

I was thinking more along the lines of voice credits given against their donated amount, which can be spent at a future date for governance/mini-rounds they want to see. As opposed to competing with donations from locked glm, governance credits are a reward for choosing to donate rather than claiming rewards for yourself.

I think we’re on the same page. Any governance proposal in our mind should be decided by a weighted vote based on public good donations. How to design this is still the question, but the overall idea I think we’re aligned on.

In terms of the design, does vote weight simply accumulate and thus give the early adopters who have donated in more rounds more of an advantage? Or should previous donations begin to taper off in effective weight as we move into the future. Example of this is your weight from donations this period = x, + last period which = .5x + 2 epochs ago = .25x , and anything before is null.

@thedevanshmehta

The other structure is the one I operate under at the Treasury and Sustainability WG, where I get paid ~$100 per hour and allocate 20 hours a week to driving the campaign for Arbitrum to diversify its treasury, utilize sequencer revenue, mitigate price impact from ARB liquidations and convert its grants into investments.

I personally far prefer the fixed pay structure - it allows me to draft neutral frameworks that I think are interesting for the DAO to consider, without giving me a vested financial interest in making sure it gets passed.

I would also argue that fixed pay allows for more creative work as its de-linked from a particular short term outcome

I can see this working really well with Arbitrum because of the diversity and large community, its probably hard to game. But with such a small user base at the moment, and what could be an even smaller subset if we transition to voting based on donations in Octant, then it could be susceptible to grifters.

Any thoughts here? Maybe there’s a path towards your idea that we start elsewhere and move towards yours? Just thinking out loud here.

[hanniabu]

There’s 2 general discussions to be had and after catching up it looks like you’ve caught on to them:

1. What is the vision for Octant?
2. What does the governance look like?

In order to properly analyze #2, we need to explore #1.

What is the vision for Octant?

The vision I’ve always had for Octant is:

• A primary group with a set allocation that will go towards a limited set of short tail projects.
• A secondary group with a set allocation that will go towards mid tail projects.
• At the end of each epoch, N projects from the primary group with the least support will drop down to the secondary group and N projects from the secondary group have the opportunity to move up to the primary group.
• A third group with a set allocation that will go towards long tail projects, but for retroactive grants. Since they have little/no track record this would likely be the best course for them.

I’d like to hear a more comprehensive vision from the team as it seems there’s some information we’re not aware of, such as:

• “So Octant V2 has not been discussed much, but a much more flexible and on chain version of Octant is being built behind the scenes”
• “We are going to be running mini grant rounds on Grant Stack and Jokerace” (thought mini grants was just an idea but it seems like it’s further along than that)
• “We are looking into having multiple funding models depending upon where a project is at in their development.”

I’ll stop here because until a clear vision is established we won’t be able to effectively make decisions on governance since the functionality you’ll need to cater to can widely vary.

[petheth]

Re:rewarding governance/participation/community contributions - one good way could be to set a certain amount of GLM as a pool for contributors, then set up a Coordinape circle where community members can join, report their contributions to the Octant & help allocate the community rewards to other community members based on their contributions.

Also like this idea of laying out the intents doc. I wouldn’t mind if the first version was decided on in a centralized way with community suggestions on a google doc, regardless of how its made its great to have to guide the decision making & allocating processes.

@rowdy

We can find creative ways to incorporate the GLM token into the design but our focus should be on empowering active members that donate to public goods.

Random idea this gave me is that we could plug in existing data from Gitcoin & Giveth donors, maybe give 1 voting token to every address that donated at least $100 or so to public goods. This would plug in the wider public goods ecosystem, promote & grow the Octant.

@thedevanshmehta

Since number of projects are smaller and more curated than Gitcoin, we have an opportunity for intentional matchmaking rather than Gitcoin’s more spontaneous & serendipitous connections

I like this. We could start with a simple channel on discord for people to post the kind of roles they’re looking for. If its useful, we could do something like Trusted Seed - have people fill forms & info appearing in a public Notion

I also like the idea of govpow accrual & govpow not being based on the stake size, tho I’m not sure how the latter could be fairly implemented.

