Carl's (OS Observer) Thoughts on Optimism's new RPGF direction

My thoughts on Optimism’s new direction for Retro Funding: 1/ I am excited to see an increased focus on verifiable impact and a shift to more tightly curated rounds. I have been outspoken about the need for these types of things for much of the past year. FWIW, my project @OSObserver began as a rage hack to prove that it wasn’t too hard to get relevant data about projects and improve the badgeholder voting experience. Since then, I’ve learned a few things … First, it’s really hard to get the data you need to do this well (ahem, these things are always clearer in retrospect). Then, it’s even harder to derive meaningful impact metrics for comparing projects (currently experiencing this on a daily basis). And finally, the metrics aren’t really the point. The point is the legitimacy of the metrics (who came up with them? how robust are they? how transparent are they?) and the ensuing debate around what forms of impact should be rewarded most. More on this later… 2/ I am slightly disappointed that there hasn’t been more engagement in the Citizens House and on the governance forum about the question: “what forms of impact should be rewarded most”. There have been lots of suggestions about improving the process, scoring algorithms, and UI/UX. All of that is good, but in my opinion that stuff is secondary to the big questions around impact. These questions include everything from “what’s the right ratio of upstream to downstream funding” to “do we care more about newer teams or ones that stuck it out through the bear market”. These are inherently political questions because the answers reveal where people thing the OP should flow. In my view, the role of governance is to help steer the ship to where we think we’ll catch the most fish, not to count and weigh the fish in our net. To be fair, things are certainly moving in that direction, but more could be done to force these hard conversations before rounds are announced. 3/ I am rather weary of arguments over semantics (“is this a public good”) and where to categorize projects. Disagree and commit. Let’s move on to proving impact and debating how valuable that form of impact is. Per the announcement, Round 4 is about growing the number of active onchain builders. “Onchain builders introduce new users to Optimism, drive protocol usage and network effects.” There are good debates to be had about the quality of new users, the elasticity of blockspace demand, the attribution of various network effects, how far downstream / upstream you want to ring fence impact, and so on. Let’s talk about those things ... with relevant data in the loop. 4/ I’m humbled that some of the work our 3-person team contributed over the past few months was referenced in the announcement. As verifiable impact metrics begin to play a greater role in the round design and voting mechanism, we'd like to see more citizens assume the role of “impact data scientists”. These are people who search the data for signals, good and bad. They track the impact of funding deployed across the ecosystem and propose models that aim to maximize impact per unit spent. With Open Source Observer, our mission is to create a “people’s data warehouse” for performing this type of work. We are un-opinionated about the form of impact but highly opinionated about the quality of the data backing it - and how easy it should be to access that data as a public good. If we are successful, then we hope to give OP badgeholders more data and impact metrics to work with in future Retro Funding rounds. We also hope to inspire more analysts to work on this problem because it’s a hard one and because we think there needs to be a plurality of impact models. 5/ “All models are wrong but some are useful.” I’m excited about greater focus on metrics, but live by the words above. Specifically, I need help building models for measuring impact. Truth is, over the past few months, I’ve spent too much time building the models and not enough time talking about why you should care about them. h/t @timdaub for sharing this: https://news.kiwistand.com/stories?index… and it somehow being the first notification I saw when I picked up my phone this morning. As someone who gets their energy from building and writing stuff, not evangelizing, I am all too eager to live in a world where impact is self-evident and you don’t need to promote what you’re doing very much. (FWIW, some of the best moments the past few months were when brought me to new corners of the Ethereum ecosystem, like Kiwi News, that are filled with builder energy.) But whatever impact model I or someone else creates in isolation will lack the legitimacy of one that is shaped by a community of people with real skin in the game and differing opinions. We want to put the right data out in the open so people can debate the important stuff. We need help with this. I’ll share more ways of getting involved soon, but here are some recent posts about what we’re up and how to get involved: https://docs.opensource.observer/blog/im… https://docs.opensource.observer/blog/re… That's all (for now)