by Grant Support Squad - DAO Decentraland
The DAO treasury's main expense is the Grants Program. Currently, there is considerable expenditure through the Bids and Tenders Program, but it has relatively similar issues to the traditional Grants Program.
We could mention:
- Open Voting Issues: Open voting has led to lobbying, toxicity, and inefficiencies, as community members must read, evaluate, and vote on all proposals. This time-consuming process often leads to lengthy voting, rejection, and resubmission cycles.
- Whale votes: Despite the concerns raised during the voting period, the whale's votes and the proposal passed the threshold.
- Technical Knowledge Gaps during the Voting Period: No one is responsible for assessing prospect projects during the voting period. Voters often lack the necessary expertise to properly assess the technical or strategic merit of proposals properly, leading to uninformed decisions.
- Internal Bias and Talent Access: The program predominantly attracts Grants applications from current DAO members, which restricts the introduction of top talent from outside the ecosystem.
- Centralized Accountability : Adversarial relationship between grantees, DAO members, and GSS. While we have tried to foster a better, coach-like relationship, there remains a constant focus on centralized accountability.
- Overlapping Projects: Multiple projects frequently target the same objectives, leading to duplication of efforts and inefficient resource use.
- Neglected Areas: Critical areas such as platform development and core technology often go unnoticed, with few stakeholders addressing these blind spots.
- Lack of Strategic Planning for fundings: There is an absence of high-level strategic planning or other ways of using the current funds or exploring other ways DAO design their programan (Rounds, quadratics funds, retroactive funds, etc)
You can see it in our last GSS report.
That’s why we’ve taken two interesting reference cases to discuss with everyone in Lisbon.