@jengajojo

Have the DAO be it’s own entity and let the foundation be a service provider/steward for the DAO as opposed to the DAO being an extension of the foundation

This makes sense, then slowly delegate more authority to this DAO.

@james

• What areas of Octant’s operations would you like to have a say in?
• How can we incentivize meaningful participation in governance?
• Are there any specific governance models from other projects that you find inspiring or effective?

Nothing specific but kind of all of it. I think what you’re doing right now makes a lot of sense - we don’t have to govern right away by having all of the community have a say in things, simply involving the community in the decision making by asking for feedback etc. is a great way to start.

In general, I like the idea of decentralizing by opening up to community-wide contributions & participation, rather than direct governance through voting. Latter is nice but former can actually be a lot more meaningful than clicking the vote button.

tl;dr

• would consider setting a GLM pool for community rewards through Coordinape, maybe starting with $1-2k/mo
• echoing the idea of co-writing the intentions doc with the input from the community
• if giving governance right based on public goods contributions, maybe include Gitcoin & Giveth contributors
• a channel for Octant projects to recruit contributors
• maybe also a channel for indexing project updates so they’re more visible vs tucked away on forums all in their own separate threads

And if we want to start playing with actual DAO infra, we could start by starting a DAO on Silohaus/DAOhaus, with voting power based on existing POAPs
Could use it to test decision making around whatever, but have the ultimate say or veto power remain with the Golem Foundation for the foreseeable future

[james]

@hanniabu

• A primary group with a set allocation that will go towards a limited set of short tail projects.
• A secondary group with a set allocation that will go towards mid tail projects.
• At the end of each epoch, N projects from the primary group with the least support will drop down to the secondary group and N projects from the secondary group have the opportunity to move up to the primary group.
• A third group with a set allocation that will go towards long tail projects, but for retroactive grants. Since they have little/no track record this would likely be the best course for them.

This seems somewhat like relegation/promotion model that various structures outside of web3 use.

@hanniabu

I’d like to hear a more comprehensive vision from the team as it seems there’s some information we’re not aware of, such as:

My idea of where this project is going centers around there being two primary things Octant needs to design for:

• Adding value to the GLM ecosystem
• Adding value to public goods funding ecosystem.

There is overlap between the two, but I’d argue not a very high amount. Meaning they are not mutually inclusive and therefor in ways, design needs to work for both in parallel. How could that work?

I see us being able to build for public goods funding community by designing a mechanism that supports human based decision making. With a anti sybil solution, we can move towards a quadratic voting mechanism (or something else) that will allow the matching pool to be signaled based on collective decision making.

Outside of the scope of the matching pool, and rewards in general, there are a lot of other issues that collective governance via a GLM based setup could direct:

• Epoch Round Governance : Defining round features or changes to: the minimum funding threshold, the amount of projects eligible to participate, potential epoch themes are just a few ideas.
• Incentive mechanisms : Designing incentives for beneficial tokenomics for GLM or governance.
• Unused Staking Rewards : Allow outside projects or individuals to come and pitch a campaign or design a retroactive reward system. Same idea for content and & educational initiatives about Octant’s technology, or related subjects.
• Ecosystem Investments : Investments in complementary projects or protocols, or research (DAO research relevant).
• Partnerships and Collaborations : Deciding on strategic partnerships or collaborations with other entities.

These are just some of the ideas I have, but I see a two pronged approach because there are two different goals within Octant that we are building for simultaneously.

[james]

Of course there is some conflict of interest if we are handing a piece of the PG funding aspect over to the capital based decisionmaking, so I don’t want to signal that these are strong opinions, but ones that we are looking to explore collectively, which is why we’re kicking off this conversation.

[james]

@petheth

Re:rewarding governance/participation/community contributions - one good way could be to set a certain amount of GLM as a pool for contributors, then set up a Coordinape circle where community members can join, report their contributions to the Octant & help allocate the community rewards to other community members based on their contributions.

I like this idea a lot.

@petheth

Also like this idea of laying out the intents doc. I wouldn’t mind if the first version was decided on in a centralized way with community suggestions on a google doc, regardless of how its made its great to have to guide the decision making & allocating processes.

