Please give a short description of the topic/cause for your Community Hub
The Grants & Impact Community Hub brings together many of the top research and development organizations and individuals to host a series of discussions and workshops that can help builders build more sustainable projects and help the space broadly understand the outcomes and impact of our collective work.
What will you offer to the Devcon attendees?
The motivation around this hub is that a) the vast majority of established organizations in the space feel the need to launch grant programs and b) that many early stage builders rely on grants to help them start or continue their journeys as they build new tools or products in the space. Despite that, the grant experience is often unpleasant, few programs support their grantees during the application process (and even fewer support once grants have been issued), and there is no clear definition of impact, which leads to a lack of clarity of what programs want in the long term beyond immediate growth. This combination of factors leads to inefficient capital allocation as well as user experiences that have a lot of room for improvement.
The goal of this hub would be to bring together granting organizations, researchers, and those building relevant tools to help improve the grant space. Collectively, we will be able to host a series of discussions and workshops to dive deep into and get closer to solving core problems that we face.
There are many people who will be applying to speak on the mainstage on some of these topics, so this space can serve a nice complement to the larger presentations and panels.
Add a rough outline of your Community Hubs program
A sample program could look something like the following:
- Day 1 - Funder office hours
- Give different grant programs and round operators office hours opportunities throughout the day
- Day 2 - Helping grantees succeed
- Doing a series of workshops and discussions meant to help grantees strengthen their proposals, increase their chance of success, and how thinking about outputs, outcomes, and impact will help them work more easily with grant programs
- Day 3 - Impact, impact, impact (aka outputs, outcomes, impact)
- Series of discussions and workshops getting into outputs/outcome/impact mapping
- Explore some tools that can help us map impact
- Day 4 - Sustainability beyond grants
- Discussions and potentially some workshop delving into the type of funding channels projects can rely on at different stages of their growth (ranging from hackathons to grants to crowdfunding to formal VC investments)
List the people who will organise, oversee and be responsible for the Community Hub
The current group of Core Facilitators, those who will be planning the programming, arranging guests, and co-managing the space during the week represent orgs such as: Metagov, Grant Innovation Lab, Karma, Funding the Commons, Stellar, Blockful, Octant, Raid Guild, and the University of Malta. We are looking to have 12 core facilitators so that we have 3 people committed to covering each day + the teammates to support individual sessions each day.
When considering the teammates, those committing to running/moderating at least a single session during the 4 days, our representation includes: Impact Gardens, Open Source Observer, Fracton Ventures Research, Voice Deck DAO, and Morph. We will also be inviting top grant programs to be included in the first day, as well as many other individuals and orgs to be part of the programming over the 4 days to ensure there is a continuous series of quality conversations or small workshops.
Core Facilitators
- Eugene Leventhal
- Mahesh Murthy
- Feems
- Beth McCarthy
- Anke Liu
- Danimim
- Mashal Waqar
- Ben Biedermann
- Shinya Mori
- TBD
- TBD
- TBD
Teammates
The project at the core of organizing this hub would be Metagov, a research nonprofit that is itself a collective of researchers. The collaborators work across many different projects and we have already run multiple events (see takeaways from the Web3 Grant Summit from February and the July Grant Operator workshop) where we create no-shill spaces that are free of marketing. Metagov will work closely with the Cartography Syndicate group, another collective, to make sure that we bring together a few dozen relevant organizations and individuals to focus on improving the experience for grantees.
The Metagov team will run another Grant Operator Workshop right before DevCon, so will have many takeaways and learnings to share with the wider community of grantees. We will also invite grant operators and other relevant individuals to join specific sessions.
List the equipment or production needs (see what’s possible in the RFP)
The production would be light weight and wouldn’t require more than some whiteboards and screens, as well as whatever furniture would be available for seating for small group discussions