On my todo list and will have it formalized next week

@petheth

Random idea this gave me is that we could plug in existing data from Gitcoin & Giveth donors, maybe give 1 voting token to every address that donated at least $100 or so to public goods. This would plug in the wider public goods ecosystem, promote & grow the Octant.

Would be happy to explore this! We’ve thought about it but this is what we did with Epoch Zero in a way and saw mixed results in terms of what they did with the GLM.

We are interested in getting GLM into quality individuals hands that want to contribute, so thinking how we can explore that together in 2024 would be a great concept to develop imo

[james]

I want to thank everyone that shared their feedback!

There is a lot of really good information to distill from this conversation. What I am seeing right now:

1. We as a team need to get really clear on what our intentions and goals are with Octant. As mentioned before, this is bifurcated in wanting to add value to the GLM ecosystem, and the public goods ecosystem, but this has not yet been stated, and there is work to be done from us in outlining formally and clearly.

2. With a strong statement of intention, we can collectively design (or redesign) many different aspects related to Octant that have been listed here. There are so many things I can list from what people above have shared, but some of the big ones are:

• Deciding the design of how rewards are allocated.
  • Users, what tail of public goods, unused rewards, etc.
• Empowering a DAO that is separate from Foundation (this would be the long term goal).
  • And how we can protect Octant from attacks if/when governance has transitioned away from Foundation.
• Deciding voting power and choices/tradeoffs for Octant mechanics.
• Whom to partner with for mini rounds. These are all some examples of the many things that can be explored.

Governance Council

Many of you are aware of this next bit of info, but the plan here is to have #1 answered in early January. Soon after, we plan to bring together a governance council that will help us with #2. This governance council will be roughly 20-30 individuals with experience related to what we are trying to build here. A document is being formalized right now that covers the structure, but this will be a very transparent process, mostly being discussed on this forum, with a planned call once a month. More updates about this council will come soon once I have them.

If anyone has anything else though that they would like to share, please do, as I don’t want to close off this conversation early!

[DanSingjoy]

Hi James,

Thank you very much for starting this discussion and sharing all the great insights. I’ve been closely following the conversation and I believe the Respect Game provides an ideal approach to community-led governance for Octant.

Enhancing Octant with the Respect Game

The Respect Game is a profoundly helpful consensus game that can enable the Octant community to play a significant role in the operations, design, and strategic decisions of Octant. In addition to facilitating community-led governance, the Respect Game provides a fun way to foster collaborations, promote public goods creators, and fairly award positive impact.

This innovative consensus game could be easily implemented into the governance council and calls that you are planning. The Respect Game is played in live meetings or video calls and it takes about an hour to play. You can see an overview of how the Octant community could implement the Respect Game here. My team has been collaborating with hundreds of builders to refine this game for the past few years and we usually play it once a week, but it could be played just once a month. The game is flexible and can be tailored to suit Octant’s goals.

Community Governance with Fractal Democracy

The Respect Game empowers communities with a revolutionary governance system called Fractal Democracy. The community members who have earned the most Respect by reaching consensus in community events can join a governance council to help lead the Octant ecosystem. Respect is a soulbound token that participants earn by helping Octant and it could be used to coordinate the future of Octant. Alternatively, participants could elect delegates during meetings to represent them in the council. The roles, responsibilities, and powers for this council could be automatically updated onchain with Hats Protocol.

The repeated, communal meetings for the Respect Game provides an invaluable sybil-resistant reputation system and a powerful coordination primitive to support collective human based decision making. It can be used to help make all of the decisions you described regarding Octant’s design, operations, and strategy in a joyful community driven process. The Respect Game is also highly scalable due to it’s fractal nature where participants split up into breakout groups. This enables the Octant community governance to make better decisions with the wisdom of the crowd, run more experiments like mini rounds, and scale to more effectively fund public goods creators.

Additional Incentives

In addition to the prospect of earning Respect and more intrinsic incentives like collaborating with fellow Octant community members, meaningful participation in governance could be further incentivized by rewarding GLM or ETH to participants in Respect Games at Octant meetings. Respect is distributed in a fibonacci ratio to fairly award participants for their contributions and additional rewards could be automatically distributed in the same ratio with a tool like 0xSplits.

@james

Are there any specific governance models from other projects that you find inspiring or effective?

Yes. My team and I created Optimism Fractal and Eden Fractal, which are communities with weekly events based around the Respect Game. We’ve hosted over a hundred events featuring the Respect Game with an average of ten participants and have received outstanding feedback from hundreds of supporters. You’re welcome to watch videos of Optimism Fractal meetings and join our weekly events to see how the Respect Game can work in action.

In addition, there are about fifteen projects that have implemented variations of the Respect Game. Our team has worked closely with leading innovators in Genesis Fractal, fractally, Eden Elections, and Psinq to develop variants of the Respect Game for the past three years. The Genesis Fractal had an average attendance of 37 participants as you can see on this dashboard and an Eden Election had almost 200 participants with over a million dollars governed by elected delegates.

All of these projects received excellent reviews and many participants reported life-changing benefits, inspiring countless volunteer hours devoted towards developing these processes. Each project has iterated with variations of fractal democracy for community-led governance that could be helpful for Octant. You can learn more about the history of projects that have developed the Respect Game and similar processes for fractal democracy in this article.

@james

How can we incentivize meaningful participation in governance?

Our team built open-source tools that enable anyone to enjoy the benefits of the Respect Game with their community or organization. The Octant community could use these tools at weekly or monthly meetings to create an ideal community-led governance that supports the Golem Network and public goods funding ecosystem.

Please feel free to reach out with any questions or comments. I’d be happy to provide more details and help Octant get started with the Respect Game. We’re excited to get more involved in the Octant community and greatly appreciate the support of GLM holders for Optimystics in the Epoch 2 snapshot poll. You can learn more by exploring Optimystics on discuss.octant.app and this article with more details of how the Respect Game could be implemented for the Octant community.

Thank you for reading. I’m looking forward to hearing your thoughts and wishing everyone a happy new year!

[james]

Thanks @DanSingjoy for sharing this. I would have a couple of concerns around implementing this at such an early stage:

@DanSingjoy

The Respect Game is played in live meetings or video calls and it takes about an hour to play.

The first being the time commitment. Due to the quality of people who have already softly committed to joining, I need to be extremely mindful in how we manage our time together. The overwhelming majority of contributors have explicitly stated that they are happy to join as long as time expectations are on the lower end.

@DanSingjoy

Community Governance with Fractal Democracy

My second concern would be introducing something new when there is already many other things we need to level set with this group on. The respect game might be something worth exploring as we look to scale this community governance idea, but at the moment each of these members are already well known contributors in our community (no need for sybil or earning rep in my opinion), or they come from a highly reputable referral that we can trust. This is going to be a small group altogether, and I would be confident in managing this from a more traditional viewpoint, and then keeping ideas like yours in our view should we need tools later on.

[Bobbay]

From my experience of participating in DeFi and L2 DAOs, each DAO takes a very different route to what decentralized governance means to them. The best part about having a community in a DAO is letting them get involved, but the question is more on how involved they should be in decisions. Every decision? Grants only? This depends on the protocol; there is no one-stop solution.

A good example is comparing Optimism to Abritrum; Arbitrum DAO has a very community hands-on approach where the community decides every single aspect, whereas Optimism takes a much more guided approach with support from the core teams utilizing this “season” approach to use reflections and the team uses community feedback to develop next steps. Each has its pros and cons.

You can also look at DeFi protocols where Aave DAO has decentralised into multiple service providers and has active governance participation. This is in contrast to Ajna Finance, who plan to have very minimal governance, where delegates will only vote on grant distributions. Both are really different protocols, hence why Ajna Finance can have minimal governance, but it shows the diversity in design.

Could Octant automate more of its processes to reduce unnecessary governance votes? Or does the DAO want to vote on every decision? Its a conversation for the DAO.

Regarding governance participation, it’s very common to see loads of activity in the early stages until it slowly decreases due to an opportunity cost of participating somewhere else or the the novelty wears off. Retroactive rewards, recognition programs and gas rebates (if there was onchain voting) are nice ways to encourage sustainable participation.

In practice, “recognized delegate” programs are a nice way to encourage ongoing participation and in combination with retroactive rewards, you get this nice combination of receiving (minimal?) monthly compensation and a larger portion of retroactive rewards depending on your impact which encourages delegates to be more active and contribute to the DAO, alongside their voting.

[james]

@Bobbay

but the question is more on how involved they should be in decisions

We’re already asking ourselves this now, great point.

@Bobbay

Regarding governance participation, it’s very common to see loads of activity in the early stages until it slowly decreases due to an opportunity cost of participating somewhere else or the the novelty wears off. Retroactive rewards, recognition programs and gas rebates (if there was onchain voting) are nice ways to encourage sustainable participation.

Any examples of this I could look into deeper? I had a feeling this was the case, so I’m glad to know you’ve experienced this. I think with the sustainable mechanism that Octant has, there are ways to keep participation steady, and more importantly, signal to the community that we value them.

[Bobbay]

Optimism community contributions naturally fell off when committees were introduced and delegates no longer had to vote on each proposal. They introduced retroactive rewards for those who participated in governance and had a minimum amount of voting power and had comp for committee members.

Arbitrum has retro citizens funding round and in the LTIP proposal on Arbitrum we added these retroacting funding pot to enable the DAO to reward active contributors to the LTIP program.

Aave introduced the orbit program a while ago that provided gas rebates to delegates and paid them a small stipend a month based on their activity. Those 3 DAOs are the interesting ones to check out imo.

[james]

Appreciate the info!!!

[CoachJ]

Hey, CoachJ here from Gitcoin

Nothing much to add here - so many great thoughts from familiar names and great minds already.

@james it sounds like you at the team are going to get focused first and foremost on the fundamentals of “What do we want?” and “Why do we want it?”.

I’m looking to forward to hearing updates and getting more involved in the conversation

[james]

So we’ve got our mission statement / north star for the project, and we have a big announcement next week that touches pretty heavy on this. I’ll get an update to everyone soon with a few big changes and developments that will go into effect for Epoch Three around rewards and governance.

[lanzdingz]

Gm friends,

Went through everyone’s thoughts and ideas - looking forward to continuing to tinker and build this system out together.

@thedevanshmehta

For example Gitcoin is a regranting mechanism passing on funds received in octant to other projects across the ecosystem, whereas @LefterisJP and Rotki utilize funds to pay their developers for building the end product.

@mike.sylphdapps.eth

Efforts to fund projects in this blue range would have a nice symbiotic effect for Octant and those projects.

• These projects are established but haven’t “made it” yet, so a funding round has a real chance to get them what they need to get to that level.

I think an example of this is the round Octant ran with SheFi - a recognized and trusted community that partnered with Octant to help fund projects within their ecosystem.

I’m also exploring this with Unlock Protocol now by running a retro-funding round for projects using Unlock on Arbiturm - we’re testing to see how this impacts the ecosystem.

Just throwing out some incentive structures from DAOs I’m in for different ‘contribution ↔ reward’ cycles

Taho is playing around with a ‘game-like’ governance model to encourage active participation - they just wrapped up their beta version, but it saw a ton of engagement (but also TAHO hasn’t launched its token officially so lots of people farming the airdrop) . One interesting component they are playing with are XP points (actual on-chain points) that you earn via doing ‘quests’ set out by the ‘realm’ you’ve staked your tokens with (ex: Public Goods, Arbitrum, Base etc). Now they are a community-run wallet so their setup is much larger, but could still pull some inspiration from them. At the end of each ‘season’ you’re able to claim swap your XP points for TAHO. Maybe GLM staking ‘activates’ participation in quests that support public goods during a ‘season’ (epoch) - if you complete the quest, you earn XP - this XP can be redeemed for GLM tokens (or a retro ETH pool we set up). ThankARB is also experimenting with a version of this where you do tasks and earn ThankARB and or also ARB tokens. *this could also be something that helps us temp check the quality of Octant governance votes.

Pros: rewards stakers and encourages more public good impact that can be traced back to Octant
Cons: Takes time to build out this system and education is needed to help onboard people to it

UnlockDAO has a very simple retro reward - every month you are able to self-nominate or nominate someone else for retro-funding. A snapshot vote is set up and based on your allocated votes, you receive a portion of 100UDT.

Pros: here its simple, consistent (so easy entry to contribute because you know there’s a path for a small amount of rewards), and accessible.

Cons: isn’t always easy to gage impact of work and voting doesn’t always reflect impact of work but can still be a popularity contest/ it’s weighted based on token so larger whales have a big impact on the voting, but might not have the context on the work.

Gitcoin citizens round - retroactively rewarding people who positively support the growth of the Gitcoin ecosystem. They also just launched a new citizens initiate that has ‘open’ access but still moves through a curated grants team.

Pros: incentivizes contributing to the gitcoin ecosystem, without having to pay for more worksteams/working groups

Cons: it can still feel like a populatiry contest with QF rounds and there isn’t a solid metric in place to track the impact of the work and how that positively shows up in the amount of funding a citizen receives.

There is also Optimism retroPGF model - which I know some of this group is in the training cohort for. Using this model for both contributor engagement, as well as a means to distribute larger amounts of funding (and having the community participate as badge holders).

Overall there are many different models and incentive structures to explore which is exciting. We just need to distill it down to what we would like to experiment with here with Octant.

[james]

@lanzdingz

Taho is playing around with a ‘game-like’ governance model to encourage active participation - they just wrapped up their beta version, but it saw a ton of engagement (but also TAHO hasn’t launched its token officially so lots of people farming the airdrop) . One interesting component they are playing with are XP points (actual on-chain points) that you earn via doing ‘quests’ set out by the ‘realm’ you’ve staked your tokens with (ex: Public Goods, Arbitrum, Base etc). Now they are a community-run wallet so their setup is much larger, but could still pull some inspiration from them. At the end of each ‘season’ you’re able to claim swap your XP points for TAHO. Maybe GLM staking ‘activates’ participation in quests that support public goods during a ‘season’ (epoch) - if you complete the quest, you earn XP - this XP can be redeemed for GLM tokens (or a retro ETH pool we set up). ThankARB is also experimenting with a version of this where you do tasks and earn ThankARB and or also ARB tokens. *this could also be something that helps us temp check the quality of Octant governance votes.

This is really interesting. I’ve actually been exploring this idea with @trigs in what some are calling “Proof of Contribution”. And while this is all still early, I think having a few different paths towards governance power rather than just straight token voting would be really interesting.

Thanks for diving into the pros and cons for each that you list here. Valuable information, and something Ill think on more prior to our call on Monday!

[Abundance]

Read through the thread and I think there are already a ton of ideas of how to approach governance. I think that at the end of the day the governance structure should reinforce the purpose of the project. If the “why” is clear then it’s much easier to weigh the different options and choose the “how.” I think this quote may be a good starting point:

@james

My idea of where this project is going centers around there being two primary things Octant needs to design for:

• Adding value to the GLM ecosystem
• Adding value to public goods funding ecosystem.

I generally agree with this view, and think there is a variety of paths to get there, and different strategies to growing both the GLM ecosystem and contributing to public goods.

What was mostly discussed in the thread so far (on what to fund) is which part of the crypto ecosystem public goods “tails” should Octant focus on funding - the answer to that should be guided by what we believe adds the most value to the GLM ecosystem & most value to the ecosystem. “What” that is could be something to experiment with in the coming Epochs, something for the community to engage in, and something to evaluate the impact of - I don’t know if there is a clear answer to it.

I’d like to suggest though that there is another aspect to the crypto ecosystems which is not discussed as often: growing the ecosystem itself by funding public goods outside of crypto. If there is one Epoch per year where the Octant community decides on a particular theme (science, climate, geographic location, etc.) and then “normies” apply for funding, that can help grow the ecosystem as a whole (as well as improve its image)